It is quite fitting that Los Angeles’ new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art looks like a spaceship since it is the “colossal pet project” of the man behind the Star Wars franchise, George Lucas, said The Washington Post. Thought to cost an “eye-popping” $1 billion (£756 million), the art inside is a “dizzying mix” of Renaissance and baroque paintings, digital reproductions, a Naboo N-1 Starfighter and “great heaps of the finest dreck”.

At the museum’s official opening, Lucas’ co-founder and wife, Mellody Hobson, said the collection’s broad scope was intentional, as narrative art should be anything that “depicts the myths that anchor us, the stories that we believe in”. But, for many in the art world, such a statement subverts the traditional principles of art, and signals a worrying trend towards more superficial art curation.

‘Cinematic, commercial, kitsch’

“Lucas has built a temple to story,” said The Atlantic. The exhibits may sound “random” but that makes this collection “wildly democratic” and, like Star Wars, a “brilliant hodgepodge of influences”. Any “conceptual bagginess” in this “all-gatheringness” is a statement in itself: art is a “vehicle for the real story, which is imagination and connection, which is life”.

Unlike traditional art museums, Lucas’ displays are “heavy on character-building, storytelling and myth-making”, and are “largely untouched by abstraction and other innovations of modern art”, said The Art Newspaper. Beyond the expected Star Wars ephemera, there are a few nice surprises: works by street artists Banksy and JR, and a “first-rate selection” of children’s book illustrations. Granted, the mix is “profoundly weird” but, rather than trying to “fetishise” original objects, it speaks to a desire to view “every image as ripe for reproduction”.

“There is something so cinematic, commercial and kitsch” about it, it is definitely in the right city – “home of the Hollywood hills and tills”, said The Economist. There is a “certain scorning of traditional expertise”: very few exhibits display accompanying text to explain what they are and why they’re there. “Snooty critics may sneer” but Lucas wants people “looking at the image and not the history lesson”.

‘Anti-intellectual’

“To which group of people do these narrative artworks belong?” said Art Review. The Western Stories gallery, for example, consists of entirely “Wild West” imagery “from a genre that has enabled an insidious historical revision of the forced displacement of Indigenous people”. And the Work sections shows largely “white men engaged in the dignified labour of industrialisation”. Throughout, “gendered stereotypes and sexist visual conventions abound”; narratives are “shown from only one side – that of a dominant American ideology reflected in the country’s most commercialised artforms”.

Lucas has “brought the history of the Western art museum to its inevitable conclusion”, said The Washington Post. “Centuries of efforts to democratise the experience have come to fruition, in a gigantic, magnificent, messy, maddening absurdity.”

Disconnecting art from its history in this way “sidelines the moral, ethical and cultural content of the story”. It’s as though the museum is dedicated to “the anti-intellectual proposition that art is feeling and experiencing, not thinking”, by getting rid of “all the old hierarchies, categories and distinctions” and replacing them with “anything that feels cinematic”. It’s a “bewildering” but also “astonishing pantheon of disparate but recognisable images”. It will be “extraordinarily popular”.

The arrival in the UK of the Bayeux Tapestry has caught the headlines in recent weeks, and for good reason. But London, and the rest of the country, has a wealth of high-quality exhibitions taking place over the coming months, which also demand attention.

The capital, Bath, Liverpool and Newcastle are all hosting some highly anticipated shows, ranging from studies of Korean culture, portraits of the 90s and the birth of oil painting among others. Here are some of our favourites.

Korea

British Museum, London WC1

If you can’t get tickets for the Bayeux Tapestry exhibit, the British Museum has much more in store. Its next big show is dedicated to Korea, and encompasses the past two millennia of that nation’s culture and history. Featuring paintings, sculptures and decorative pieces, as well as religious icons, it will recount the peninsula’s complex history in eye-catching detail. Many of the pieces have been borrowed from collections in Korea itself, and have never before been seen in the UK.
1 October-31 January 2027; britishmuseum.org

Ancient Landscape, Modern Times: Eric Ravilious and the Artists of the Chalk Downs

Holburne Museum, Bath

In the years between the world wars, a number of British painters adopted a style that embraced the new while also expressing a yearning for Britain’s mysterious past. Chief among them was Eric Ravilious (1903-1942), whose pictures present an uncanny synthesis of ancient and modern. At Bath’s Holburne Museum, his paintings of the South Downs will be shown with works by contemporaries such as William Nicholson, Paul Nash and Tirzah Garwood. For these artists, the view from the hills wasn’t just a picturesque vision; it was a means to explore questions of English identity and belonging.
3 October-10 January 2027; holburne.org

The 90s: Art and Fashion

Tate Britain, London

Curated by Edward Enninful, the former editor of Vogue, this celebration of a decade known for its bold creativity will feature art by the likes of Steve McQueen, Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas, photographs by Juergen Teller and David Sims, and fashion collections by Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen.
8 October-14 February 2027; tate.org.uk

Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Poetry

Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne

The Laing Gallery’s autumn exhibition joins the dots between the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite “Brotherhood” and their literary fellow-travellers. Featuring major loans from collections across the UK, including works by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Edward Burne-Jones, it shows how the movement’s leading lights were inspired by poets such as Dante, Chaucer and Keats, as well as by their own contemporaries – and how the artists influenced later poets.
17 October-13 February 2027; northeastmuseums.org.uk/laing

Van Eyck: The Portraits

National Gallery, London WC2

Jan van Eyck has been described as the inventor of oil painting; and while this has since been disputed, there’s no doubting his status as a founding artist of the Western canon. Only around 20 paintings by van Eyck (1390-1441) are known to have survived, including nine portraits: of rich Flanders merchants, nobles – not least the deathless “Arnolfini Portrait” (1434) – and family members. For the first time, all nine will be united. Along with its forthcoming Renoir show, this National Gallery exhibition is sure to be a highlight of the coming months.
21 November-11 April 2027; nationalgallery.org.uk

Mary Magdalene: Woman and Myth

Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool

The Walker’s next big show invites us to consider one of history’s most contentious yet frequently portrayed figures: Mary Magdalene. This exhibition tells her extraordinary story through early Renaissance panels by Carlo Crivelli, Annibale Carracci and Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, and reinterprets it through baroque paintings and even works of conceptual art. The show will also tour to Sheffield and Bishop Auckland.
6 February 2027-23 May 2027; liverpoolmuseums.org.uk

Europe’s art scene continues to be one of the richest and most diverse in the world. From Renaissance masterpieces, to innovative impressionism, the continent’s exhibitions have so much to offer this autumn. Explore some of the titans of industry in Dalí and Rembrandt, and discover lesser-known gems such as Mary Cassatt, for shows right up until April.

Willem de Kooning at Work

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Willem de Kooning (1904-97) was just 22 when he left Rotterdam for America. A stowaway on a freighter, he had no money and scarcely a word of English. Yet within 30 years, he was a titan of abstract expressionism. Marking the centenary of his departure, this exhibition explores one of the 20th century’s most revered painters.
9 October-17 January 2027

Bernini – Painter and Sculptor

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) was arguably the ultimate Renaissance man. He painted, sculpted and even planned cities; and, as an architect, he arguably invented the baroque style. Vienna’s art history museum is mounting an unprecedented display of the artist’s masterpieces.
2 December-4 April 2027

Hals-Rembrandt

Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands

Two giants of Dutch art are united here for a surefire blockbuster. Hals was lively and irreverent; Rembrandt dealt with subjects altogether more weighty. A shared sensibility as painters, however, shines through their respective bodies of work.
6 November-28 February 2027

Mary Cassatt: Being Independent

Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France

The impressionist master Mary Cassatt finally gets the retrospective she deserves. Cassatt (1844-1926), who was born in America but worked in Paris, was every bit as inventive as her better-known male peers: her pictures of children are stupendous, less soppy than Renoir, more modern than Manet.
6 October-31 January 2027

The Freudian Universe of Dalí

Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain

Surrealism was a movement inherently linked to Freudian psychoanalysis; this show features 62 works by Salvador Dalí, and explores his deeply odd beliefs from a therapist’s point of view. It will come as no surprise to learn there is a lot to unpick.
20 October-24 January 2027

It’s going to be a big fall for museum lovers. Major exhibitions focusing on a legendary tapestry, extraordinary needlework created by American schoolgirls and bejeweled Islamic art are all opening, each one displaying priceless objects from around the globe. Peep these six standouts.

The Bayeux Tapestry, British Museum, London

One of the most important works in European history is the Bayeux Tapestry, a nearly 230-foot-long embroidered cloth that tells the tale of the 1066 Norman conquest of England. The remarkable piece of art is almost 1,000 years old, and on display at the British Museum thanks to a historic agreement with France. Abundant in “visual thrills, horrors and humor,” the tapestry is “stupefying and delightful,” laid out in a case that fills the gallery, said The Guardian.

The tapestry is the hottest ticket in London, and if you can’t secure entry through the traditional channels, there’s another way. One Aldwych is offering the Bayeux Tapestry package until the end of the year, which includes an overnight stay in this luxe Covent Garden hotel, plus two tickets to see the Bayeux Tapestry, two themed cocktails, English breakfast in the morning and a curated in-room mini-bar. (through July 11, 2027)

‘Broken. The Power of the Fragment,’ Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy

These remnants tell a story, piece by piece. “Broken. The Power of the Fragment” examines the “reasons and circumstances that have led to the destruction or damage of sculptures,” from war to natural disasters to vandalism, said Palazzo Strozzi. In this well-rounded exhibition, works by Michelangelo and Auguste Rodin are shown next to modern art by Louise Bourgeois and Huma Bhabha, who have “taken the fragment as a starting point for new expressive possibilities.” (Sept. 25, 2026-Jan. 24, 2027)

‘From the Louvre: Masterpieces of Islamic Art,’ Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, DC

This groundbreaking exhibition of 26 objects from the Louvre’s permanent Islamic art collection marks the first time the museum has loaned the set to another institution. The “treasures” include “Baptistery of Saint Louis,” a 14th-century brass basin from Syria or Egypt, and two “jewel-embedded” ivory pen cases believed to have been commissioned by 17th century Mughal emperor Jahangir, said Artforum. All of the objects — paintings, jade, ceramics, glass and metalwork — are from the 7th to 19th centuries. (Sept. 26, 2026-Jan. 18, 2027)

‘Locating Girlhood: Place and Identity in Early American “Schoolgirl” Art,’ American Folk Art Museum, New York City

The “spectacular” handiwork of 18th and 19th century American girls will be on display at this exhibition “several years in the making,” American Folk Art Museum Deputy Director Emelie Gevalt told Antiques and the Arts Weekly. This collection of more than 100 examples of needlework and other decorative arts, on loan from dozens of museums and private collections, is one of the most “significant” presentations on the subject in years and “sheds new light on a rich but understudied genre.” (Oct. 9, 2026-Feb. 28, 2027)

‘Losing Ourselves Together: The Art of Bobby Anspach,’ Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio

The Toledo Museum of Art invites you to enter the world of Bobby Anspach. The late Toledo-born artist created sculptural installations, and “Losing Ourselves Together” is “anchored” by his immersive “eye machines,” which use “light, sound and carefully constructed optical effects” to alter your sense of “time and space,” said the museum. At your visit’s end, stop in the reflection room, a space for “contemplation and relaxation.” (Oct. 17, 2026-March 14, 2027)

‘Mathematics and the Art of M.C. Escher,’ The National Museum of Mathematics, New York City

Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher specialized in “mind-bending images” of “impossible architecture, tessellations and visual paradoxes,” making him a “beloved figure in both the art and math worlds,” said the National Museum of Mathematics. In this exhibition, the focus is on his works that feature “elegant mathematical structures,” spotlighting more than 60 wood engravings, drawings, lithographs and 3D objects. (Oct. 1, 2026-Feb. 8, 2027)

The Bayeux Tapestry, which opens today at the British Museum, is “shivers-down-the-spine, tell-the-grandchildren sort of stuff”, said Laura Freeman in The Times. Textbooks can tell you the facts: “seventy metres, 58 scenes, 626 figures”, but the reconstructions and photographs are nothing like the real thing. In fact, it’s “more than a shiver of excitement”, it’s the “loan of the millennium” and truly "magnificent".

The British Museum is offering a “once-in-a-lifetime – no, once-in-history – opportunity to experience a genuine wonder of the world at close quarters”, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. Right from the off, it is best to “let the images carry you”. After Harold assumes the throne, having sworn allegiance to William on a trip to France, the early sections of the Normans’ preparations for war have a “documentary veracity” and “cinematic drive, that propels us remorselessly onwards to the departure of the Norman longships towards the English shore”.

