Features

Acquisitions of the Month: April 2023

The joint acquisition of Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Portrait of Mai (Omai)’ by the National Portrait Gallery and the J. Paul Getty Museum has been confirmed

2 May 2023

The creative curating of Walter Hopps

The Menil Collection in Houston looks at the groundbreaking work of a curator who brought a new generation of American artists into museums

27 Apr 2023

What Handel liked to hang on his walls

Three hundred years after the composer moved into his London townhouse, what does the art collection he amassed there tell us about his music?

27 Apr 2023
wax figurine of a girl lying down

The unnerving appeal of wax figures

From votive offerings to anatomical models, wax is the perfect material for blurring the boundaries between art and life

27 Apr 2023
ceramic depiction of Gilbert & George

The modern potter who was devoted to Delft

When Simon Pettet moved into Dennis Severs’ House in Spitalfields he began to channel the 18th century in the 1980s

27 Apr 2023

‘Sydney Modern must be given time to evolve’

The Art Gallery of New South Wales’s extension is too populist and commercially minded for some – but it is full of possibilities

27 Apr 2023

The family vineyard where art grows between the vines

Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s sculpture garden in Piedmont is also home to the family rosé

27 Apr 2023
watercolour painting of a girl in a kitchen

Unhappy medium – the pensive watercolours of Richard Foster Yarde

The American artist’s melancholy approach is part of a much punchier tradition says Elisa Germán, co-curator of a show at Harvard Art Museums

27 Apr 2023

What’s the point of studying fine art?

Enrolment in the humanities is tumbling across the United States, but the numbers for fine art are still holding up

21 Apr 2023

Newcastle’s Side Gallery is too important to stay closed

The gallery founded by the Amber Collective is a champion of documentary photography, strongly rooted in the local area, and deserves all the support it can get

16 Apr 2023
Ateneum Art Museum

Finnish lines – a new look for the Ateneum in Helsinki

Finland’s most important art museum has been completely rehung just as questions of culture and national identity are on everyone’s mind

14 Apr 2023
Photo: Yu Yigang; courtesy the Gilbert & George Centre; © Gilbert & George

Could Gilbert & George keep going forever?

The self-styled ‘living sculptures’ have long been an east London fixture – and they’ve just opened a new centre in a bid to stick around even after they’re gone

12 Apr 2023
Engraved gold ruby goblet (c. 1685–90), Johann Kunckel, engraving att. to Gottfried Spiller. Courtesy Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Acquisitions of the Month: March 2023

A rare 17th-century gold ruby glass goblet and original designs by Augustus Pugin are among this month’s highlights

4 Apr 2023

In Lausanne, a lively new museum district has finally arrived

The Plateforme 10 project has brought the city’s fine arts, design and photo museums together on the site of a former train yard

28 Mar 2023
Restaurant dining room with views over the City of London

Supper in the City at the Barbican Brasserie

The arts centre’s new restaurant is not exactly a feast for the eyes, but the food more than makes up for it

28 Mar 2023

James Joyce walks into a bar in Zurich

At the Kronenhalle in Zurich, the writer was most likely to ask for Fendant de Sion, a wine that deserves to be much better known abroad

28 Mar 2023
detail of a rug

Fine carpets from Asia are definitely back in fashion

After a spell in the doldrums, prices for magnificent carpets from across the continent are starting to soar again

28 Mar 2023

The cosmic visions of Hilma af Klint

The Swedish artist is now fêted as a pioneer of abstract art, but her spiritual inclinations are what really resonate today

28 Mar 2023

The Tower of Babel now owes more to Bruegel than the Bible

When we think of the biblical folly, it’s Pieter Breugel the Elder’s painting that first comes to mind – but artists and writers are still reimagining it today

28 Mar 2023

The restless side of Felix Vallotton’s sleeping woman

At the MAH in Geneva, the artist Ugo Rondinone has rehung Le Sommeil to bring its livelier side to the fore, explains curator Samuel Gross

28 Mar 2023

Smooth operator – the seductive sculptures of Antonio Canova

The sculptor was regarded as too sensual by classicists and too cold by Romantics, but a more superficial look at his work suggests what he was really up to

28 Mar 2023
Alfred Wallace Russel

Alfred Russel Wallace’s botanical sketches are a natural wonder

The naturalist sketched his discoveries with unmatched dedication, but was unlucky to lose so many of the original specimens at sea

27 Mar 2023

Acquisitions of the Month: February 2023

David Bowie’s archive and the first clutch of NFTs to be acquired by a French museum are among this month’s highlights

28 Feb 2023

What the art world gets wrong about craft

The growing tendency to fold 20th-century makers into the history of modern art often ignores what was truly innovative about their work

27 Feb 2023