Features

Gold Icon ‘We’ve been living like this for years’ – on the fires in Southern California

Lyra Kilston considers the generations of residents who have chosen to live in Los Angeles, perilously

3 Mar 2025

Gold Icon The rise of performance art in Renaissance Italy

An accomplished musician as well as a painter, Lorenzo Costa was perfectly placed to capture the changing fashions and shifting social etiquette of his day

3 Mar 2025

Gold Icon ‘The painting ought not to feel measured – something horrible is happening’

Tessa Hadley is unsettled by Giovanni Bellini’s eerily calm depiction of the murder of Saint Peter Martyr

3 Mar 2025

Gold Icon ‘Bandjoun Station is an imposing proposition’

Clad in the symbolic designs of artist and founder Barthélémy Toguo, the arts centre in Cameroon is breaking new ground

3 Mar 2025

Gold Icon ‘The vitality and sheer weirdness is thrilling’ – at the Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens

An exhibition of ancient art spanning centuries and islands isn’t afraid to let the objects speak for themselves

3 Mar 2025

Gold Icon The Argentinian winery where you can see James Turrell at altitude

The treacherous journey to get to Colomé, home to a private art gallery and one of the world’s highest wineries, is well worth the trek

3 Mar 2025

Gold Icon Gilty pleasures – Versailles in the 21st century

With new leadership, and restored rooms that haven’t looked this good since the Ancien Régime, is Versailles entering another golden era?

3 Mar 2025

Gold Icon Tracey Emin’s passion project

The artists grapples with the universal themes of love and loss in a striking new painting, explains Martina Droth of the Yale Center for British Art

3 Mar 2025

Gold Icon New kid on the bloc – behind the scenes at Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art

This nomadic gallery finally has a permanent home, but can the impressive collection protect it from Poland’s fraught cultural politics?

3 Mar 2025

Gold Icon Layer cakes – the colourful confections of Wayne Thiebaud

In his voluptuous paintings of cakes and other foodstuffs, the American artist captured both pleasure and a sense of surfeit

3 Mar 2025

At home with Charles Dickens

The novelist was a wandering soul, so what can his house in London – now celebrating its centenary as a museum – tell us about the man?

28 Feb 2025

Gold Icon The Chinese artist who brought ink painting to a new audience

A meditative painting by Qi Baishi demonstrates his modern approach to an ancient art form, explains Jeremy Zhang of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco

25 Feb 2025

Gold Icon When Rubens was king of the castle

The Flemish castle bought by Rubens in 1635 was intended as a country retreat, and it inspired the artist’s greatest landscapes

24 Feb 2025

Gold Icon The painter who poked fun at 18th-century Paris

Working in the new medium of pastels, Maurice-Quentin de La Tour portrayed the cultural and political elite of his day in a style that matched the hedonism of the age

23 Feb 2025

Gold Icon Wining and dining in the prints of Pablo Picasso

Picasso was the possessor of a hearty appetite and depictions of alcohol and excess are also central to his work

20 Feb 2025

Gold Icon Can American art museums escape the culture wars?

Recent rehangs at the Met and the Brooklyn Museum suggest that part of the answer lies in respecting the viewer’s own capacity for interpretation

15 Feb 2025

Queen of suspense – the art of Patricia Highsmith

Thirty years after the novelist’s death, Apollo revisits the Ripley creator’s close ties to the visual arts

12 Feb 2025

Gold Icon Inside Edith Wharton’s house, a mirthful ode to classical taste

The home the writer designed for herself in the hills of Massachusetts is a window on to the shifting tastes of Gilded Age America

11 Feb 2025

Acquisitions of the month: January 2025

Highlights include a trove of photographs by Robert Frank and the first Bernini statue in a Dutch public collection

7 Feb 2025

Prince Karim Aga Khan IV (1936–2025)

The Aga Khan IV, who has died at the age of 88, formed an important collection of Islamic art and dedicated some of his fabulous wealth to cultural heritage projects around the world

7 Feb 2025

Gold Icon The meteorite that fired up Dürer’s imagination

Helen Gordon charts the fall and cultural rise of the Ensisheim meteorite of 1492

3 Feb 2025

Gold Icon On the irresistible ripples of Viennetta

A textural triumph and a sensual delight, this distinctly ’80s ice cream is as pleasing to look at as it is to consume

Gold Icon The Louvre restores Cimabue to his rightful place

Two restored masterpieces – one vast in scale, the other intimate – are being shown together for the first time to give us fresh insights into ‘the first light of Renaissance painting’

3 Feb 2025

Pompeii’s extraordinary recent discoveries lay a firm foundation for the future

The Great Pompeii project has more than lived up to the name, but it’s now time for a period of conservation and consolidation

31 Jan 2025