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 […]
Recent articles
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 […]
My teenage ode to the joys of Tintoretto
When I was a teenager — jejune, pretentious, cocky — I wrote a poem about the impact on me of Tintoretto. I’d been to Venice and seen his thunderous masterpieces in the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. For a few days it short-circuited my reason. Hence the poem. In almost any circumstance, I would be […]
David Hockney at 88 — he’s begun his last dance with the joy of a child
The most quoted remark by Picasso, his most telling quip, is: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” It’s popular because it nails something tangible and crucial: the artistic joy that appears twice in a long creative life — at the beginning and at the […]
Why does death inspire so much art? It’s the killer question
When Moses came down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments given to him by God, two in particular would have interested any artists gathered in the waiting crowd. One is the Second Commandment, which says, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above […]