Hello, 2025. And, in particular, hello, the new National Gallery, which has been completing a controversial rebuild for what feels like a couple of decades but has really been only three years or so. Rooms closed. Pictures missing. Scaffolding everywhere. They’ve managed to stay open, but it’s been an annoying place to visit. Now, at […]

It may have passed you by that 2024 was a significant anniversary. Unless, of course, you live in Germany, in which case you could not have missed it. Exhibitions were opened. Television films were screened. Articles were written. Because 2024 was the 250th anniversary of the birth of Caspar David Friedrich, the German Romantic genius […]

Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) had a life that reads like a work of fiction. Born into money in Lancashire, she careered through a rich girl’s journey that involved being expelled from school, running away to France, going mad, finding the Devil, shacking up with the predatory German surrealist Max Ernst — who had a thing for […]

The Italian old master Parmigianino (1503-40) is one of those artists for whom the label “old master” feels ill-fitting. He’s too youthful a presence — too fresh, lively and weird — to sit comfortably in the past. He died young as well, aged 37, so there was no time to slow down or grow wise. […]

Sometimes in art, a work that you think means one thing turns out to mean something else. It’s an enrichment, an enlargement of possibilities, with none of that neon-lit, clever-dickiness you get with Tate-style conceptual art. Genuinely thoughtful artists adopt a more subtle approach. George Shaw is certainly one of those. A selection of new paintings at […]

Abraham Lincoln, America’s second greatest president, according to the new president-elect, would perhaps have enjoyed the extraordinary event that has arrived at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich. According to persistent rumours circulating in the digital ether, Lincoln once said that two of his favourite things were “sitting on my front porch smoking a pipe of […]

The death of Frank Auerbach on Monday leaves a deep hole at the centre of art. In the final stretches of his long career he was regularly called “the greatest living artist”, an elastic and blurred title, yes, but one for which vanishingly few are shortlisted. You need to be especially potent, especially important, especially […]

The Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham often has fancy ideas for shows. But it’s outdone itself with Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites, an event that looks simultaneously at the way art looks and how it smells. It’s inspired by a book published in 2022 by Dr Christina Bradstreet, a curator and theoretician, […]

The Royal Collection may not actually be a bottomless pit of art treasures, but it certainly feels like one. Show after show features fresh selections of goodies pulled out from far corners of the monarchical holdings and unleashed on us serfs, pleasuring us and filling us with envy. The enormous cache of Italian Renaissance drawings […]

Slowly, effectively, the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes has been devoting ambitious shows to female artists whose work has been underappreciated. It’s a process that began in 2019 with a pioneering display about Paula Rego, and which has continued with examinations of the nanny turned street photographer Vivian Maier, and a tribute to the bottomless […]