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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The effortless unease of Thomas Schütte
The sculptor’s grotesque figures and expressive faces reflect us back to ourselves in uncomfortable and witty ways
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Apollo at 100