Throughout, the Tapestry portrays “storytelling of the highest order”, and “simply getting it to London is a momentous achievement”, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. Its “most famous section”, the Battle of Hastings, feels like an “11th-century equivalent of Pablo Picasso’s anti-war masterpiece ‘Guernica’ (1937)”. It is “pure carnage”. Horses fall, warriors are decapitated and a mace flies through the air: “an emblem of anarchy and violence”. But far from a “tub-thumping celebration of Norman power”, it is striking how much it feels like a “requiem” for Anglo-Saxon England. “To see this astonishing artefact back in Britain for the first time in 1,000 years is the most moving moment of my career.”

The pace of the battle scenes “hurtles along”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. But in the borders, the Tapestry sets out its action in a “wider world, and even, when it shows the comet, a larger cosmos”. Against the brutality of the violence, depictions of peasants working the land are stitched in “distracting, vibrant detail”. This is both “pointed and poignant: whoever wins, whoever rules England, country people will still work the soil”.

Some of the best bits are when there is no violence at all, said Jo Lawson-Tancred on Artnet. The artwork certainly has some historical “limitations” of accuracy, but most importantly it offers a “rare, secular insight into a medieval way of life that might otherwise feel too remote to imagine”. We see unique depictions of a “lavish” Norman feast of food seized from the English in Pevensey, with striking detail of cooking in a “cauldron over fire and serving roast meat on skewers”.

There are moments of levity, too, said Andrzej Lukowski in Time Out. It may be “extravagantly otherworldly”, but it is also “accessible by dint of its simplicity”. The narrow tapestry is “topped and tailed by joyously random images of fantastical beasts and the odd weird naked guy”. This is not just an artefact consigned to the past: “it’s boyishly excitable about the details of conflict, an action comic realised in millennium-old cloth”.

The Bayeux Tapestry is on display in the British Museum from 10 September 2026 until 11 July 2027. Tickets will next be released on 21 October for viewings between 1 January and 31 March 2027.

In 1929, the American photographer Berenice Abbott returned to New York after several years in Paris, said Seán O’Hagan in The Observer, and “found her home city in the throes of rapid transformation”. As “a new architecture of skyscrapers and towering urban canyons” altered Manhattan, she began work on an “epic” project to document the changing metropolis. She had already sensed that photography was the medium with which to capture the “urban dynamic” of the 20th century.

In 1928, she had asked: “How can anyone but a photographer hope today to fix for posterity the image of the modern city?” And that is a question that “echoes through” “Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography”, at London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery. Bringing together works by US photographers from the 1900s to the 1980s, it is in fact “a portrait of several American cities”, from Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era San Francisco, to “the blankly intriguing streets” of Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles in the 1960s. It is not a complete survey, but it’s nevertheless a fabulous show that “just about adds up to a visual narrative of an American century”.

This “quietly contemplative but gripping” exhibition includes works by “era-defining photographers” drawn from the collection of Norway’s Savings Bank Foundation DNB, said Charlotte Jansen in The Guardian – which inevitably limits the curatorial choice. It begins with images of New York and its towering monoliths by the great pioneers Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, and then just keeps moving “through masterpieces”. Lange’s “Migrant Mother” (1936) is among the examples of early social documentary on show. There is also Lewis Hine’s iron worker on the Empire State Building, circa 1930.

Many of the photographers in the first half had trained as painters, which shows in their “glorious attentiveness to composition and light”. And, while you feel that some were trying to deal with the overwhelming vastness of the new American city by making pieces of it their own, others – such as the street photographer Garry Winogrand – disappear into it.

Upbeat and “unashamedly nostalgic”, the exhibition is full of striking imagery, said Jackie Wullschläger in the Financial Times. Look out, among many other things, for Steichen’s “The Maypole” (1932), which brilliantly conveys the excitement and vast presence of the Empire State Building, and for the film about Saul Leiter, that “unsung chronicler of mid-century American uncertainty”, who turned his poetic and painterly outsider’s eye on life in the East Village. “‘I may be old-fashioned,’ he said, ‘but I believe there is such a thing as a search for beauty – a delight in the nice things in the world. And I don’t think one should have to apologise for it.’ Bravo to that, and to the spirit of pleasure throughout this show.”
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London SE21. Until 4 October

The Julio Le Parc retrospective London’s Tate Modern “plunges” you into 1960s Paris, and it’s “riotous good fun”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian.

Le Parc was born in Argentina in 1928 and moved to France 30 years later, arriving in Paris as a refugee from his home country’s military dictatorship. There, he established a collective that sought to “subvert high culture with democratic play” and to fill the city’s – as he thought – dull museums “with noise and action”.

He created sculptures out of random objects: “bicycle spokes, a fan belt, geometric cut-outs, wobbly platters”. Often, the audience can participate, by pushing buttons that trigger his creations into activity – for he believed that looking at art should not be a passive experience. Some of his sculptures are reminiscent of cool 1960s abstract painting but more entertaining: “as if Bridget Riley had got fed up composing her optically confounding art and decided to open a funfair”.

Le Parc died, aged 97, just weeks before the opening of this fabulous exhibition, which is full of his “kinetic sculptures”: “miracles in light, creating impossible spatial illusions”. They use light, movement and mirrored surfaces to create shapes that “multiply, then vanish before, or rather inside, your eyes”.

“Everything in this show is just waiting to spring into life,” said Laura Cumming in The Observer. Even Le Parc’s fairly conventional early paintings are more sophisticated than they look. One 1959 composition initially “resembles nothing so much as a gingham tablecloth” but fast reveals itself to be a dazzling optical illusion.

But the “immersive installations” Le Parc made as a member of the “Grav” collective are far more interesting: 1962’s “awesome” “Continual Light Cylinder”, for instance, is a choreography of “prisms, mirrors, rotators” and lightbulbs that creates “a continuously changing aurora of mesmerising light in an enormous circle”.

It’s all great until we reach the last room, which sadly descends into “kitsch” – “all airbrushed rainbows and prisms, like prog rock album covers from the 1970s”.

At its best, Le Parc’s work is touched “with futuristic grace”, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph, while also “seeming retro, as evocative of a specific historical moment as, say, a miniskirt or a lava lamp”. One installation creates “wispy, silvery reflections” from hanging metal squares; in another, constantly moving strands of white light are projected so as to resemble a close-up of “a gigantic clock face”.

Le Parc’s art isn’t always charming, and can at times feel “unsettling” and “aggressive”, but it’s rarely “slight”: his aim was never merely to “distract frazzled minds or dupe the eye”. Instead, he sought to create “a sense of poetry via mechanical means”. “This show is less fun-house, more laboratory of ideas.”
Tate Modern, London SE1. Until 3 May 2027.

The life of the artist Richard Dadd “makes for quite a story”, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. Dadd (1817-86) was a talented painter who began to display signs of schizophrenia during a tour of the Near East.

Then in 1843, he murdered his father during a “psychotic episode”, believing him to be a devil. He spent the rest of his life incarcerated in Bethlem Hospital (Bedlam) and Broadmoor, where he continued to paint; the bustling fairy scenes he created are some of the “most haunting” images in the history of British art. He was almost forgotten until the 1960s, when his exquisitely precise, visionary works became popular in the hippy era. Dadd has remained a cult figure ever since, but in an era of greater mental health awareness, it feels timely that the Royal Academy (where he trained as a young man) is revisiting his art with unprecedented sensitivity. The first major exhibition devoted to this archetypal “outsider” in more than 50 years, it surveys his entire career and poses the question: how did mental illness affect Dadd’s paintings?

The show encourages us to see Dadd as more than a “mad” artist, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. And it’s true that he was already “remarkable” before his incarceration. Fairies – a common subject in the Victorian era – were his “hit theme”: not “Disneyfied fairies”, but the “sinister and destructive” beings seen in Shakespeare. His Puck, for instance, is “personified as a giant baby irradiated by lunar light”, perched on a toadstool. Dadd’s paintings from Bedlam, however, are “brutally different”.

His “masterpiece”, “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke”, painted over nine years from 1855, represents a total break with existing pictorial convention: between tall, magnified strands of grass and vegetation you can make out “a detailed portrayal of fairy society”. The “tiny folk” are not beautiful, but often malformed – as if he were showing us “natural history specimens observed through a microscope”. In the end, “you can’t get away from it. Dadd was an interesting artist before Bedlam but became a great one in it.”

Dadd wasn’t a true outsider artist, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. He was “trained as well as talented”, as the “dull”, conventional opening room shows. Even in the asylum, he remained “in sync with mainstream Victorian art”: there are costumes, Orientalist themes, pre-Raphaelite touches. Yet the “originality of his vision” is never in doubt – Dadd’s art was singular, hallucinatory, and enlivened by an “ironic wit”. Even his conventional travel scenes have strange, surrealist-like touches: “The Artist’s Halt in the Desert” (c.1845) shows the Moon skewered by a lance, “like a marshmallow on a stick”. Dadd gave form to “those shadowy, sometimes bedevilling thoughts that dwell in the hinterland of consciousness” – and this is a weird but “compelling” exhibition.

Royal Academy, London W1. Until 25 October

Ana Mendieta “made art from blood, feathers, flowers and sand and in such fresh ways, you’d think these primeval substances were new inventions”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian.

“She literally played with fire, drawing a human figure with gunpowder on the ground or on the trunk of a tree, then setting it alight”; the resulting scorched shadows bring to mind the victims of a nuclear bomb or the dead of Pompeii.

Mendieta was born in Cuba in 1948, and when the revolution came, she was sent to the US, where she always felt like an outsider. “Home, for her, was the past”, and she made it her mission to “excavate the very origins of art and mythology”.

Mendieta worked in many disciplines: painting, film, photography, performance, sculpture. She used “organic matter”: a human silhouette made of flowers; a hand imprint in a muddy wasteland; a fertility goddess figure carved in limestone. Her art is “irresistible”, and creates “a personal mythology … as weirdly coherent as William Blake’s”.

If she had lived, Mendieta would have been “at the forefront of the art of this century”. But in 1985, aged only 36, she died – falling from the balcony of her 34th-floor apartment in New York, in suspicious circumstances. The artist Carl Andre, her husband, was tried for murder, and acquitted.

The show is packed with “raw, timely works”, said Chloë Ashby in The Independent. They “compel us to pay attention to the natural world”. Scattered throughout are pieces from her Silueta Series, begun in 1973. Many of these are photographs, documenting the artist’s practice of stamping human silhouettes into mud and observing as “weeds and brambles” or other growths rendered them invisible.

Elsewhere, a famous video sees the artist next to a stream, “pouring a pail of cow’s blood over her body”. Blood spilling from her limbs, she lies down in “a mass of soft white chicken feathers”. When she stands, she is “a woman transformed, part-human, part-bird, bizarrely and brilliantly engaged with nature”.

Many of Mendieta’s concerns – “feminism, environmentalism, anti-colonialism” – resonate today, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. Yet this is not a show about “identity politics”. It is, rather, “filled with a rich visual poetry” that is “both forceful and fragile”.

One photograph from the Silueta Series, for instance, sees a human outline half buried on a hillside, “arms clamped by its sides in the manner of an Egyptian mummy”. Another sees Mendieta herself deep in a rocky cavity, as if consumed by the wildflowers sprouting around her.

The exhibition doesn’t make a martyr of her: Andre is barely mentioned, and this is for the best. Staged with “flair” and “sensitivity”, it crackles with “a sense of pagan magic” – and it’s by far the best show Tate Modern has mounted this summer.

Tate Modern, London SE1. Until 17 January

“The godfather of Chinese contemporary art”, Ai Weiwei is also an activist who has, over decades, “documented the failures and excesses” of the Chinese Communist Party, said Tim Smith-Laing in the Financial Times.

He has been imprisoned, kept under house arrest and, eventually, exiled. Earlier this month, for a one-off performance piece at his new show in Manchester’s Aviva Studios, Ai re-enacted a full 24 hours of his 81-day detention inside a replica cell.

‘Best at enormous scale’

“This is an artist for whom risk has real meaning. His courage and achievements are nothing short of extraordinary,” said Smith-Laing. So I walked into the cavernous hall where “Button Up!” is being held “ready to be moved and awed”. Instead, “I found myself mostly unmoved and underwhelmed”.

Everything is on a vast scale. The giant mural “History of Bombs” is made up of 3.5 million Lego bricks. The sculpture “La Commedia Umana” is a chandelier made from 2,000 pieces of glass, shaped like human body parts. The room is “like something out of Piranesi’s prisons: indescribably vast, its ceiling and far walls disappearing into darkness and simultaneously crammed and scattered with objects that were all out of scale”. But big art is not necessarily good art.

Ai’s art always works “best at enormous scale”, said Eddy Frankel in The Guardian. It’s most effective when “blown up, expanded, shoved in your face”. And, in this sense, the artist doesn’t disappoint. Spread across one wall is “a giant inflatable dinghy” filled with figures in lifejackets. It’s not a good-looking piece of art, “but it makes a point, and makes it loudly”: if you think you can ignore the refugee crisis, think again.

