Two shows. One big, one small. One in Amsterdam, one in London. Both concerned with the mad things you see when reality is pulled out of true, played with, distorted. A pair of shows, therefore, that feel very on message, given the present state of the world. The big show is at the Rijksmuseum in […]
Recent articles
Who fried their brains trying to make Lucian Freud sexy and original?
There are times — not often — when my heart goes out to curators and I feel the urge to hug them and tell them: “Never mind. You tried.” So it is with the creators of Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting at the National Portrait Gallery. You can tell from the title that it has been an […]
My eyes filled with tears at the life of this Siouxsie Sioux fangirl
Art is always personal. Someone else’s imagination is whispering to your imagination in a visual Esperanto. But Sue Webster’s artistic disrobing at Firstsite in Colchester is more than autobiography. It’s an exorcism; a life flashing by; an existence reset. The results are so moving, they filled my eyes with tears. Generationally Webster is a YBA: […]
What’s gone wrong with Britain’s art schools?
New Contemporaries is a useful exhibition. Every year, it selects a group of “early-career UK-based artists” hot out of art school and presents them to us in a touring show. In the 77 years it has been going — the first effort was in 1949! — it has survived numerous rewrites and its chief ambition remains […]
You won’t believe art’s spooky new age of weirdness
When it comes to directions, art is a writhing snake. None of us can confidently predict where it will head next. But when the Eighties turned into the Nineties, and the Nineties became the Noughties, and even when the Noughties grew into the Teenies, none of us expected the art of the 2020s to develop […]
The flag that reminds us what Hawaii might have been
The Hawai’i show at the British Museum is full of unexpected sights, big and small, but what surprised me most was the revelation that the official flag of Hawaii is dominated by the Union Jack. There it is, looming up in the corner, surrounded by matching stripes of red, white and blue — as British a flag […]
How to understand art — by Waldemar Januszczak
Like all life’s profound pleasures, looking at art is a complex business. More accurately, perhaps, it’s a pleasure with many layers and stages. It’s like making love. Sure, you can have a version where it’s a quick in and out, and that’s it. But for the experienced art lover the real joy is in the […]
Are you ready for Frida Kahlo and Tracey Emin at Tate Modern?
It has been a while — too long — since Tate Modern’s exhibition plans have felt as uplifting as they do for 2026. A few loudly belted-out hurrahs are definitely in order. “The world’s leading gallery of contemporary art” has been in a rut in recent years. The preachy and the dull have recurrently been […]
Are we right to suspect the worst of Caravaggio?
Startling. That’s the word that best describes the impact of the single painting by Caravaggio from which the management at the Wallace Collection has fashioned a dramatic, unsettling and richly engrossing exhibition. Painted in Rome in about 1601, Caravaggio’s Victorious Cupid shows a naked boy, aged about 12, balanced precariously on a messy heap of still-lifes. So […]
My encounters with the smart, lethal Charles Saatchi
In art some questions are difficult to answer. Was it really Leonardo da Vinci who painted the Salvator Mundi that was sold to a Saudi prince in 2017 for $450.3 million? We’ll never know for sure. What was Marcel Duchamp really trying to say when he turned a urinal upside down and called it Fountain? Beats me. Art […]