Reviews

Unsafe spaces

The history of the asylum is a tale of many reforms and not much progress

5 Nov 2016

The most beautiful calligraphy in the world

Everyone should make a point of seeing these 61 Qur’ans, in a show that sets many common misunderstandings straight.

4 Nov 2016

How classicism took hold of the modern age

An exhibition at Pallant House shows how classicism was a way of reinvigorating modernist experimentation

4 Nov 2016

Charting the life and times of Kenneth Clark

This major, vivid biography of the art historian is meticulously researched – and long overdue

2 Nov 2016

Akomfrah and Turner make for a potent mix in Margate

Turner Contemporary reveals how both artists explore man’s struggle in the face of much bigger forces

1 Nov 2016

More to Mucha than meets the eye – or is there?

An exhibition at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Museum aims to rethink the familiar work of Czech artist Alphonse Mucha – but could it have gone further?

1 Nov 2016

The global ambitions of Artes Mundi

Six shortlisted artists battle it out for this year’s prize – one of the nominees, Bedwyr Williams, tells Apollo about his futuristic project

27 Oct 2016

It’s the loneliness of Diane Arbus’s images that make them so discomforting today

An exhibition of Diane Arbus’s early work presents curiosities without cabinets

26 Oct 2016

Della Robbia’s glazed terracotta changed Tuscan art

This superb exhibition makes us look at terra invetriata – a prodigious combination of earth, glass, and fire – through the eyes of 15th-century Tuscans

25 Oct 2016
Dog (c. 1954–60), Keith Cunningham

Keith Cunningham: the artist who walked away from fame

He was ranked alongside Auerbach and Kossoff: so why did Cunningham stop painting just as his career was taking off?

24 Oct 2016

The illuminated manuscripts that are lighting up the Fens

The Fitzwilliam Museum’s ‘Colour’ exhibition is a triumphant introduction to medieval manuscript painting

20 Oct 2016
Untitled (detail; 2016), Kai Althoff.

Kai Althoff reveals the pain and the privilege of being an artist

‘I cannot defend or think of it as something people need to see or bother with’

19 Oct 2016
(2016), Neo Rauch. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London

Neo Rauch and the carnival of European art

The German artist’s work, finally on show in London, is an uprooted reunion of everything strange in the supposedly familiar tale of western art history

14 Oct 2016
‘Louise Bourgeois. Turning Inwards’, Hauser & Wirth Somerset, 2016. Louise Bourgeois © The Easton Foundation/VAGA, New York/DACS, London 2016.

Why are Louise Bourgeois’s webs and spiders so captivating?

The etchings and sculptures on show at Hauser & Wirth Somerset are at their most powerful when we stop trying to understand them

13 Oct 2016
Gazing Ball (Tintoretto The Origin of the Milky Way) (2016), Jeff Koons.

Has Jeff Koons earned his place in art history?

With his Gazing Balls, Koons has created a body of work that appeals to the brain as well as the eyes

12 Oct 2016
Echo Lake (1998), Peter Doig.

Painting through the night with Tom Hammick

‘Towards Night’ at the Towner brings together over 60 artists, but the story it tells is Hammick’s alone

12 Oct 2016

How Georgia O’Keeffe transformed the American landscape

Georgia O’Keeffe’s commitment to what she called ‘the Great American Thing’ inspired her engagement with place

8 Oct 2016
The Brunswick and the Vengeur du Peuple at the Battle of the First of June, 1794 (1795), Nicholas Pocock. National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

Seeing the sea through the eyes of British artists

‘Spreading Canvas: Eighteenth-Century British Marine Painting’ at the Yale Center for British Art is a voyage of discovery

6 Oct 2016

Orlando Furioso’s imaginative universe 500 years later

An exhibition celebrating the 500th anniversary of Ariosto’s epic Italian poem is as rich as the book itself

6 Oct 2016
The Optic Cloak (2016), Conrad Shawcross. Photo: Marc Wilmot, courtesy of the Greenwich Peninsula

London’s new landmark is a triumph of engineering

Conrad Shawcross’s ‘Optic Cloak’ in Greenwich is sympathetic to both its natural and social context. Can the wider redevelopment of the area follow suit?

Virginia Dwan in her gallery during the exhibition 'Language III', Dwan Gallery, New York (May 1969). Courtesy Dwan Gallery Archive

Virginia Dwan emerges as the star of the NGA’s new galleries

The National Gallery has opened its revamped East Building with a celebration of the woman who put some of the USA’s most influential contemporary artists on the map

4 Oct 2016

Why collections must stay at the heart of the 21st-century museum

A deeply felt study of the importance of museums stresses how central objects are to their function and future

1 Oct 2016

Sound and vision as the Hayward Gallery goes off-site

Despite the difficulties of exhibiting sound and film, the audio-visual works on display here command our full attention

29 Sep 2016

Crossing space and time with the Victorians

‘The breadth of the Atlantic, with all its waves, is as nothing’

29 Sep 2016