‘Heavy-handed’ symbolism

Elsewhere, “house-sized flags” sewn from hundreds of thousands of buttons represent the emblems of the multinational alliance – Britain, the US, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the Austrian-Hungarian empire – that invaded China in 1900. The flags hang heavy, as if “weighed down by history and its continuing impact”. “Not everything here is that good, sadly.” There are some questionable exhibits and, at many moments – with Lego bombs or the migrant boat on Hokusai’s great wave – “the symbolism is so heavy-handed it feels as if Banksy did it”.

Ai “has never excelled in nuance”, said Cal Revely-Calder in The Telegraph, and the work on show is certainly anything but subtle. Sometimes, this works: the most “affecting” thing here is a serene re-creation of a Ming-era temple, reconstructed in its entirety. But all too often the effects are “superficial and brief”.

Throughout, Ai rails against “the murky legacies of the West”, and his sallies on big topics such as “colonisation, refugees, war” are presumably intended to make the visitor “feel guilt”. Yet his work lacks any “second dimension”, and its worthy messages frequently come across as simplistic. “Meaningful politics seems to escape Ai Weiwei. So does meaningful art.”

Aviva Studios, Manchester. Until 6 September

Until the 1980s, Old Masters – paintings typically completed before 1850 – “ruled the art world”, said The Economist. But collectors began to see the “centuries-spanning” category as “too old-timey”, instead turning to more modern and Impressionist art in the following decades.

Now, experts are not only witnessing unforeseen rises in sales, but also dramatic changes in the attitudes of collectors and artists alike.

‘Untrammelled by tradition’

Old Masters have had “new life breathed into them”, said The Economist. In 2025, global sales of the paintings reached “$1.2 billion [£895 million], 30% higher than a year earlier”. And it’s younger buyers who are “showing more enthusiasm”.

This year at Sotheby’s, one of the world’s largest auction houses, “around 16% of bidders in Old Masters sales” were “under the age of 40, nearly triple the share from five years ago”.

Several changes have occurred in the last 50 years. For instance, the contemporary art market has shown “signs of volatility”, causing collectors to turn to Old Masters which are more “stable and significantly less expensive”. There is also an element of “scarcity” that makes them more attractive, as higher numbers of the older paintings enter museum collections with each passing year.

However portraits and figurative art are “in vogue” because they are, ultimately, “Instagrammable”. People are drawn to what appears to be a “simpler life (if you ignore the revolutions, plagues and awful dentistry of past eras)”. And they are so used to seeing pictures of people online that observers are “primed to connect to painted ones”.

There’s also “new money in Old Masters,” said Margaret Carrigan on Artnet. There was a longstanding belief that “newly minted millionaires and billionaires could be lured” to the art market via modern, “tech-flavoured” offerings, such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), but the “pop of the NFT bubble” has seemed to disprove that.

Yet sales suggest they are “still in the game”. During London’s Classics Week, Sotheby’s and Christie’s brought in £76.7 million, a “respectable 9.4% rise on the same auctions last year”. Buyers are now more likely to collect “cross-category”, and there is a “hunger” for works that “feel contemporary, regardless of age”.

“Amid rapid, destabilising technological change, visualising the creation of a new world and meditating on our inescapable mortality seem pretty apropos.”

Works by “household-name” artists such as Canaletto, Michelangelo and Rembrandt, have always been popular, said Emma Crichton-Miller in the Financial Times. What’s more surprising is the “surge in value for images by lesser-known artists”. A new generation of collectors, “untrammelled by tradition” have a new set of criteria: there is a “striking” pattern that desirable paintings are portraits, that can be “admired with little contextual knowledge beyond our shared human nature”. Once seen as the “backwater for scholarly private collectors” this new trend has “encouraged works not seen for decades out into the marketplace”. When auctions come around, “expect surprises”.

‘Embraced’ by artists

In the past, lesser-known artists would imitate bigger names – in effect “art historical name-dropping” to improve the “gravity and market confidence” of their works, said J. Cabelle Ahn on Artnet. Cynics would call evoking Old Masters styles as a form of “reference-baiting”. But one of the main reasons for this “trans-historical escalation” is “technological unease”. Not only do artists fear being eclipsed by AI, but there is a movement to explore “foundational concepts like meaning and originality in the endless sea of information”.

Not only is figurative painting “back in a big way” for collectors, but it is being “embraced” by large numbers of emerging artists “keen to demonstrate their skills”, said Chloe Stead in the Financial Times. This could be guided by materials, and neglected older techniques appearing “new”. Oil paint became popular in the Netherlands in the 12th century, even now, for artists seeking to create realistic images, there is “no better alternative”.

There may be “some merit” to the idea that current “geopolitical and financial instability” has “spooked” collectors to return to what they know, and that artists are capitalising on this movement. But it is worth remembering that “Renaissance art was intended to be accessible and easily readable”. Perhaps this reversion of style by young artists is not influenced by a “retrograde nostalgia”, but by a “desire to connect to audiences outside the confines of the art world”.

What happened

The Bayeux Tapestry, a wool-on-linen depiction of the Norman conquest of Anglo-Saxon England in 1066, arrived in London this morning after a secret journey from France. It’s the first time the Medieval artwork has returned to Britain since its creation nearly 1,000 years ago.

The high-security, “dead of night” delivery to the British Museum was “like a heist movie in reverse,” The Associated Press said.

Who said what

The Bayeux Tapestry is an “epic depiction” of the defeat of King Harold II at the Battle of Hastings, the BBC said. It was the last successful conquest of England and it “changed everything, reshaping the country entirely.” When French President Emmanuel Macron “offered us the tapestry, I think he understood that it would have far more impact in the U.K.,” Peter Ricketts, the retired British diplomat who helped secure the loan, told the AP. Everybody in Britain “knows 1066.” The 230-foot tapestry’s 58 scenes brim with “vivid and sometimes gory detail,” the AP said, including “mutilated bodies and the unlucky Harold, felled by an arrow through his eye.”

What next?

Before going on public display in September, the AP said, the tapestry “will spend several days acclimatizing before it is carefully unpacked and unfolded” for the exhibition, which the British Museum “expects to be one of the most popular in its history.”

“I had two goals while pottering among the 1,851 works in the 258th Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition,” said Christopher Howse in The Telegraph. First, to find “a nice little piece to buy”; second, “to identify the most annoying exhibit”. There were, alas, many more contenders for the latter than the former.

The RA’s summer show has been running every year since 1769, making it the world’s oldest open-submission exhibition. Every year, it mixes the work of famous artists with efforts by members of the public; and every piece displayed, this year as always, is for sale.

Its 2026 iteration has been “coordinated” by the conceptual artist Ryan Gander, whose chosen theme for it is “Interconnectedness”. I didn’t detect a hint of that here: it is, rather, a “whirl of objects” – an incoherent and unsatisfying display. “If you really dislike someone, then you might consider giving them ‘Speaking Clock’ by Peter Liversidge, which is just a Tannoy announcing the time each minute. It would be an expensive hate crime, though, at £7,500.”

This year’s exhibition is “less awful than usual”, said Eddy Frankel in The Guardian. Yes, of course it features “some of the worst art you’ve ever seen”. Nadirs include “a vast, half-arsed nude” by Tracey Emin; and Antony Gormley’s “giant” sculpture of his own likeness, that you’re encouraged to enter via “his backside”.

Yet Gander brings “a little bit of strangeness” to the event, which is very welcome. He gives ample space for oddball displays: “a video of a bloke doing Bowie karaoke”; a sculpture of a disembodied corpse sitting on a chair; a pair of silver boots “dumped on a plinth”.

As for buying opportunities, if I had the cash, I’d be interested in the comedian Harry Hill’s two paintings of cars on fire, which are “bleak and silly”, but strikingly so. The best things are by artists you’ve probably never heard of. Glen Pudvine’s image of hands unfolding a piece of paper, for instance, is “stunningly executed”. Harriet Porter, meanwhile, is a regular at the Summer Exhibition – and she’s always “the best thing in it”. Her painting of a “small, silver pot” is “hazy, minimal, serene”.

The summer show means “a great deal” to the non-professional artists who submit their best work, said Laura Freeman in The Times. There’s the standard deluge of cat pictures (though, curiously, there are fewer dogs than usual), but there are also some really good submissions: Sharmini Wirasekara, for instance, is exhibiting a “beaded beetle” that strikes me as “an iridescent miracle”.

Yet there are many disappointments: a Grayson Perry tapestry railing at the rise of AI doesn’t make sense in this context; and, in the RA courtyard, Ugo Rondinone’s LED rainbow sculpture spelling out the words “The Song is You” is the “tritest” work to occupy the space in years. Overall, this is “a flat and charmless year”.

Royal Academy, London W1. Until 23 August

It’s an overused term, but Frida Kahlo “has become an icon”, said Laura Freeman in The Times. Her likeness is now inescapable and her story, too, is familiar: born in Mexico City in 1907, she took up painting as a teenager, while recovering from a traffic accident that would lead to her losing a leg below the knee.

She had a short but difficult life, compounded by health problems and her tumultuous marriage to the philandering muralist Diego Rivera. She died in relative obscurity in 1954, aged 47; but her works have since become “objects of mass worship and private devotion”.

“The brand, the brow, are unmistakable”; even before this exhibition opened, Tate had sold 35,000 advance tickets – the greatest number in its history. The show brings together around 30 of Kahlo’s own works alongside 150 by her contemporaries and admirers, in an attempt to track her arc from neglected painter to global phenomenon. I’m “no Frida fangirl”, and as an exhibition this is in some respects unsatisfying, but I left “reeling” from the “dizzying singularity of her vision”.

“There are few faces as familiar,” said Chloe Ashby in The Independent. Yet as the show demonstrates, she “had multiple selves: avant-garde artist; political activist; devoted wife; bisexual; disabled person; intellectual”. Her father was German, her mother “mestiza” (part Indigenous). In art and life, she “projected her shifting identity”. Among the “big hitters” here is a self-portrait painted in 1940, shortly after her divorce. It sees her “surrounded by greenery”, a “black cat and spider monkey peeking over her shoulders, a thorn necklace pricking her skin”.

There are some nice surprises, too: “The Chick” (1945) is an “exquisite” vision of “a fluffy, white fledgling”. Unfortunately, Kahlo’s own work represents only the first half of the show. Her “icon” status has made it hard to borrow her works, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. “Kahlo’s collectors, it seems, don’t care about supporting museums or sharing their treasures – I’m talking to you, Madonna.” The curators compensate for this “thin haul” by adding works by her contemporaries, and by artists who have been inspired by her one way or another.

Kahlo “was a sort of creative patron saint” to many artists, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. Yet when we see homages here, we rarely see the original image that inspired them. This shifts the focus “from Kahlo to her imitators”; and much of their work is “boring and second-rate”. There’s a room concentrating on “Fridamania”, featuring everything from editions of a “canonical” 1980s biography, to a Frida Barbie doll – a tribute controversially manufactured “with lightened skin”. This could have been a “fascinating” exploration of the artist’s latter-day cult, but there’s too much padding here. The show feels like a “festive get-together at which the guest of honour is only intermittently present”.

Tate Modern, London SE1. Until 3 January 2027

Production of a film adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel “Northanger Abbey” has collapsed, leaving crew members owed “potentially hundreds of thousands of pounds”, said Deadline.

The project began as an ambitious reimagining of Austen’s gothic novel but it fell apart before cameras could roll. Some of the “hardest hit” workers have even been “left having to borrow petrol money to return home”, said The Times.

‘Uniquely vulnerable’

“A lack of money is at the root of many of the issues”, as funding “proved catastrophic” for the independent company behind the adaptation of the 19th-century book.

The £7 million production, “mounted in the UK by a team of inexperienced US producers”, got under way in Bath and Bristol but “fell apart during advanced prep” early last year, said Deadline. The company has collapsed and “failed to deliver on its promises to pay workers what they are owed”, so a “handful” of crew are taking legal action.

It’s thought that around 50 freelancers could be owed up to £200,000 after signing contracts with the independent business Northanger Limited. In a leaked recording, David Alan Ruben, the company’s chief who is also credited as the film’s writer, director and producer, said that its investors had failed to provide funding. “It has been the most brutal, horrible experience, and I’m just so sorry,” he told staff in February last year.

The UK has “no rules” around putting crew cash in an escrow account, so freelancers here are “uniquely vulnerable” when films run into financing issues, said Deadline.

Philippa Childs, head of the broadcasting union Bectu, said that “this kind of thing happens all too often” when production companies commission work without “secure funding for the project in place”.

Austen’s ‘most nuanced’ works

Austen is “one of the most adapted authors of all time” with her life and novels dramatised for film and TV from “every angle imaginable”, said Amy Wilcockson, from Queen Mary University of London, on The Conversation.

