Reviews
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
The jazzy life of Gertrude Abercrombie
The jazzy life of Gertrude AbercrombieOnce a central figure in Chicago’s mid-century art and jazz scene, this surrealist painter was long forgotten – until now
Armchair travel in the Middle Ages
This selection of guides to the foreign lands reveals a bustling, busy Middle Ages full of fantastical visions
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
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
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
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
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.
‘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
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?
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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?
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
High tech before big tech – ‘Electric Dreams’ at Tate Modern, reviewed
These artistic experiments by early embracers of new technologies already look charmingly retro
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
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?
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When the Nazis pilloried modern art