Reviews

Gold Icon The awesome landscapes of José María Velasco

The 19th-century painter’s views of the Valley of Mexico are at once scientific documents and odes to a landscape in flux

1 May 2025

Gold Icon The softer side of Anselm Kiefer

Two exhibitions marking the German painter’s 80th birthday show his great range, from his maximalist masterpieces to surprisingly intimate works

1 May 2025

Meet two heroines of Irish modernism

Tutored in Paris in the 1920s, Dublin-born artists Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone brought a boldly avant-garde sensibility to traditional subjects

30 Apr 2025

Gold Icon The art of long-distance communication

The invention of the telegraph in a fractured post-Revolutionary France collapsed time and space, changing visual culture for ever

26 Apr 2025

The British Royal Family’s love of bling

The Edwardians are associated with elegance but an exhibition at the King’s Gallery in London suggests that excess was the hallmark of the age

25 Apr 2025

The Black artists who found themselves in post-war Paris

The Pompidou presents African, Caribbean and American artists who could be free in the French capital in ways often denied to them at home

23 Apr 2025

Gold Icon Armchair travel in the Middle Ages

At the Morgan Library in New York, a selection of guides to foreign lands reveals a bustling Middle Ages full of fantastical visions

23 Apr 2025

Gold Icon When a picture looks good enough to eat

This chronicle of iconophagy – the act of consuming an image – is an enlightening if occasionally stodgy read

16 Apr 2025

How two artists have weathered one stormy marriage

The ups and downs in the lives of photographer Joel Meyerowitz and the writer and artist Maggie Barrett makes for documentary dynamite

15 Apr 2025

Munch behind the mask

Self-portraits and depictions of family and friends build a picture of the ‘Scream’ artist as insider rather than outsider, more savvy than angsty

15 Apr 2025

Gold Icon The drugged-up doodles of Henri Michaux

The artist’s mescaline trips in the 1950s and ’60s led to extraordinary acts of creativity, when he tried to pin down their effect on paper

8 Apr 2025

Gold Icon The jazzy life of Gertrude Abercrombie

Once a central figure in Chicago’s mid-century art and jazz scene, this Surrealist painter was long forgotten – until now

1 Apr 2025

Gold Icon The many faces of Medardo Rosso

The sculptor’s impressionistic works – and the photographs he took of them – always highlight the humanity of his subjects

Gold Icon Sebastiano del Piombo’s sound beginning

A new study of the 16th-century painter highlights his musical training and makes some bold claims about attribution

31 Mar 2025

Swimming and style – a brief history

The Design Museum’s deep dive into swimming shows that people have always felt the urge to get into the water, for survival, sport or fun

29 Mar 2025

Keita Morimoto turns Tokyo into a nocturnal no-man’s-land

In the painter’s night-time scenes, occasional isolated figures play second fiddle to the anonymous urban settings they inhabit

29 Mar 2025

Gold Icon The singular vision of Svetlana Alpers

As a selection of her essays makes clear, the eminent art historian has always been committed to looking as a means of understanding

29 Mar 2025

To infinity and beyond with Caspar David Friedrich

The high priest of German Romanticism is at his best when practising a minimalism that requires maximum imaginative effort from the viewer

28 Mar 2025

Celia Paul faces the ghosts of her past

In recent portraits and seascapes the painter ponders time and memory, and the legacy of Lucian Freud and co.

27 Mar 2025
painting of tablecloth by Alison Watt

‘Edging into the surreal’ – Alison Watt enters the world of John Soane

At Pitzhanger Manor, eerie paintings by the Scottish artist commune with its architect’s taste for pared-back eccentricity

26 Mar 2025

Gold Icon The brave new world of Brazilian modernism

Artists were just as dedicated to the avant-garde as their peers in architecture and music, but were the results of their efforts as radical?

25 Mar 2025

Gold Icon The shock of the boreal – ‘Northern Lights’ at the Fondation Beyeler, reviewed

Canadian and Scandinavian painters approached their respective landscapes in distinctive ways and with differing levels of realism

18 Mar 2025

When attacks on art become art

While museums are desperate to stop climate actions involving works of art, a gallery in London has put defaced paintings front and centre, tomato soup and all

7 Mar 2025

Wolfgang Buttress creates a buzz in Liverpool

The artist has been making installations about bees for years. His apian interests are now the subject of an exhibition at the World Museum

6 Mar 2025