But when it comes to “Northanger Abbey” and “Mansfield Park” filmmakers seem “happy to leave these stories be”. “Northanger Abbey” offers a “harsh criticism of the conventions of marriage, wealth and social status faced by young women”, while “Mansfield Park” shows that Austen was “interested in questions of slavery and race”.

Perhaps this “serious and timely subject matter”, which is “unlike the usual” Austen narrative, “puts off filmmakers”, but they’re her “most nuanced works”, which focus “not just on romance” but on society’s “wider issues”. They “deserve their time in the limelight”.

David Hockney, who has died aged 88, was widely considered to have been Britain’s greatest living artist, said The Daily Telegraph. Instantly recognisable, with his bleached-blond hair, round glasses, impish smile and “ever-smouldering cigarette”, he was for decades a subject of fascination to the world’s media, as Picasso had been a generation earlier. And just as Picasso once commented that he never produced a painting as a work of art – it was all research – Hockney was a man of restless curiosity, who for more than 60 years never stopped the process of experimentation and reinvention.

What drove him was an intense need to understand “the way the world works, how the eye sees it and how the brush sets it down”, said Laura Freeman in The Times. “What happens when raindrops strike still water? Or a body breaks the surface of a swimming pool? How do you capture a glass of water, transparency on transparency, or shafts of sunlight on a polished parquet floor?”

He was a superb draughtsman, but there was no medium he would not try in his effort to depict the world as it is seen. He worked in oils, acrylics, watercolours, charcoal, pen and ink, pencil, felt-tips, crayons; he produced etchings and drypoints; and made use Polaroid cameras, Xerox photocopiers, inkjet printers and the iPad. His inspirations ranged from Monet to Chinese scrolls to the Bayeux Tapestry, and he found inspiration in everything California’s epic landscapes to the graffiti in public lavatories.

Accessible superstar

He was fascinated by the mechanics of image-making, said Kelsey Ables in The Atlantic – and, as he put it, “any technology that is about pictures”. In 2001, he published an art historical book in which he laid out his carefully researched but hotly debated theory that the likes of Caravaggio and van Eyck had used devices such as concave mirrors and projecting lenses to achieve realism.

Hockney’s work was not always universally admired by the critics; but his aim, he said, had never been to please a room full of art-world insiders, but to make pictures that were appreciated by a lot of people. And he did. People flocked to his exhibitions; their posters became collectors’ items. In 2018, one of the sun-drenched paintings he produced in California – 1972’s “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” – became the most expensive artwork by a living artist ever sold at auction, at $90 million.

Yet neither his enormous success, nor the glamorous circles in which he moved – in Los Angeles, Paris and London – seemed fundamentally to change him. “The moment I first sold pictures to earn a living, I felt rich,” he said. “I’ve been rich ever since... You are a rich man if you do the things you want to do.” He retained a deep-seated seriousness about his work and a ferocious dedication to it; he was not a regular on any party circuit. And he never ceased to be a Yorkshireman (nor did he lose his accent, which he said might have been partly due to his inherited deafness: he started losing his hearing in his 40s).

He was an art-world superstar, who somehow conveyed a sense of being personally accessible. Modest, direct and down to earth, he remained close to his family (he spent every Christmas with his parents until their deaths) and for a period in the latter part of his life, he lived in the seaside town of Bridlington, in east Yorkshire. Over the years, he attained a level of popularity “that has eluded younger British artists”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian, “and has more in common with that of David Attenborough” or Queen Elizabeth II.

Grammar school boy

David Hockney was born in Bradford in 1937, the fourth of five children. His mother, Laura, was a devout Methodist and a vegetarian, while his father, Kenneth, who worked as an accounts clerk and also restored prams and bicycles, had been a conscientious objector, and was a militant anti-smoker.

Hockney inherited a propensity for strongly held views, but he famously campaigned for the right of smokers to smoke, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian. He loved tobacco, he said. He kept 2,000 cigarettes at home “for emergencies”, and liked to point out that he had outlived four doctors who’d advised him to kick the habit. He held a sign reading “DEATH awaits you all even if you do not smoke” at a Labour Party conference in 2005, and from 2012 he sported a badge saying: “End bossiness soon”.

Hockney grew up during the War, and money was tight, but from the age of three, he drew where he could – even on the kitchen floor. Years later, he said that being gay in that era had not been as hard for him as it might have been, because he had always felt set apart by his talent. To his parents’ delight, he won a scholarship to Bradford Grammar School, but the boys in the top stream were not given much time in the art room, so he determinedly dropped down the divisions. In one science paper, he left the answers blank, and wrote “am no good at science but I can draw” above a sketch of the invigilator.

At 16, he was awarded a grant to attend Bradford School of Art. On his first day, he turned up in a suit, bowler hat and red scarf, but while his dress sense was outlandish, his work ethic was even then decidedly Protestant, said Sam Woodhouse on BBC News: he was at his easel for 12 hours a day. Later, he kept by his bed a sign reading: “GET UP AND WORK IMMEDIATELY”.

Extraordinary talent

He sold his first painting, a portrait of his father, in 1957, for £10. By then, the themes that would preoccupy him were already evident, said The Daily Telegraph: “a cool self-interest, a strong sense of pattern, the contrast between stillness and movement, surface and depth”. He refused to do National Service, and spent two years scrubbing floors as a hospital orderly instead. In 1959, he moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art, where his contemporaries included Allen Jones and R.B. Kitaj.

Figurative art was regarded as over in the early 1960s. Hockney gave the fashionable abstract expressionism a try, but found it unsatisfying. Eventually, he took Kitaj's advice – to paint the things that he loved, that interested him and mattered to him. In his second year at the RCA, he produced “We Two Boys Together Clinging” – the title refers to a Walt Whitman poem. It depicts two blob-like figures locked in an embrace. Numbered codes indicate that they represent the artist and his unrequited crush, Cliff Richard. Homosexual acts would not be decriminalised for another six years, but Hockney did not stay long in the closet. “Never worry about what the neighbours think,” had been his father’s advice.

To graduate, he was required to write a thesis. He refused to comply, stubbornly insisting that he be judged on his art alone. Recognising the extraordinary nature of his talent, the RCA not only made an exception for him, it awarded him a gold medal. He turned up to the ceremony wearing a gold lamé jacket. His sartorial style evolved over the years but was never less than eye-catching. “Yellow galoshes,” exclaimed King Charles delightedly, when he spotted the Crocs that Hockney had paired with a Savile Row checked suit for a lunch at Buckingham Palace in 2022. “Beautifully chosen!”

Out west

A star straight from art school, he was taken on by the dealer John Kasmin, who oversaw his production of “A Rake’s Progress”, a series of etchings inspired by a visit to New York in 1961. He’d relished the energy of the city and its more permissive attitudes, and these semi-abstract etchings depicted the rake cruising in Central Park, dying his hair and drinking in gay bars. Kasmin marketed them at £250 a set. With the proceeds, Hockney flew back to New York in 1963, and then on to Los Angeles. Other artists were drawn to Manhattan, said The Times, but he told interviewers that he found its lines too vertical.

As the plane made its descent, he was struck by the sight of hundreds of swimming pools twinkling blue in the sunshine. “My God,” he recalled thinking. “This place needs its Piranesi... so here I am.” Los Angelinos would later tell him, he said, that they had not really noticed the palm trees until he started painting them. As well as California’s sunlight and blue skies, he embraced its sense of freedom, and its open gay culture. He rented a flat in Santa Monica, and within a few months he had flown his parents out from Bradford to visit him. En route from the airport, his mother gazed out of the window, apparently rapt by these strange surroundings. “I don’t understand it,” she eventually remarked. “Such lovely drying weather and no one’s got their washing out.”

His first California picture was 1964's “Plastic Tree Plus City Hall”, said The Guardian, which celebrated the flat artificiality of LA, what the critic Robert Hughes called its role as a “glaring, over-lit, antiseptic madhouse”. To paint it, he had swapped his oils for acrylics. Doing away with surface texture, these plastic-based paints were perfect for capturing the bright colours and – “that signifier of a shallow”, more hedonistic world – “the dappled surface of a chlorinated pool”. The same year, he produced “Picture of a Hollywood Swimming Pool”. It is “poster-like” but – like the artist who painted it – its “frivolity is deceptive”. This is a “polished, late-modernist work”, with an “interplay of surface and depth” that draws “on its maker's knowledge of Matisse and Cézanne”. A voracious reader, Hockney was highly learned.

He followed it up with the pool paintings that remain among his most famous, including “Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool”, featuring the tan-lined bottom of Peter Schlesinger, his muse and lover, and 1967’s “A Bigger Splash”. In 1973 that work lent its name to a semi-fictionalised documentary about the artist. Shot over three years, it was focused on Hockney's painful break-up Schlesinger, his partner from 1966. Hockney repeatedly painted his partners, his friends and the other people around him, while refusing most commissions. The art critic Waldemar Januszczak once asked why he had never painted the late Queen. “Because I didn’t know her,” he replied.

Artistic evolution

In the 1970s, he produced a series of double portraits. One was of Christopher Isherwood (an avid collector of his work) and his partner Don Bachardy. “Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy” shows the fashion designer Ossie Clark, his wife, the textile designer Celia Birtwell (Hockney’s muse for several decades), and their cat (actually Blanche), in their flat in Notting Hill. The painting was a wedding present; but the conventions of wedding portraiture are overturned (she stands, he sits) and the portrait hints at the complexities of the couple’s relationship. He also painted his parents. In “My Parents”, his mother sits upright, staring lovingly at her son, her face illuminated by light from an unseen window; his father looks restless, as he sits hunched over a book. There is a space between them. “It is a tender picture about the failure of communication,” said The New York Times, “and the loving acceptance of that.”

The 1980s were a difficult period. As HIV-Aids ravaged LA’s gay community, Hockney saw countless friends and acquaintances fall sick and die. That his hearing was starting to deteriorate left him further isolated. Professionally, he moved away from painting and started to work on his “joiners” – hundreds of photographs (initially Polaroids) that he stitched together in an effort to create images that encompassed multiple viewpoints. He called this new cubism. Later on in the decade, he began experimenting with photocopies, and also distributed his drawings to friends via fax machines. Having produced evocative set and costume designs for “The Rake's Progress” at Glyndebourne in the mid-1970s, he embarked on major projects for the Metropolitan Opera in New York. More intimately, he painted and drew his beloved dachshunds, Stanley and Boodgie, over and over again.

Meanwhile, he had continued to paint his mother, on his many visits home. She died in 1999, aged 98. A few years later, he left LA and settled in the Edwardian villa overlooking the sea that he had bought for her, in Bridlington. From his studio nearby, he produced a series of monumental paintings of the Wolds landscape. These formed the basis of “A Bigger Picture” – a record-breaking exhibition at the RA in 2012. The following year tragedy struck when his 23-year-old studio assistant, Dominic Elliott, was found dead in his house after a drink and drugs bender. Hockney – who had been asleep at the time – was devastated. Soon after, he moved to Normandy with his partner of two decades, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima, where he captured the shifting landscape on an iPad. During the March 2020 lockdown, he sent out a new iPad drawing of yellow daffodils against a grey field, with the message: “Do remember they can’t cancel spring.” He was at heart an optimist, who signed off emails to friends with the words: “Love life.”

Over the years, Hockney was offered countless honours and turned most down – including a knighthood. He did, however, accept the Order of Merit. It was a personal gift from the then-Queen, and he reasoned that it would be ungracious to reject it. Arguably, the honour he most appreciated came in 2007, said Sam Woodhouse. At a dinner at Tate Britain to mark his 70th birthday, it was announced that the smoke alarms would be turned off for ten minutes at the end, so that Hockney could have a cigarette with his coffee.

Marilyn Monroe and David Attenborough were both born in 1926, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. If things had gone differently, we might be celebrating her 100th birthday this year as well as his. But “some candles were not made for lengthy flickering” and now, instead of a party, “we have a Marilyn blockbuster” at the National Portrait Gallery that is “packed to the rafters with her image”.

The show “goes down various alleys and has several twists. But it ends up coming to the simplest of conclusions: boy, did the camera love her.” It explores her photographic legacy in a clever way, grouping the “seemingly countless portraits” according to the photographers who took the pictures. It also insistently reminds us of Monroe’s own agency in creating her image: the exhibition casts her as a “self-made figure”. Born Norma Jeane Mortenson, she grew up poor, with an unstable mother and an absent father, and was passed from foster home to orphanage. But even from the early days, she “knew how she wanted to be seen”.

“Marilyn was acting for the camera long before she ever appeared on screen,” said Laura Cumming in The Observer. The earliest picture here is essentially a teenage self-portrait, taken in a photo booth: she’s yet to adopt her “trademark blonde hair” but she already has the “joyously open smile” and perfect teeth of legend. Picture by picture, she develops the look for which we remember her – and “a star is born”.

