Reviews

Making progress in postwar Britain

This focused survey shows that artists after the war seemed more than ready to embrace the future

28 Apr 2022

Mary Weatherford takes on Titian in his hometown

The Californian painter’s responses to ‘The Flaying of Marsyas’ have a sublime quality all of its own

26 Apr 2022
Le Parc des Sources, Vichy (1970), David Hockney.

David Hockney sees through it all at the Fitzwilliam

The painter may be fond of his iPad, but his longstanding suspicion of the technologies that have tied artists to linear perspective is to the fore here

15 Apr 2022
Vase with the head of an elephant (1757), designed by Jean Claude Chambellan Duplessis the Elder and painted by Charles-Nicolas Dodin for Sèvres. The Wallace Collection, London

The rococo interiors that furnished Walt Disney’s imagination

The French furniture that inspired the look of Disney’s best-loved films also came out of a studio system that required a good deal of collaboration

15 Apr 2022
The Skiiers by Akseli Gallen-Kallela

The Finnish painter who longed for freedom

Akseli Gallen-Kallela is best-known for his pretty lakeside views, but he also yearned for political independence and spiritual fulfilment

13 Apr 2022
Daddy: A Melodrama

Power play — ‘“Daddy”: A Melodrama’ at the Almeida, reviewed

Jeremy O. Harris’ latest play unravels the twisted power dynamics between a wealthy white art collector and an emerging Black artist on a Hockney-inspired stage

8 Apr 2022
Allies (1995), Lawrence Holofcener.

Why are so many public statues so disappointing?

The most successful public statues are more than mere three-dimensional versions of photographs plonked on plinths

5 Apr 2022
Bacon in Moscow

Spying an opportunity – how Francis Bacon made it to Moscow

James Birch recounts the improbable story of how, with help from the KGB, he put on a show of Bacon’s work in the Soviet Union

5 Apr 2022
Coffee service for Alice Belin du Pont (designed 1910–11), Tiffany and Company. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven

Gilt complex – ‘Gold in America’ at Yale University Art Gallery, reviewed

The gold objects in this show may glitter, but some of their previous owners are cast in a far from flattering light

5 Apr 2022
Nude Self Portrait (c. 1915; detail), Florine Stettheimer. Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York

The thoroughly modern scenes of Florine Stettheimer

The painter who was at the heart of the New York avant-garde captured the many excitements of the modern age

5 Apr 2022
Einder (Horizon) Marlene Dumas

Full frontal flatness – Marlene Dumas in Venice, reviewed

The South African artist’s exposing paintings are not merely portraits of bare flesh – they are revelations of humanity’s darker, more painful depths

1 Apr 2022
Detail of a print depicting a raven by John James Audubon.

Lord of the wings – how Audubon’s career got off to a flying start

James John Audubon’s illustrations of birds endure to this day, even if many of the species he depicted didn’t make it

1 Apr 2022
Howard Carter photographed with the golden sarcophagus of Tutankhamun in 1922 by Harry Burton (colourised version).

Golden boy – the timeless appeal of Tutankhamun

A century after the discovery of his tomb, our interest in the teenage pharaoh says more about the present than the past

1 Apr 2022
Yves Saint Laurent’s Mondrian dress (Autumn-Winter 1965), displayed next to Piet Mondrian’s Composition en rouge, bleu et blanc (1937).

‘A six-gun salute to the bespectacled one’ – Yves Saint Laurent in Paris, reviewed

The designer’s infatuation with the fine arts ran deep, as a series of exhibitions throughout the city’s museums makes clear

24 Mar 2022
(1942), René Magritte.

Meet Magritte – the man behind the apple

Bowler hats off to a new biography of the painter that chips away at the Belgian’s bourgeois veneer

18 Mar 2022
Robert Dudley (detail; c. 1575), unknown Anglo-Netherlandish artist. Photo: © National Portrait Gallery, London

A full house of Tudors at the Holburne Museum

Seeing the National Portrait Gallery’s treasures in a new setting allows us to appreciate the larger-life-than personalities behind the paintings in new ways

17 Mar 2022
Saint Mary Magdalene (detail; c. 1491–94), Carlo Crivelli. Photo: © National Gallery, London

In Carlo Crivelli’s tricksy paintings, nothing is as it seems

The painter employed trompe l’oeil like no artist before or since – and his box of tricks makes for a real treat at Ikon in Birmingham

11 Mar 2022
Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire.

How every age has invented a Stonehenge to suit itself

The prehistoric monument may seem timeless, but enthusiasts have constantly reimagined the site to suit their own preoccupations

4 Mar 2022
Benton End, Suffolk, home of the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing from 1939–78.

School for sandals – educating artists at Benton End

Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines’s art school in Suffolk was an unusual meeting of rural idyll and bohemian vice

3 Mar 2022
A Member of the Wedigh Family (detail; c. 1533), Hans Holbein the Younger. Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

Holbein’s signs and seals really deliver at the Morgan Library

By homing in on Holbein’s miniatures, this survey of the Renaissance master gives us a broad picture of the world he lived in

28 Feb 2022
(detail; 1933), Koga Harue.

Did Surrealism really travel all that well?

The movement begun by André Breton in Paris found followers all over the world, but displaying their efforts all together makes for a muddled show

22 Feb 2022
Self absorbed, much? Julia Garner as Anna Sorokin in Inventing Anna.

Only the art world could have been fooled by Anna Sorokin for so long

The story of the scammer who passed herself off as an heiress should make for must-see television, but reality far outstrips Shonda Rhimes’s overly safe retelling

18 Feb 2022
Lintel 1 from Laxtunich (773), Guatemala. Current location unknown.

The mystery of the lost Maya sculpture

Andew James Hamilton follows the efforts to find a Maya carving that was first uncovered in 1950, but has since seemingly disappeared from view

18 Feb 2022
Apparition of the Crucifixes of Mount Ararat in the Church of Sant’Antonio di Castello,

In Renaissance Italy, the making of altarpieces was an amazingly exacting affair

In this hugely ambitious survey, David Ekserdjian encourages us to see some of the most remarkable artworks of their time with fresh eyes

18 Feb 2022