Reviews

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 Armchair travel in the Middle Ages

This selection of guides to the foreign lands reveals a bustling, busy Middle Ages full of fantastical visions

31 Mar 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

To infinity and beyond with Caspar David Friedrich

The high priest of German Romanticism is at his best when practising a minimalism that requires maximum imaginative effort from the viewer

31 Mar 2025

Gold Icon When a picture is good enough to eat

This chronicle of iconophagy – the act of consuming an image – is an enlightening if occasionally stodgy read

31 Mar 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

Gold Icon The singular vision of Svetlana Alpers

As a selection of her essays makes clear, the eminent art historian has always been committed to looking as a means of understanding

29 Mar 2025

Celia Paul faces the ghosts of her past

In recent portraits and seascapes the painter ponders time and memory, and the legacy of Lucian Freud and co.

28 Mar 2025
painting of tablecloth by Alison Watt

‘Edging into the surreal’ – Alison Watt enters the world of John Soane

At Pitzhanger Manor, eerie paintings by the Scottish artist commune with its architect’s taste for pared-back eccentricity

26 Mar 2025

Gold Icon The brave new world of Brazilian modernism

Artists were just as dedicated to the avant-garde as their peers in architecture and music, but were the results of their efforts as radical?

25 Mar 2025

Gold Icon The shock of the boreal – ‘Northern Lights’ at the Fondation Beyeler, reviewed

Canadian and Scandinavian painters approached their respective landscapes in distinctive ways and with differing levels of realism

18 Mar 2025

When attacks on art become art

While museums are desperate to stop climate actions involving works of art, a gallery in London has put defaced paintings front and centre, tomato soup and all

7 Mar 2025

Wolfgang Buttress creates a buzz in Liverpool

The artist has been making installations about bees for years. His apian interests are now the subject of an exhibition at the World Museum

6 Mar 2025

Gold Icon The Sienese painters who sparked a revolution in European art

The innovations of artists in the first half of the 14th century created new pathways for painting for centuries to come

6 Mar 2025

Gold Icon Was Artemisia really bad with money?

A study of the baroque painter’s business practices finds faults with her financial acumen and artistic training – though not everyone will agree

3 Mar 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

3 Mar 2025

Gold Icon Tech bros of Versailles – ‘Science and Splendour’ at the Science Museum, reviewed

Technology and ornament went hand in hand at the court of Louis XIV, and his successors expected the same from the scientific advances of their day

27 Feb 2025

Gold Icon Meet John Singer Sargent’s favourite family

The artist painted the Wertheimers 12 times, in portraits that shed light on the changing fortunes of an extraordinary family

26 Feb 2025

Playing mind games with Joseph Kosuth

As the Hungarian-American artist celebrates his 80th birthday, is his brand of conceptual art still as radical as it once was?

26 Feb 2025

The intimidating art of Louise Nevelson

The artist’s monochrome sculptures made of everyday objects are full of menace and all the more exhilarating for it

24 Feb 2025

Gold Icon High tech before big tech – ‘Electric Dreams’ at Tate Modern, reviewed

These artistic experiments by early embracers of new technologies already look charmingly retro

21 Feb 2025

Gold Icon The avant-garde painters who went round in circles

Whether Orphism can be called a coherent movement is one thing, but its practitioners produced some excellent art

12 Feb 2025

When gladiators roamed the British Isles

A touring exhibition of gladiatorial objects found in Britain makes a stab at getting to the heart of our fascination with the amphitheatre, but does it succeed?

11 Feb 2025

Gold Icon The real saints and scribes of medieval Europe, celebrity edition

The British Library’s exhibition of women in the Middle Ages who were creative and intellectual pioneers is a red-carpet affair

8 Feb 2025