“You think you know her face, but each new image overturns the last.” She collaborates with each new photographer: “more intellectual with Eve Arnold, more intimate with Cecil Beaton, more seductive with Sam Shaw”. We variously see her “finger-to-temple over a book”; “tensely concentrated in a morning headstand”; “glacially glamorous in furs, or casually conversational in the back yard”.

Yet she is always herself in the photos – a quality the various paintings of her here fail to replicate. There are “tearful” pop-art homages by Peter Blake and Pauline Boty, and an “awful” portrait by Willem de Kooning that sees her as “a cock-eyed doll”. The “arc of this riveting show” is “perfectly conceived”, and as you reach the tragic finale, you cannot fail “to be intensely moved”.

It is moving, said Charlotte Jansen in The Guardian. But the exhibition also gets a bit “dull” at times. “Monroe’s cheeriness, the glut of gleeful smiles, becomes overkill” – and you long to see some “slips of the mask”. Still, it’s clear that she had “a special, unselfconscious command of the camera”. I wanted to “hate” this show – exhibitions of celebrity photography are seldom interesting – yet, whether as a “mousey-haired” teenager or as an “uncontainable, insanely glamorous film star”, Monroe herself radiates charm. She makes it worthwhile.

National Portrait Gallery, London WC2. Until 6 September

Anish Kapoor’s first major exhibition was at the Hayward Gallery nearly 30 years ago. But his latest, delivered in an age of “minuscule attention spans”, is filled with so many “tricks and surprises you’re likely to drop your phone mid-text into a black hole”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian.

Kapoor’s “mind-warping” piece “Mount Moriah at the Gate of the Ghetto” (2022) is one of the standouts – a mountain hanging upside down from the ceiling, painted in “thick slathers of red and black” and dripping “fire or lava that metamorphoses into wet, fresh blood”. It’s a “metaphysical rollercoaster ride of a show, a divine bloodbath”.

His “Plastic Sacrifice” series exposes “horribly surgical-looking”, synthetic PVC skin. “They resemble a serial killer’s trophy art.” Contrary to the “small, dry efforts” of much modern art, Kapoor “soaks the Hayward in the blood and guts of his unfettered imagination”.

With his “brilliantly gross” sculptures of “gory, vile piles of wet guts”, Kapoor’s message is clear, said Eddy Frankel in The Times. “It doesn’t matter how special you think you are, at the end of the day we’re all just meat”.

His paintings using Vantablack – the most light-absorbent pigment on Earth – are not as successful, however. What are meant to be deep, searching abysses are just “black squares and circles”. These may be “pretty heinous”, but, at its best, Kapoor’s art is “universal, enormous, overwhelming and very, very human”.

The newest intriguing installation, “Ha Makom”, finished earlier this year, could be a “film set, a spaceport, or a remote ancient temple”, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. Inspired by Uluru, the “sacred sandstone monolith” in Australia, it combines the “pristine” precision of his work, with “intense” colour.

In all, the “beautifully presented” show is “zinging”. If there had been any doubt, “Kapoor silences those who characterise his ambitious aesthetic quest, striving for metaphysical effects, as out of step with our ironic and cynical times”.

Hayward Gallery, London SE1, until 18 October

Marjane Satrapi made revolutionary Iran come alive in stark black-and-white images. The Iranian-born writer, artist, and director was best known worldwide as the creator of Persepolis, the groundbreaking graphic novel describing her childhood experiences of the Islamic fundamentalist 1979 revolution that ripped away women’s rights and led to the horrors of the Iran-Iraq War. Published in four parts, from 2000 to 2003, Persepolis sold millions of copies, and Satrapi’s 2007 film adaptation received an Oscar nomination and the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Satrapi said her goal was not just to protest the regime but also to humanize a people stereotyped as either terrorists or veiled, silenced women. “If these people scare you, look closer,” she said in 2007. “They have parents, they have lovers, they have hope, they have stories.”

“Satrapi was a born troublemaker,” said The Nation, just like the rest of her family. Descendants of a prince who became a communist, the Satrapis “opposed both the dictatorship of the shah and the theocracy that was established by the 1979 revolution.” At school, Satrapi “talked back,” wore what she liked, and hoarded tapes of rock music. When she was 14, her parents sent her to boarding school in Vienna for her safety, but she was lonely there, bouncing from dorm to dorm and even living on the streets a few months. After an illness, she returned to Iran, had a brief marriage to a war veteran, and earned a master’s degree in art. It was when she moved to France for further studies in 1994 that she finally “found her artistic voice,” said The Hollywood Reporter, as well as her longtime husband, Swedish actor Mattias Ripa. She followed Persepolis with Chicken With Plums, an illustrated story and film based on a musician relative. She then directed several more movies, including the 2019 Marie Curie biopic Radioactive, starring Rosamund Pike.

Yet her masterwork remained Persepolis, the story of the “gradual suffocation of a society,” said Le Monde (France), and of the lifelong depression that drove her to suicide attempts. Her family said she died “of sadness” a year after Ripa’s death from cancer. In her last book, she explored the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran, which started in 2022 after a woman arrested for improper hijab died in custody. “Human nature,” she said, “is made for freedom.”

Britain’s landscape has long been “a source of inspiration for artists”, whether the countryside, the coastline or the sprawl of “growing towns and cities”, said Tara Joshi in The Observer. This new exhibition at Pallant House records the various ways in which painters, printmakers and sculptors have captured the “sense and spirit of place” in our surroundings.

Bringing together works by more than 60 artists, it takes in much more than pictures of “pretty rolling hills”, instead encompassing “stories of labour, memory and myth”, and styles from romanticism to surrealism to pure abstraction.

As is often the case at Pallant House, it focuses on artists who espoused a particularly British form of modernism – Graham Sutherland, Eric Ravilious and Paul Nash are all present. Scenes of pastoral tranquillity clash with visions of “monstrous trees”, “almost flesh-like” terrain and “landscapes that seem post-apocalyptic”.

The show begins with the 18th-century “picturesque” movement and the Golden Age of the English watercolour, said Laura Freeman in The Times, featuring artists such as William Gilpin, John Sell Cotman and J.M.W. Turner. The real focus, however, is on the 20th century. Its first decade saw artists such as Wyndham Lewis and Edward Wadsworth revering the machine as an engine of progress; landscape painting seemed a “quaint” pursuit.

Yet following the industrial slaughter of the First World War, painters discovered “a new impulse to cherish” an environment beyond the cities. Paul Nash, recovering from the Western Front, painted ancient sites such as Avebury in Wiltshire and the Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire. Edward Bawden designed wallpaper mimicking the patterning of the fields. A new boom in motor touring led to illustrated guide books for Shell, employing many of these artists.

In this “gently elegiac show, rapture and sadness go hand in hand”. The growth of new developments is a recurring theme: Ravilious depicted a new bungalow beside a red-brick school.

There are a fair few “second-rate exhibits”, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. Many British modernists were mediocre, ripping off “stronger talents”, deploying an ugly palette or fetishising rural customs to the point of sentimentality. The best work, by contrast, has an “idiosyncratic poetry”, finding “strangeness in the familiar”.

There’s a “first-rate” Ravilious watercolour of the Cerne Abbas Giant, turfed over so as not to offer the Luftwaffe a navigational landmark; it’s hidden behind a barbed-wire fence, “as if Britain’s primeval id had been cordoned off”.

Other highlights include five panoramic semi-abstract paintings by Ivon Hitchens and a “vast” vision of the Thames Estuary by Michael Andrews, painted shortly before his death in 1995. It’s “otherworldly”, like a depiction of the hereafter. It makes for a fine ending to this uneven, but interesting show.

Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, W Sussex. Until 1 November

Summers are the perfect time to explore, and that includes at museums. These new exhibitions — an examination of American Pop Art, a closer look at the scandalous painting that rocked early 20th-century France and an immersive celebration of Yoko Ono — are all worth the trek.

‘Guggenheim Pop: 1960 to Now,’ Guggenheim New York

The evolution of American Pop Art is explored in this exhibition of 29 pioneering and contemporary artists, like Maurizio Cattelan, Yayoi Kusama, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. A “reaction to the consumerism” that infiltrated the U.S. post-World War II, American Pop Art “elevates everyday objects” like soup cans to the “status of art,” often with an “irreverent sense of humor,” said Artsy. By placing historic works alongside recent acquisitions by current artists, the Guggenheim aims to demonstrate how the art form, “as a strategy, continues to inspire, provoke and evolve,” said Lauren Hinkson, the museum’s curator of collections. (through Jan. 10, 2027)

‘Hew Locke: Passages,’ The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Using “found materials and iconic imagery,” Guyanese British artist Hew Locke creates “theatrical tableaux” that speak on “iconographies of empire, history and collective memory,” said The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. “Hew Locke: Passages” is an impressive — and comprehensive — look at his work, from the 1990s to today. More than 40 collages, sculptures and assemblages will be displayed, including “Infanta,” Locke’s “richly detailed” charcoal drawings, and his reimagined royal coats of arms. (June 21-Sept. 13)

‘Matisse’s Femme au chapeau: A Modern Scandal,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

When Henri Matisse debuted “Femme au chapeau (Woman with a Hat)” in 1905, it was a “clanging bell” that announced the “split between Postimpressionism and Fauvism,” the French avant-garde art movement, said Galerie. This portrait of his wife, Amélie, with a “greenish face” and “crazily bright, abstracted hat,” was like nothing ever seen before, and stunned the art world. “Matisse’s Femme au chapeau: A Modern Scandal” tells the “full story” of how the painting changed the rules and showcases works by the other artists who appeared in the 1905 Salon d’Automne in Paris. (through Sept. 13, 2026)

‘Saodat Ismailova: Melted into the Sun,’ Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, D.C.

Through her videos and photographs, Uzbek artist and filmmaker Saodat Ismailova “immerses” viewers in the “expansive landscapes, layered histories and cultural memory” of Central Asia, said the National Museum of Asian Art. “Melted into the Sun” is Ismailova’s first major solo museum exhibition in the United States, and her work will be presented alongside historical objects in the museum’s collection. Highlights include “The Letters,” photographic prints based on portraits of Ismailova’s family, and “Her Right,” a short film about “sacrifices made for the freedom of contemporary Uzbek women” that will be projected on horsehair. (June 13-Nov. 29, 2026)

‘Willem de Kooning Drawing,’ The Art Institute of Chicago

Famous for his “frenetic, abstract canvases,” Willem de Kooning was also an “exceptional draftsman” who got his start “copying from casts and antiquities like the Old Masters before him,” said Artnet. More than 200 of his drawings will be shown during “Willem de Kooning Drawing,” from the iconic “Excavation” and “Woman I” to pieces that have never before been seen in public. Some of the most fascinating works in the exhibition were completed during the 1960s, when de Kooning would create “obstacles to his long-honed skill,” like drawing with his non-dominant hand or while blindfolded. (June 14-Sept. 20, 2026)

‘Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,’ The Broad, Los Angeles

A “cultural reframing” of Yoko Ono’s legacy is underway, and instead of being seen as the “woman who broke up the Beatles,” she is now “widely understood” to be one of the “foundational figures of conceptual and performance art,” said Vogue. “Music of the Mind” features works that “underscore” this, like “Freedom,” a 1970 film addressing women’s liberation, and original typed pages of her 1964 book, “Grapefruit.” Visitors can also directly participate in Ono’s work, with opportunities to hammer a nail into a canvas or tie a wish to a tree outside in the Broad’s plaza. (through Oct. 11, 2026)

The world-renowned Bayeux Tapestry will embark on a “highly secretive journey” to cross the Channel on loan to the British Museum, said ITV News. The artefact, which depicts the Battle of Hastings in 1066, has reportedly been insured for “around £800 million” by the UK Treasury during its 10-month stay, which will begin in September.

The 70m embroidery, believed to have been created in the 1070s by English needleworkers, has left Bayeux only twice in 950 years. In 1803, it was displayed in Paris by Napoleon to inspire troops against the British, and during the Second World War it was moved several times to protect it from damage and the Nazi occupation.

The Tapestry is the “single most recognisable and understood object in our history”, former chancellor George Osborne, now chair of the British Museum, told the Financial Times. “The only thing that comes close is Stonehenge, and nobody’s going to be moving that any time soon.”

Dress rehearsals

The announcement of the loan “caused uproar” in France, said The Telegraph. A petition started by La Tribune de l’Art newspaper garnered around 78,000 signatures protesting the move due to the fragile condition of the tapestry. An assessment of the fabric in 2021 found that it contained “24,000 stains, 16,445 creases, almost 10,000 areas of damage and about 30 tears”.

A new “highly detailed” report on the arrangements for the tapestry’s transportation has “eased many concerns”, said Le Monde. “Nothing has been left to chance”, said Delphine Christophe, director general of heritage and architecture in the Ministry of Culture.

