Reviews

The Venice Architecture Biennale is branching out this year, 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 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

3 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 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

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

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 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