Apollo

Giovanni da Udine

A fresco by Giovanni da Udine at the Villa Farnesina, Rome

The first show devoted to Raphael’s pupil, held in the castle he decorated in his home city

Joseph E. Yoakum: What I Saw

American Zeppolin Flight from New York City to Paris France in Year 1939 (1969), Joseph E. Yoakum.

Works on paper at the Art Institute of Chicago by the retired veteran and circus worker, who began to draw in the final decade of his life

Museum of the Home

Michael McMillan’s ‘Front Room 1976’.

The former Geffrye Museum has had its very own £18.1m home makeover

August Gaul: Modern Animals

Two Sitting Cubs (1903/4), August Gaul.

From wild beasts to pedigree dogs – the Kunstmuseum Bern explores how animals were depicted in Gaul’s time

Australian art that doesn’t beat about the bush – The National 2021, reviewed

Still from CREATION dance by Deborah Kelly; installation view at The National 2021: New Australian Art’, Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia.

A survey of new Australian art presents a planet in crisis – but it’s more uplifting than it sounds

For Etel Adnan, a show in Turkey is a symbolic homecoming

Late Afternoon (2020), Etel Adnan.

A retrospective at the Pera Museum in Istanbul demonstrates the vast geographic sweep of the Lebanese-American artist’s work and biography – including her Ottoman roots

Rankin’s Great British Photography Challenge is too polite for its own good

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Six pack: the contestants in Great British Photography Challenge.

The TV competition series is billed as a ‘masterclass’ – and none of the contestants will be booted off until the finale. Where’s the fun in that?

‘The greatest story of gluttony’ – on the genius of Eric Carle, creator of The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Eric Carle, creator of The Very Hungry Caterpillar

The much-loved author cut his teeth on illustrations for medical ad campaigns – which proved ideal training for the world of children’s books

Do artists dress to impress?

Barbara Hepworth in 1957.

In ‘What Artists Wear’, Charlie Porter casts an eye over the wardrobe choices of everyone from Barbara Hepworth to Jean-Michel Basquiat

All art is for children – and great art can make children of us all

Joseph Cornell with visitors to ‘A Joseph Cornell Exhibition for Children’ at the Cooper Union, New York in 1972. Photo: Denise Hare

Modern masters from Joseph Cornell to Paul Klee have produced works expressly for children, writes Ben Street – but perhaps all great art is a type of child’s play?

Can Italy solve its tourist troubles?

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The MSC Magnifica seen from a canal in Venice in June 2019.

With mass tourism poised to return, have local politicians and cultural leaders finally worked out how to manage the crowds? 

In the studio with… Sheila Hicks

Sheila Hicks at an exhibition of her work at the Chaumont-sur-Loire castle in 2017.

When the weather permits, the artist builds her textile sculptures in the cobblestone courtyard of her studio in the heart of Paris

John Craxton was a great artist – but his real talent was for living life to the full

John Craxton (left) and Patrick Leigh Fermor (right), Serifos, Greece, 1951.

A new biography of the British painter has a fine sense of his precocious talent – and real feeling for his rakish charm

The Martian landscape is magical but mundane – though it would be a mistake to start taking it for granted

An image of the ‘Santa Cruz’ mountain on Mars, taken by Perseverance's Mastcam-Z in April 2021.

Mars has never seemed closer, with rovers spamming us with photos from its surface

The week in art news – Laurence des Cars becomes first woman to lead Louvre

Laurence des Cars at the Musée d’Orsay in May 2021.

Plus: chairs of the National Gallery and the National Trust resign; and more stories

Offices have become museum pieces – in the case of Stephen Hawking’s, literally

Stephen Hawking in his office at the Department of Advanced Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, commissioned by the Science Museum Group in 2011 to mark Hawking’s 70th birthday.

The contents of the late scientist’s office are heading to the Science Museum in London – and it’s not the first workspace to be preserved in this way

Art and Diplomacy: Japanese Objects from the Château de Fontainebleau

Detail from Japanese folding screen.

An exceptional group of diplomatic gifts from the 14th Shogun to Napoleon III goes in display in Fontainebleau

Cézanne Drawing

Still Life with Blue Pot (1900–06), Paul Cézanne.

Some 250 works on paper at MoMA reveal the post-Impressionist at his most innovative and daring

Kara Walker: A Black Hole is Everything a Star Longs to Be

Kara Walker photographed in her studio in 2019 (detail).

The provocative American artist offers a glimpse of her extensive archive of drawings at the Kunstmuseum Basel

Rubens: Reuniting the Great Landscapes

The Rainbow Landscape (detail; c. 1636), Peter Paul Rubens.

A pair of late masterpieces by the Flemish painter are displayed together at the Wallace Collection for the first time in 200 years

On the Grand Canal, this crumbling Venetian palazzo has been given a new lease of life

Palazzo Vendramin Grimani (2021), Patrick Tourneboeuf.

The Palazzo Vendramin Grimani has opened with a display that reunites some of the paintings it was once home to – plus a helping of contemporary art

Raising the curtain on early Klimt

Saint Cecilia (Allegory of Instrumental Music)

An early commission by the painter for a public theatre in Rijeka is the subject of a major display in the city this summer

Is the ‘arm’s-length’ principle under threat in UK museums?

Illustration by David Biskup

With the government waging its ‘culture war’, the independence of national museums is at stake, write Chris Smith and Margot Finn

Down the rabbit hole at LACMA

Rabbit (1986), Edward Ruscha. Los Angeles County Museum of Art

A temporary display of the museum’s collection telescopes time and space to group objects thematically – but is this a productive path to follow?