British roads – which generate “far more intense and constant vibrations” than their French counterparts – are the main source of concern. As such, teams have tested seven routes, and experts have “mapped every pothole and bump along the route from Bayeux to the British Museum”. Vibrations have now been “reduced by 96%”, said the outlet. This is about the “same level of movement a sculpture experiences on its pedestal in a museum”.

For the journey, the tapestry will be stored in a 1.6 ton “specially built climate-controlled crate” which is “literally suspended in mid-air” to minimise adverse motion. Two “full dress rehearsals” using a replica of identical length and weight have already taken place to practise proper handling of the 900-year-old work. The tapestry itself is currently being stored in a “secret location”.

‘Arduous’ journey

The Bayeux Tapestry is more than an artefact, said Financial Times political editor George Parker. Its arrival on British soil will be “hailed as a symbolic reconciliation of Britain and France after the chaos and bitterness of Brexit”. Ironically, despite depicting violent and bloody conflict between the Normans and Anglo-Saxons, the effort to bring the tapestry back to the UK has become a “symbol of Anglo-French co-operation”.

Britain’s journey to displaying the Bayeux Tapestry has been “arduous”, said The Independent. Requests to exhibit it in London have been “rejected several times”, most notably for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, and for the 900th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings in 1966. President Emmanuel Macron, however, first “signalled his eagerness for the move” in 2018, although progress was stalled by the Covid pandemic.

Now, the British Museum is “set to hit the jackpot”, said Le Monde. The cost of installing, displaying and protecting the piece, none of which will be covered by France, is “classified and likely enormous”. But considering that the tapestry has attracted around 400,000 visitors in Bayeux, the museum could easily expect to generate at least “€10 million” (£8.6 million) in ticket sales.

This will be the “museum event of the century”, but it may not be the easiest viewing experience, said Apollo Magazine. Time slots for viewing will be “only 40 minutes”, which has caused the art community to “raise an eyebrow”. “With the tapestry being 70m-long, that means each visitor has about 34 seconds to move along the work in 7cm intervals.”

The authorities in China have banned a prizewinning film because nationalists and the manosphere “resented its portrayal of their country”, said The Economist.

The movie, “Her Heart Beats in its Cage”, is a prison drama based on real killing, centering on Zhao Xiaohong, who may be perceived as a “star in the making”, a “feminist icon”, a “murderer” or “part of a calculated deception”, said The Times.

Deeply conflicted 

Zhao killed her husband with a fruit knife during an argument that “spilt over into a violent altercation” about the wider division of domestic chores. A court found her guilty of intentional killing in 2009 and sentenced her to 15 years in prison.

She was preparing for release from jail when Xiaoyu Qin, a film director, “discovered” her. He visited her prison, and was surprised to find “marginalised individuals full of personality and complexity, intense clashes between notions of good and evil” and “deeply conflicted stories”, he told China Newsweek.

For the film, Qin blended documentary-style footage of Zhao’s time in jail, filmed with the approval of the government, with scripted performances by her and her family, including her husband’s relatives. Critics claimed that Qin had “lured” the grieving family into participating and “feigning forgiveness”, said The Economist.

When the film was shown last year at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain, it “caused an immediate stir” and “made headlines back home in China”, said The Times.

It was quickly criticised online for allegedly whitewashing a convicted killer. Some argued that the film was “condoning violence” and “rewarding a criminal”, while others “questioned whether she was a victim of domestic violence at all”, noting that the judge had “rejected” her claim of self-defence.

There were also “the usual claims” on China’s “highly nationalistic internet” that the movie depicted the country in a “bad light”, which is the “sort of issue” on which censors “tend to agree with popular opinion”.

The film’s release in China was hotly anticipated, but as controversy raged, it disappeared from schedules less than a fortnight before its release. No explanation was given.

Meanwhile, the film’s cast and crew are not responding to requests for interviews, so “even finding out their defence to the accusations and counter-accusations” aimed at the film has “become more and more difficult”, as reports and reviews are “ruthlessly scrubbed”. Zhao’s social media accounts have also been blocked, according to reports in state media.

Touchy nationalism 

Chinese “propaganda” is “full of distortion and deception”, said The Economist, but much of the reaction online “reflected a touchy nationalism”, claiming the film was a “Western plot to undermine party rule by spreading liberal, pro-feminist values”.

China is undergoing its own “version” of the “West’s culture wars”, said The Times, with feminists “calling out the patriarchy and sexual harassment”, while men, particularly young men, are “crying foul”.

But “more informed online debate” about the movie has focused on reforms to the justice system. The law has been altered to allow judges assessing a self-defence claim to take into account any previous history of domestic violence.

Beware the politician who claims to be “100% committed” to their constituency, or their country, said Laura Freeman in The Times. “There is much to be said for a hobby and hinterland.”

In a photograph in the first room of this exhibition, Winston Churchill stands at his easel, a paintbrush in his hand, a cigar in his mouth. “Over 50 years, in and out of office, and in and out of black-dog glooms, Churchill produced more than 500 paintings. About 50 of them are gathered here.” None are of any great artistic merit.

But the show conveys the sense of a man who was unflagging in his efforts and eager to learn (he sought advice from the likes of John Lavery and William Nicholson) – and who loved painting, the whole business of it: “the colours, the carrying bag for canvases, the sending off of telegrams to request a new tube of cadmium rose, the doing of daub after daub in the hope that the next one might be a keeper”.

And wherever he went, he kept an eye out for what he called a “paintatious” spot. “If it weren’t for painting,” he once said, “I couldn’t live; I couldn’t bear the strain of things.” As you walk through this charming, informative exhibition, “you share his pleasure and release”.

Churchill “came to painting late”, said Nick Curtis in The Independent. He was 40 years old, and at a very low ebb following the catastrophic failure of the Gallipoli campaign, when he took up the hobby, in 1915, and became hooked. He dismissed his efforts as “daubs”, and he repeatedly stressed that, for him, painting was therapy, a refuge from the strains of his work. But when, in an effort to get an honest appraisal of his talent, he submitted paintings under an assumed name to the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, they were praised by the committee and accepted.

Their charm, though, lies in their amateurishness, said Olivia McEwan in The Guardian. Churchill wasn’t trying to impress anyone; nor was he using art to make a point (though the cannon pointing across the Channel in “The Beach at Walmer”, from 1938, is surely a metaphor). He was a Sunday painter, who showed in his Mediterranean landscapes (probably his best works) a love for “dazzlingly contrasting colours”.

The exhibition is interesting because of who Churchill was: it records where he went, what he saw. You would not mistake him for a major artist, and perhaps not even a minor one.

No, you would not, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. Many of his canvases look like “inexpert imitations” of post-Impressionist paintings he admired. I was surprised, though, to find that, overall, he was a pretty decent painter. A few of his oils don’t work (and the stick figures in the backgrounds of some are risible), but they almost all convey “his infectious passion for the art form”, and one or two really come together. Look out for the view, from about 1924, of his beloved Chartwell in the snow. It is “delicious”.

The Wallace Collection, London W1. Until 29 November

“The Venice Biennale is the world’s most prestigious international art exhibition,” said Katrin Bennhold in The New York Times. Every other year, a colossal central show aspires to distil the current state of contemporary art, while the nations of the world stage individual exhibitions in designated pavilions, each competing for the coveted top prize. Elsewhere, a host of satellite exhibitions take over the city’s museums and public spaces.

In 2026, however, the art has been overshadowed by “everything else”. For one thing, the main event’s curator, Cameroon-born Koyo Kouoh, died unexpectedly last May. Then Russia – absent since 2022 – returned to the fold. In response, the biennale jury said it wouldn’t award prizes to countries accused of war crimes – there were protests against Israel too – and resigned in protest.

Yet some of the exhibits at this “massive mess” of a biennale still deserve a visit, said Eddy Frankel in The Guardian. The national pavilions are often interesting, and “some of them are even quite fun”. Denmark’s offering incorporates “a hi-tech sperm bank”; “a singing turd” is featured at Luxembourg’s; the Japanese show encourages visitors to carry around “fake babies”; and Malta’s features “a life-size chocolate Russell Crowe”.

Weirdest of all is Florentina Holzinger’s Austria pavilion, “a confrontational, stomach-turning” performance piece, in which naked female performers swim in urine and circle an artificial lake on jet skis. Ridiculous as it sounds, it’s “brilliantly obscene and vile” – and, beneath the wackiness, a scary portent of ecological catastrophe.

Russia’s display, on the other hand, is “wretched”, said Jackie Wullschläger in the Financial Times. I went in expecting a “whitewash” and was greeted with a “limp” display of flowers, some “embarrassed folk music performers” and insistent “offers of alcohol”. Nor is Lubaina Himid’s British pavilion up to much. Her paintings of “generic black figures characterised by profession (chef, tailor, gardener)” feel “lacklustre” and “predictable”.

The central exhibition, In Minor Keys, which foregrounds artists from the “global south”, aims to celebrate quiet pleasures and beauty in the face of tragedy, said Wullschläger. The idea is nice, but the overall quality is “poor”. Some exceptions aside – not least Theo Eshetu’s uprooted olive tree mounted on a revolving plinth, “superimposed with a film showing its earlier fullness” – it’s the same old melange of “identikit hanging textiles” and anti-colonial railing. I left feeling “alienated, hectored, patronised and bored”.

It’s not all bad, said Hettie Judah in Apollo. The Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar has his own room, “a vast lozenge of space flooded with disorienting red light”; at its end is a tiny metal cube forged from rare minerals necessary for modern technological gadgets. It’s “a temple to callous, extractive greed” and its “catastrophic human cost”. There are other highlights – but, true to its title, this is a show of “minor encounters” not “revelations”. And its very scale, alas, drowns out the “subtleties”. The show could have done with more “editorial rigour”.

Europe’s biggest exhibition of James McNeill Whistler’s artworks has opened at London’s Tate Britain and it’s a “luscious, seductive blockbuster”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian.

The boundary-pushing American artist “delighted and scandalised late Victorian Britain” in his day. Like his Aesthetic Movement contemporary, Oscar Wilde, he “dared to say that art has no responsibility to depict real life or serve a moral purpose”.

At the heart of this show is Whistler’s famous painting of his mother, Anna, on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. It’s an “odd, ungainly, unforgettable” portrait, which depicts her like a “carving from a medieval tomb” with a “rigid, lightless and cold” face. The “carefully composed pattern” and muted tones of black and grey transform his mother into a “symbol of art for art’s sake”.

His mother might be the “headline act” but it’s a “tiny sketch” of his niece that steals the show, said Laura Freeman in The Times. Whistler’s drawings and etchings are dazzling evidence of “how precise he could be when he wasn’t having one of his attacks of the vapours”.

Tate Britain “never misses an opportunity to remind you of the injustices of history”. But this is a show that “seeks to transport you to the past” instead of trying to re-examine it. “Let Whistler be Whistler and history be history”.

It’s an “alluring” retrospective that’s an “unapologetic display of pure peacockery”, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. “Beauty” tends now to be “treated like a dirty word” in some parts of the art world but the Tate chooses to put Whistler’s “relentless pursuit of beauty” front and centre. “Kudos to curator Carol Jacobi for insisting on its importance.”

Alongside the paintings and sketches are “gorgeous pieces of furniture” that Whistler decorated, and Japanese prints he took inspiration from. Throughout the show, the “storytelling is crisp, the analysis smart”. But there are “too many” reproductions of works that couldn’t travel, and a “glut of minor pieces towards the end”.

Still, the exhibition “elucidates the alchemical nature of his art” and there’s something “beguiling” and “daring” about his “wraith-like experiments” that verges on 20th-century abstraction. “It doesn’t take long to succumb to his spell.”

Until 27 September, Tate Britain.

Francisco de Zurbarán was a “genius” of the Spanish baroque, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. Zurbarán (1598-1664) “comes between El Greco and Velázquez”; he is “as wild as the former, as profound as the latter”.

Based mainly in Seville at the moment of the city’s greatest prosperity, he was lauded for his “electrifying” paintings of religious subjects, “hyper-real” down to the last fold of cloth and “pinprick of congealing blood”, and for his “radiant still lifes”.

There has never before been an exhibition devoted to Zurbarán in Britain, partly because the museums that own his greatest paintings are seldom prepared to loan them. This show at the National Gallery thus represents a coup: drawing on collections from Seville to San Diego, it brings together 40 works for a “magnificently choreographed” trawl through Zurbarán’s oeuvre. The paintings here are spotlit “in galleries dark as pitch”, just like the figures depicted in them. It’s a “stupendous” show that “astonishes from first to last”.

Zurbarán is “a mesmerising paradox, a mystical Catholic artist who paints with scientific accuracy”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. The first painting shows Saint Peter Nolasco kneeling before a vision of Saint Peter hanging upside-down, his hands and feet nailed to an inverted cross. “You can see why Salvador Dalí loved this artist”: Zurbarán is “a primitive surrealist”.

