Reviews

How to cut a statue down to size

Robert Bevan’s call to require a lot less from our public monuments has much to recommend it

3 Jan 2023
by Giorgio Vasari

The vanished collection of Giorgio Vasari

Giorgio Vasari’s famous collection of Renaissance drawings was dispersed after his death, and scholars have been trying track down its contents for centuries

3 Jan 2023
The Plumb Pudding in Danger by James Gillray

National lampooner: James Gillray vs the British establishment

The artist’s excoriating images have long set the standard for political satire

3 Jan 2023

Lucian Freud and the art of paying attention

No one could accuse the painter of flattering his subjects, but he was certainly painstaking about capturing them on canvas

3 Jan 2023
still from Gray Glass by Fiona Tan

Fiona Tan turns back time in Amsterdam

The artist rifles through archives and our collective imaginations to reshape what we think we know about the past

23 Dec 2022
Installation view of ’Maria Bartuszová’ at Tate Modern, London, in 2022. Photo: © Tate/Joe Humphrys

Plaster master – Maria Bartuszova at Tate Modern, reviewed

The Slovakian sculptor poured and moulded plaster into creations that evoke the body and the natural world in equal measure

21 Dec 2022
Photocall for the production of A Chorus Line at the London Palladium in 2013.

Making a song and dance about musicals in the museum

A disappointingly static display at the V&A will make you long for the stage

21 Dec 2022

The Renaissance painters who turned to stone

It was Sebastiano del Piombo who rediscovered the ancient art of painting on stone and inspired others to make the most of their material

15 Dec 2022

Scary storeys – ‘Horror in the Modernist Block’, reviewed

Contemporary artists explore the fearful side of modernist architecture at Ikon, but a real sense of menace may be missing

2 Dec 2022
Women modelling spectacles of unusual shapes (1925)

Ways of seeing at the Wellcome Collection

The eye may be our most perceptive organ, but it can sometimes make us blind to the other senses

28 Nov 2022
Poor Relations by George Goodwin Kilburne

What the Victorians liked to hang on their walls

Thanks to mass production (and reproduction), in the 19th-century some middle-class homes began to resemble miniature picture galleries

28 Nov 2022
Restoration, Villa Borghese by Milton Gendel

The American who conquered cafe society in Rome

For seven decades, Milton Gendel recorded his charmed existence in delightfully candid photos and diaries

28 Nov 2022

The triumph of the Tudors

Other European dynasties of the period had equally thriving court cultures, but none has had such a hold on the popular imagination

28 Nov 2022
Alf and the Canary (Brown Ale) by Ruskin Spear

The unfashionable art of Ruskin Spear

Tanya Harrod’s biography of the unfairly neglected painter champions his scenes of London working-class life

28 Nov 2022
Magdalena Abakanowicz

The soft resistance of Magdalena Abakanowicz’s woven sculptures

The Polish artist sometimes worked at a monumental scale, but her most impressive works are less about the size than the power of their expression

27 Nov 2022

Mimic men – how artists have spurred each other to new heights

An illuminating exhibition in Vienna explores how artists from the Greeks on have revelled in rivalries

24 Nov 2022

The film-maker exploring Nigeria’s hangover from colonial rule

Ayo Akingbade’s new short film, set in the first Guinness factory to be built outside of the UK and Ireland, reveals a troubling story of labour and power

23 Nov 2022
Portrait of the artist Denis Wirth-Miller

The British painter who was bullied into obscurity

Denis Wirth-Miller was unfairly dismissed as an imitator of his friend Francis Bacon, but it’s now clear that his detractors were wholly in the wrong

17 Nov 2022
Detail of a screenshot from ‘Pentiment’, by Obsidian. Photo: Xbox Game Studios

Mobs, murder and manuscripts – why ‘Pentiment’ is a must-play for art historians

In Obsidian’s new video game, you are a 16th-century Bavarian painter – but progress on your masterpiece is interrupted by parochial violence

15 Nov 2022
What It Is (detail; 1978–82), Nellie Mae Rowe. Photo: High Museum of Art, Atlanta; © 2022 Estate of Nellie Mae Rowe/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The really radical work of Nellie Mae Rowe

Having spent most her life serving others, Nellie Mae Rowe came to art in her retirement years and found a joyful defiance in the creation of other-worldly scenes

10 Nov 2022
Nude (detail; c. 1962), Roger Hilton.

How Roger Hilton played fast and loose with the human form

The St Ives painter best known for his abstract works also created his own kind of figurative art

4 Nov 2022
The Debutante (detail; 1807), Henry Fuseli.

The fetishistic side of Henry Fuseli

The artist’s drawings of women are a testament to his private proclivities. It’s no wonder he never put them on public display

4 Nov 2022
Punto a fogliamo (leafpoint) lace reworked as a collar

On point – the wearing of lace has always been tied up with social status

Lace-making is an exacting craft – and who gets to wear the results is an equally delicate matter

31 Oct 2022

The uncanny resonance of Hannah Starkey’s portraits

The photographer refers to all the women she photographs as icons, but it is in her home town of Belfast where her subjects truly come alive

28 Oct 2022