Features

Cupid on a Dolphin mosaic at Fishbourne Roman Palace.

Roman Britain when you least expect it

Who’d have thought that a barn conversion could lead to one of the most important Roman discoveries in Britain?

5 May 2016
South London and Maudsley CEO Matthew Patrick with Grayson Perry at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, London.

The Art Fund’s shortlist for Museum of the Year has been announced

The nominees range from small local museums, to a 100-acre outdoor museum and one of the UK’s biggest institutions

29 Apr 2016

Are there too many Renaissance exhibitions?

Exhibitions about the Italian Renaissance have never been more popular, but is the difficulty of securing loans leading to some very diffuse shows?

27 Apr 2016

Is London’s skyscraper boom damaging the city?

Peter Murray and Gillian Darley debate whether London’s changing skyline is leaching the city’s history

27 Apr 2016
Cave 320, south wall, depiction of the Aparimitāyus Sutra

The sacred, ancient grottoes where world cultures came together

An enormous project to preserve, study and replicate the cave temples of Dunhuang lies behind the Getty’s latest exhibition

27 Apr 2016
Frozen Wave (The Conservation of Energy

When did the Sublime become an extended environmental guilt-trip?

The word has become a catchall term for environmentally-conscious art. It’s more specific than that

23 Apr 2016

Should public art be in the public domain? Sweden doesn’t think so

A recent court case involving Wikimedia in Sweden has taken the art world by surprise

21 Apr 2016
Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil (1873), Auguste Renoir

Painting gardens? More of a radical pursuit than you think

Monet and chums were doing something genuinely revolutionary when they stepped out into their gardens

18 Apr 2016
This is not the first time that Henry Moore's work has taken a pounding

The long tradition of hating Henry Moore

Let’s hope the disgruntled students at Columbia University don’t take their protests against Moore’s work to these extremes…

18 Apr 2016

Acquisitions of the Month: March 2016

Bonnie Prince Charlie makes a triumphant return to Edinburgh, while the NGA add hundreds of works to its huge collection

7 Apr 2016

Inside Cuba’s changing art world

Havana’s contemporary artists face a contradictory mix of opportunities and restrictions

6 Apr 2016

How a secret garden outshines Le Corbusier in Chandigarh

The self-taught Nek Chand created an extraordinary rock garden in Chandigarh and its survival is something of a miracle.

29 Mar 2016

Is it time to reform art export in the UK?

Christopher Brown and Bendor Grosvenor debate the pros and cons of the current UK export licensing system

29 Mar 2016

We need ethnographic museums today – whatever you think of their history

Ethnographic collections need to be living collections, representative of cultural diversity and mindful of traditions

29 Mar 2016

‘To see Bacon’s entire oeuvre is a revelation’

The forthcoming Francis Bacon catalogue raisonné brings together a remarkable 585 paintings

29 Mar 2016

Tim Sayer’s remarkable collection makes its public debut

The self-confessed ‘artoholic’ has donated a huge collection of 20th-century works to the Hepworth Wakefield

23 Mar 2016

The Singapore museum redrawing the map of Southeast Asian art

The National Gallery Singapore opened to justified acclaim last year. But will its mission be hampered by the country’s constraints on free expression?

19 Mar 2016

What’s in store at the State Hermitage Museum?

The Hermitage has more than 3 million items in its collection, so making its stores accessible is quite a feat

17 Mar 2016

What’s the point of rebuilding Germany’s palaces?

The construction of Berlin’s Humboldt Forum on the site of the former Stadtschloss raises challenging questions

10 Mar 2016
Artist's impression showing the exterior of the Public Art Depot, designed by MVRDV

The Rotterdam museum that collects collectors

The Museum Boijmans van Beuningen is to store private collections – which is just the sort of collaboration the museum has always thrived on

8 Mar 2016

So who the hell was Hieronymus Bosch?

We misunderstand the artist if we fail to look past his grotesque beasts and monsters

1 Mar 2016

How Isabella Stewart Gardner shaped artistic taste in the US

The first Piero, the first Simone Martini, the first Raphael… ‘Mrs Jack’ brought them all to America

1 Mar 2016

The ‘grim’ social housing that has proved more robust than what followed it

George Peabody’s vision lives on, and we would do well to heed it today

1 Mar 2016

What makes a museum secure?

What can museums do to deter would-be Thomas Crowns – and what are the risks they run rather more regularly?