It’s “an exhibition of intense religiosity”, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph, and often quite gruesome. The opening room contains three large pictures of suffering, lending it the “foetid air” of a torture chamber. An early, “strikingly realistic” crucifixion scene leads us to “Saint Serapion”, in which the subject – “wrists bound, head slumped” – “appears unable to take much more punishment”. Elsewhere, there’s a “bearded elder” pictured in the act of Christ’s circumcision; Saint Apollonia brandishing a pair of pliers, the instrument of her torture; and the famous “Agnus Dei”, depicting a lamb on a slab, “ready for slaughter”. Not all of Zurbarán’s compositional innovations have stood the test of time: his paintings often seem “theatrical”, their subjects like “actors whose performances don’t quite convince”.

Unlike Velázquez, Zurbarán never left Spain, and cannot match his “sophistication”, said Jackie Wullschläger in the Financial Times. The quality of his art was “uneven”, and in later years could be “vapidly saccharine”. But his work from the 1620s and 1630s, redolent of the vast colonial wealth and “harsh Counter-Reformation zeal” of Seville, was “superbly original and captivating”. On a smaller scale, his still lifes are stunning: in “Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose”, “cool silver and pale ceramic” contrast with the organic forms, reflecting on the mystery and fragility of the material world. This is a show that “significantly enlarges our understanding” of a fascinating artist.

National Gallery, London WC2. Until 23 August

What happened

Engaging in the arts, whether directly or by going to museums or concerts, helps people age more slowly, British researchers reported Monday in the journal Innovation in Aging. The benefits were found to be comparable to physical exercise and quitting smoking. They were most pronounced for people over 40 and those who engage in a wider range of artistic endeavors.

Who said what

The University College London researchers looked at how often 3,556 adults in the U.K. engaged in some artistic pursuit — singing, painting, dancing, crafting, photography — or visited an exhibition or heritage site. Those who did so weekly aged 4% slower in blood tests of their “epigenetic clock,” or biological aging. “People were around a year younger biologically if they’re regularly engaged in the arts,” researcher Daisy Fancourt, the study’s lead author, told NPR. Monthly arts engagement slowed aging by 3%.

Slower biological aging “does not necessarily mean someone will live longer,” The Guardian said, but “previous studies have suggested a link between arts engagement and longer lifespan.”

What next?

The research “builds on a growing body of evidence” that arts activities “reduce stress, lower inflammation and improve cardiovascular disease risk,” study senior author Feifei Bu told The Guardian. Regular creative engagement should be treated not “as a luxury” but “an essential,” Fancourt told The Art Newspaper, “just like we promote 10,000 steps a day or five-a-day of fruits and vegetables.”

Integrating art and creativity into your life, even for a few minutes a day, can have positive effects on your mental and physical health, according to scientific studies. Incorporating them can slow cognitive decline, reduce heart disease risk and improve well-being as you age.

Engaging in the arts is the “forgotten fifth pillar of health,” alongside diet, sleep, exercise and nature, said Daisy Fancourt, a professor studying the effect of the arts on people’s health, in her new book, “Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Save Lives.” There are plenty of ways to integrate creativity into your life, even if you aren’t a particularly artistic person.

Check out local resources

Spending time indulging in creative pastimes can be expensive, but it doesn’t have to be to reap health benefits. Look for inexpensive opportunities in your community. If you have museums or other cultural institutions nearby, “see if they offer any hours free of charge,” said The New York Times.

Check with your library to see whether it offers free passes to some of these places, too, Fancourt said to the outlet. Local churches might hold musical performances that cost nothing. You can also check out plays put on by local schools or community theaters. They are not as expensive as a professional production, and it’s a “lovely way of supporting local artists.”

Introduce creativity into your social life

Try swapping drinks or dinner with your friends and family for more creative activities. When Fancourt meets up with her sister, “we often do mindful coloring,” she said. It doesn’t have to be a formal endeavor; you can just get together with people and discuss your latest creative endeavors. Making it a group activity may motivate you to continue injecting creativity into your daily life.

Find an activity that meets your current needs

With so many facets to the creative life, there is bound to be an endeavor that scratches an itch. Think about “which psychological needs aren’t being met in your life,” said The Guardian. If you’re feeling out of control in your everyday life, “pick a hobby that lets you take the lead without needing instruction,” such as “drawing, creative writing or clay modeling.”

If you want to acquire a new proficiency, try tasks that will “allow you to develop a new skill.” Giving yourself a goal to work toward, like a “performance or a gift to give to friends,” can be a “good motivator.” Remember that failure is “essential to building a sense of accomplishment,” so if those scarves you knitted unravel, “practicing dealing with such failures can build your sense of resilience.”

Spend time in nature

Immersing yourself in nature can help you link to your brain’s creative side. In a study titled “Creativity in the Wild: Improving Creative Reasoning Through Immersion in Natural Settings,” a group of hikers who spent four days in nature without devices increased performance on a creativity/problem solving task by 50%.

Nature, in this study, provided “emotionally positive stimuli,” said VeryWell Mind. By reducing phone and computer use, the participants weren’t “switching tasks or multitasking, attending to sudden events, maintaining task goals or inhibiting irrelevant actions.” Spending quality time outdoors improved the group’s creativity test scores because stepping away from technology and into nature helps you “think creatively about solutions and alternative options.”

Embrace the new

Diversity of arts experiences is “just as important as frequency of engagement,” said New Scientist. Every creative encounter offers “different sensory treats for our brains and bodies,” each with its own health benefits. Experiment with different versions of creative experience, heading for “moderate novelty” that is “outside your comfort zone, but still something you think you will enjoy.” Also, focus your engagement on real-life interactions over virtual, as “screen-based arts activities tend to be the ultra-processed foods of the arts world.”

Spring is in full swing and the new exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, “In Bloom: How Plants Changed our World”, has been perfectly timed for the season, said Tim Adams in The Observer. It’s “a celebration of the ways that plants have sprouted and unfurled in our artistic and scientific imaginations”.

With a series of artworks and other items sourced largely from the collections of Oxford University – from 17th-century flower paintings to preserved plant specimens to works of contemporary art – it also provides a potted history of this country’s horticulture.

Its story begins with John Tradescant the Elder, keeper of Charles I’s gardens, who travelled the world to bring back specimens for his patrons: phlox and jasmine from Virginia, horse chestnuts from the Balkans. That “zeal for collection seeded many branches of curiosity”: artists reproduced flowers in minute detail, helping Enlightenment thinkers to identify “the precise mechanics of plant reproduction”. As this exhibition moves from Carl Linnaeus to Erasmus Darwin to contemporary painters, it is “consistently illuminating”.

Dominating the first gallery is an “imposing” portrait of Tradescant’s son, John Tradescant the Younger, who succeeded to his role, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. Depicted as a bearded gardener, he looks “every inch the Royalist horticulturalist’s crumpet”, like “a 17th-century Monty Don”. The Tradescants “embodied a new type of naturalist” who approached plant-collecting scientifically.

Among these was Mary Somerset, the Duchess of Beaufort, who showed off her plant collection at her Gloucestershire estate. She commissioned a “florilegium”, a book of flower illustrations: there’s a “dramatic, mind-bending” watercolour of a sunflower featured here, as strange as any painting by the surrealist Paul Nash.

This exhibition is full of interesting stuff – we learn that the Victorian obsession with ferns probably inspired the frond-like design of custard creams – but it struggles to tell both a scientific story and an aesthetic one. Its “overarching narrative could have done with more training and pruning”.

It’s a “rather special” show nonetheless, said Ann Treneman in The Times. I loved the paintings of tulips and roses, poppies and orchids: the still life of “broken and fraying” tulips by Simon Verelst (1644-1721) “feels so real that it almost pops out of the frame”. And a “scent trumpet” allows us to enjoy the “intoxicating” scent of the opium poppy.

The exhibition certainly tries “to cover too much ground” – and I could have done with more detail on the plants that have “changed our lives”: tea, for instance. Yet it has “oomph and originality”, presenting a “mix of the wonderful, the weird and the downright wacky”. “I would happily go back.”

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Until 16 August

One of the world’s biggest and most prestigious art events has opened mired in political controversy, resignations and boycotts over the ongoing wars in Europe and the Middle East.

The 61st edition of the Venice Biennale, which takes place every two years, began on Tuesday “under grey clouds and rain showers”, reflecting an atmosphere dominated by “political tension, parties and protest”, said Lanre Bakare in The Guardian.

What’s the cause?

The festival had been thrown into turmoil even before it formally opened. Last week, the entire five-person biennale jury resigned over the decision to allow Russia to participate – they previously stated they would not give awards to artists from countries whose leaders were facing charges of crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Russia did not show in the past two editions because of the outcry over its war in Ukraine, but was allowed to reopen its pavilion this year in what The New York Times called a “soft-power opportunity” for the Kremlin.

The Biennale argued it is “an open institution” that “rejects any form of exclusion or censorship of art”, but its decision sparked outrage from the Italian government – with Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli boycotting the opening – and the European Commission, which has threatened to terminate or suspend its €2 million (£1.73 million) grant for the exhibition.

Why the change in stance?

In letters seen by the Financial Times, the commission warned Russia’s participation would violate a ban on “providing services” to the Kremlin, as the pavilion is owned by Vladimir Putin’s government.

“By not respecting EU sanctions, Biennale has called into question its obligation to ensure respect of EU values,” the Commission’s agency for culture wrote.

With the threat of further protests and boycotts ahead of the public opening on Saturday, organisers finally bowed to pressure and agreed to close the Russian pavilion to the public.

Tetyana Berezhna, a Ukrainian culture minister, told The Guardian that not opening Russia's pavilion to the public was a “meaningful step” but that the country’s “symbolic presence” was still powerful.

“Cultural platforms shape global perception,” she said. “They define what is considered acceptable and whose voices are amplified. In this context, every form of representation matters.”

What about Israel?

There have also been protests aimed at Israel’s entry. It shuttered its pavilion in 2024 amid growing condemnation of its occupation of Gaza, with the building guarded by military personnel.

This year it is back, but “if anything, Israel’s presence has proved even more divisive” than Russia’s, said The Telegraph’s chief art critic Alastair Sooke.

Last autumn, an activist collective, Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA), organised a letter demanding the exclusion of Israel that was signed by almost 220 artists, curators and “art workers” involved in this year’s show. It has invited people to stand “in solidarity” against what it calls a “genocidal state” perpetrating “Zionist atrocities” in Palestine and plans to protest the participation of Israel this Friday.

Although it did not name specific names, the jury’s decision not to award artists from countries whose leaders are facing charges by the ICC includes Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as Vladimir Putin.

The Israeli foreign ministry responded to the statement, saying: “The political jury has transformed the Biennale from an open artistic space of free, boundless ideas into a spectacle of false, anti-Israeli political indoctrination.”

“For some, the jury’s resignation was predictable”, said Sooke, yet “for those on the other side of the debate, excluding any country from the Biennale smacks of censorship”.

“Their decision discriminated against me on a racial basis,” said the Romanian-born Israeli sculptor Belu-Simion Fainaru, who’s representing Israel. “I’m an artist and have equal rights, and I can’t be judged by belonging to a country or a race. I should just be judged on the quality and message of my art.”

Sooke said arguments over whether or not artists should be accountable for the actions of their state or country have highlighted “the creakiness of the Biennale’s national pavilion system”, one that seems outdated and “stymied by geopolitics, given the cosmopolitan nature of contemporary art”.

“It takes time to appreciate the pictures of Euan Uglow – a lot of time,” said Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times. “But then it took him a lot of time to paint them too.” Uglow (1932-2000) was a “meticulous, methodical and exacting” artist “who could take years” to complete a single painting.

His relatively few completed nudes, still lifes and landscapes bear testimony to his “intense” observational rigour. He sought to capture what he saw with “uncompromising precision”, scrutinising his subjects with no concession to flattery, and aspiring to clinical degrees of accuracy. His paintings have an “almost eerie serenity”, whether he was studying “a single daisy”, “a geometric skyline” or, in his most famous pictures, stiffly posed young women in various states of undress.

Largely due to his reticence – he turned down invitations to join the Royal Academy and to be painted by Lucian Freud – and his “fastidious” style, he has been largely forgotten since his death. This career retrospective in Milton Keynes brings together around 70 paintings spanning the arc of his career – including some of his best-known works, as well as others rarely exhibited in public (and some by artists who influenced him).

Uglow is what they call “an artist’s artist”, said Chloë Ashby in The Guardian. His paintings show visible evidence of his method – “complex little dashes and crosses and plumb lines and geometric grids” – and display obvious “technical prowess”. I warmed to the earlier work: witness the “striking” “Marigold” (1969), a portrait of a Ghanaian painter and activist.

