Reviews

Isles be back – in New Haven

Housed in the last building Louis Kahn ever designed, the newly spruced Yale Center for British Art reframes Paul Mellon’s collection, writes Morgan Falconer

2 Jun 2025

Gold Icon Civic virtues and vices in Renaissance Siena

One of history’s most mysterious political paintings might hold lessons for our own time – if we could make out the meaning

2 Jun 2025

Gold Icon When Frida Kahlo met Mary Reynolds

Revisiting a meeting of the two Surrealists in Paris in 1939 sheds new light on the movement as a whole

2 Jun 2025

Gold Icon The prints that take us on a picturesque tour of Japan

Hiroshige’s playful prints conjure the landscapes of 19th-century Japan in jewel-like tones

2 Jun 2025

Gold Icon Vanessa Bell deserves higher billing in the Bloomsbury Group

It was the painter’s misfortune to be surrounded by writers whose accounts of her have been too dominant for too long

2 Jun 2025

Gold Icon Can art survive the AI juggernaut?

In this stylish polemic, the artist Hito Steyerl casts AI image-making as bland at best and exploitative at worst

2 Jun 2025

Gold Icon The Louvre puts on its first fashion show

High fashion meets fine art for the first time in an exhibition at the Paris museum. With so much to see, it‘s hard to know where to look

31 May 2025

Audio gets visual at the Barbican this summer

‘Feel the Sound’ makes imaginative use of the brutalist building to convey the power of sound, but sometimes silence can be just as effective

30 May 2025

Gold Icon When Chinese goods first went global

The Met takes the well-trodden story of chinoiserie over the centuries and gives it a welcome feminist twist

27 May 2025

The Venice Architecture Biennale is branching out, but has it gone too far?

This year’s festival is the largest edition yet, but a display of outsize ambition doesn’t resolve its internal contradictions

23 May 2025

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

20 May 2025

The endlessly inventive art of Jack Whitten

In MoMA’s mammoth survey, the abstract painter’s desire to question everything comes across loud and clear

16 May 2025

The avant-gardists who dragged art into the future

Luma Arles celebrates E.A.T., an alliance of artists and engineers who created some of the most thrillingly eccentric artworks of the mid 20th century

16 May 2025

A novel look at Mantegna in Mantua

Inger Christensen’s reissued take on the artist’s time at the Gonzaga court is as experimental as his work would have seemed to contemporaries

13 May 2025

The comic genius of Joe Brainard

The artist made more than 100 drawings of the comic-strip character Nancy, and the results are profound as well as witty

9 May 2025

The effortless unease of Thomas Schütte

The sculptor’s grotesque figures and expressive faces reflect us back to ourselves in uncomfortable and witty ways

8 May 2025

Gold Icon The softer side of Anselm Kiefer

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

3 May 2025

Gold Icon A modern classic about ancient sculpture

Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny’s landmark history of the afterlife of classical sculpture has been refreshed to give it even more longevity

2 May 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

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