The large-scale nudes for which he is best-known, however, are “static” and inhuman. He made great demands of his models, asking them to sit in awkward poses “for days, weeks, months, years”. (Many sitters, including Cherie Blair – who appears in two paintings here – quit partway through the process.) “The Diagonal” (1971-77), his best-known work, is both “extraordinarily elegant” and “excruciating”, a vision of a model “stretched plank-like” over a chair; it took both artist and model six years to realise. The impression is of an artist who took himself “very seriously”. This doesn’t make for “an enriching viewing experience”. Frankly, his work leaves me “cold”.

Uglow’s work is “elegant and technically brilliant”, said David Trigg in Studio International. There’s a marvellous memento mori of a skull, on a bed of desert sand, against a flat, modernist background; and a “standout” still life of a honeysuckle plant in a jar, set against a blue wall – which shows his mastery as a colourist, and his interest in “complex pictorial games”. But, impressive as all this is, it’s difficult to love “the stark minimalism and exacting geometry” of Uglow’s paintings, which turn “warm, human flesh into something austere and lifeless”.

MK Gallery, Milton Keynes. Until 31 May

For centuries, east London’s Lower Lea Valley was “a place of sullen and sometimes surreal industry”, said Catherine Slessor in The Guardian: people still talk about its “fridge mountain”.

But all that changed in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics. This area became a focal point of the athletics – and when the Games ended, it was decided that their legacy would be the “Olympicopolis”, a cultural quarter inspired by the “Albertopolis” that was built in west London in the wake of the Great Exhibition. The quarter’s tongue-twisty nickname didn’t stick, but the vision was pursued, and its latest addition is this new outpost of the V&A.

Constructed at a cost of £135m, V&A East has “neither its own collection nor its own acquisition budget”, said Eleanor Halls in The Telegraph. Instead, it displays items borrowed from the archive of its parent institution in South Kensington – selected to appeal to younger visitors more interested in contemporary culture, politics and social justice than historic artefacts. “To mark that shift”, an 18ft-tall statue of a young black woman by Thomas J. Price stands outside the museum. He was among some 30,000 people aged 18 to 35 who were consulted about the museum, and some of their hopes for it – “equity”, “accountability”, “advocacy”, “generosity” – are engraved on the windows.

But if that makes you fear that this is going to be a collection “defined by buzz-words”, that will dissipate when you go inside, to the upstairs galleries answering the prompt “Why We Make”. These “luminous, unimposing” spaces contain some 500 exhibits – ranging from Vivienne Westwood costumes to Althea McNish’s glorious textiles – and feel “genuinely exciting”. But arguably the best reason to visit now is the inaugural temporary exhibition, which takes you – with headphones – through the history of black music in Britain. It covers everything from gospel and jazz to two-tone, ska and grime, while exploring the impact of the slave trade, and the way music has been used to convey resistance and suffering, as well as hope.

This museum contains much to celebrate, said Laura Freeman in The Times. And yet, it also disappoints. The building itself looks odd, all pointy like a “reconstructed Toblerone”. And the problems continue inside. The halls and stairwells are characterless; surfaces are “universally hard”. The signs look like “Scrabble tiles”; the benches are ugly (but comfy); and the bins would make William Morris shudder. How can a museum dedicated to design “be so insensitive to detail, beauty and proportion”?

As for the galleries, wandering them I found “my toes tingling with pleasure” at the beauty, the craftsmanship, the ingenuity, and also “curling in agony” at all the modish references to “lived experience” and “transcultural identities”. These flaws are maddening. But the museum is still a wonderful resource. “I am thrilled it is here.”

V&A East, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London E20

“If you didn’t know that David Hockney was 88, you might think he was in his prime,” said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. The veteran artist has lately been producing and exhibiting work at a prodigious rate, and less than a year after his “colossal” retrospective in Paris, he has returned to the UK for a “magical, moving” exhibition, “A Year in Normandie and Some Other Thoughts about Painting”, at London’s Serpentine North Gallery.

The show, which is free, consists of 10 new acrylic paintings – five portraits and five still lifes – and “A Year in Normandie”, a vast, 265ft-long frieze depicting the change of seasons observed in the countryside around his studio during the pandemic. Created on his iPad and printed on paper, it is a collage of dozens of images the artist dashed off in 2020 and 2021. While it contains traces of human presence – some garden furniture, a treehouse, various images of Hockney’s half-timbered farmhouse – “the prevailing impression is of nature’s unhurried, inexorable rhythms”, gradually moving from “bare-branched trees” to the “flaring blossom of spring” to summer’s “shaggy greenery”. It’s beautiful, “transporting” and “unexpectedly emotional” – irrefutable proof that Hockney’s “artistic powers haven’t deserted him”.

Hockney has never shied away from celebrating “conventional forms of beauty”, said Ben Eastham in The Guardian. Back in the 1960s, he disproved the lie that great art had to be “difficult”, specialising in paintings that were as immediately accessible as they were clever. In this show, the curators have made an “impressive” spectacle of the main frieze, which “will reproduce well on phone screens”. This was “a smart decision, because in reality it is underwhelming”. The work is “undone by the details”: the messy joins, the “clangorous” colours, the confected “painterly” atmosphere. The best things here are portraits. One depicts Hockney’s partner looking up from his phone, his expression “at once ironical and indulgent”. Another, of the artist’s nephew, is a fine example of his ability to “conjure character”.

I wasn’t previously a fan of Hockney’s iPad pictures, said Jackie Wullschläger in the Financial Times. Yet this show changed my mind. Here, he uses his device with the “confidence and nuance of experience”: placing a thin film over its screen, he has discovered, gives its surface “a resistance like paper” and produces sharper effects. “A Year in Normandie” is a thrilling hymn to the seasons, “rooted in French history and landscape”: it cites everything from the Bayeux Tapestry to Monet’s “Water Lilies”. Trees are the main protagonists, “in their prime or decaying, stark silhouettes, majestic crowns, or felled”; poplars fizz “like pop art”. It’s the “masterwork” of Hockney’s old age, and the show is “a generous celebration of contemporary art’s longest-lived, most irrepressible pleasure-giver”.

Serpentine North, London W2. Until 23 August

It’s a pleasant surprise when “an exhibition of beautiful and moving paintings comes along, pretty much out of the blue, by someone you have never heard of”, said Simon Schama in the Financial Times.

Michaelina Wautier was born in what is now Belgium in around 1614; she was “slightly younger than Rembrandt and older than Vermeer”. We know little about her: she came from a “well-to-do but not aristocratic family” in the Catholic south of the region, then still a possession of Spain. She never married, and she shared a Brussels studio with her brother Charles, also an artist. Wautier also had links to the court elite; several of her paintings ended up in the collection of the governor of the Spanish Netherlands.

There were many “gifted” female artists working at this time, but most were limited to painting flowers. Wautier stood apart, creating everything from self-portraits to religious and mythological scenes; indeed, “there was almost nothing (other than landscape) that [she] didn’t try or couldn’t do”. And as this spectacular show at London’s Royal Academy demonstrates, her “virtuoso talent” puts her right up there “among the highest ranks of 17th century painters”.

Wautier immediately makes her presence felt, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. The first thing here is a “towering” self-portrait, depicting her sitting at her easel, “oozing confidence, thoughtfulness and class”. Painted around 1650, at the probable height of her career, it “shows off an immediate range of skills”. The likeness is “gripping”: “a fabulous face” that stares past you “as if she has noticed someone more interesting in the room behind”. Her clothes – velvet shawl, white satin dress – are evoked with real care. More importantly, she is proudly picturing herself as an artist, as someone who has escaped domesticity. Wautier is also a superb painter of children: an “extraordinary sequence” depicting five little boys demonstrating the senses is a particular highlight, with one holding a rotten egg to illustrate the sense of smell.

There’s a fashion for “rediscovering” female artists these days, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. But the quality of Wautier’s art is “apparent at first glance”. You need only look at her enormous The “Triumph of Bacchus” (c.1655-59): it depicts “a noisy pagan procession” around the distinctly “flabby” wine god, himself splayed “like a prize marrow” in a wheelbarrow. Satyrs cavort while, to the right, a bare-breasted female figure gazes directly at the viewer; scholars now believe this to be a likeness of the artist herself. It’s the exhibition’s “climax”, and a deft display of the artist’s singular talent. Since our knowledge of Wautier is so “sketchy”, the show is one of “questions as much as answers. For most gallery-goers, though, that won’t matter, because – even incomplete – her story and her art are sufficiently compelling.”

Until 21 June; royalacademy.org.uk

Hurvin Anderson has earned a well-deserved reputation “as one of Britain’s most skilful and genuinely experimental painters”, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. Born to Jamaican parents in Handsworth, Birmingham, in 1965, Anderson “is big on artistic virtues we like to think of as typically British: emotional reticence and a doggedly patient focus on what’s in front of him”. He often returns to the same subjects: Black-owned barbershops, lush Caribbean forest-scapes, drab English suburbia.

Whatever he paints, it is always characterised by a certain sense of “detachment, even alienation”. People, if they figure at all, are generally “seen from a distance or behind or deliberately blurred”. The paintings are highly atmospheric, frequently radiating a sense of menace or melancholy – they have the air of fading memories. This “fascinating” retrospective at Tate Britain is Anderson’s biggest exhibition to date, bringing together around 80 paintings from every stage of his career. It is “an absorbing survey of an undoubtedly significant figure”. Anderson is a figurative painter in the great tradition of Bacon, Freud and Auerbach. “The linking factor is a commitment to developing his craft” that is “quite humbling”.

Anderson’s work is defined by tensions, said Laura Freeman in The Times. He constantly “pulls this way and that”, between realism and romanticism, between Britain and the Caribbean, between past and present. A major presence in these pictures is Jamaica itself: he didn’t visit until he was a teenager, and says he struggles with his “romantic” conceptions of his parents’ homeland. Yet the Jamaica we see in his paintings “isn’t the Sandals fantasy of holiday adverts”. Rather, it’s “a place of rank overabundance, hot soil and hotter concrete”. Somehow, Anderson manages to conjure the humidity of the place, hitting you “with the sinister oppression” of tropical heat. But he can be uneven, too: for every “stunner” like “Wait a Moment” (2019), a virtuosic treatment of “shifting shadows on white sand”, there’s a misfire. And too often, the Tate’s “cavernous” galleries seem to dwarf the hang.

“Quality control could have been tighter,” said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. A number of Anderson’s best paintings have been omitted in favour of “sludgy, hesitant” smaller works. Even so, there’s no shortage of “striking compositions”: “Maracas III” (2004), for instance, sees “a hazy Caribbean vista”, painted as if it were “the crystallisation of a memory”, in which tiny figures “are dwarfed by sinuous palm trees”. His complex feelings about his heritage are clear in a series of Trinidadian landscapes interrupted by barriers “such as security grilles and wire fencing, so that the viewer feels excluded”. All in all, this is a “transfixing” show. I left it “enchanted by the pensive, yearning atmosphere that’s peculiar to Anderson’s art”.

Tate Britain, London SW1. Until 23 August

George Stubbs “made his name painting horses in anatomically accurate detail and with psychological depth”, said Apollo magazine. His best-known work, “Whistlejacket” (c.1762) now hangs in the National Gallery, where it is one of the highlights of the collection.

A “commanding”, almost life-sized portrait of a rearing Arabian chestnut stallion that belonged to the second Marquess of Rockingham, it stands apart from most of the artist’s work in displaying its subject against an empty background, “rather than a rural idyll”.

Around the same time, Stubbs (1724-1806) painted another horse, Scrub, also on commission from Rockingham: the animal is depicted in a similar pose, but this time set against a landscape. The marquess, however, decided not to buy the painting, which belongs to a private collection and, before now, has only ever been on public display once. In this free one-room exhibition at the National Gallery, “Scrub” is paired with “Whistlejacket”, alongside a number of smaller paintings and drawings. It’s an event that demonstrates “Stubbs’ mastery of equine painting”.

His art was based on close, painstaking study, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. In his early 30s, Stubbs spent 18 months “studying the anatomy of horses he had dissected”, sketching their “nostrils and limbs, depicting their muscles, arteries and pencil-sharp ankles”. That knowledge underpins both paintings, almost “like a form of homage” to the animals. Whistlejacket, famous for winning a 2,000-guinea race in 1759, seems to be ringed by a halo, with only faint traces of shadow around his two earth-bound hooves; he rises in “magnificent levade” without “rider, backdrop or saddle”, “a powerful, liberated force rising on hind legs”.

Whether the painting is unfinished – and if so, why – remains unclear, though there’s a “hoary old art story” that Whistlejacket tried to attack his own portrait because it looked so realistic – whereupon Rockingham told Stubbs to “put down his brushes”.

There is evidence that both horses were “originally supposed to have George III on their backs”, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times – but that the marquess, a prominent Whig, fell out with the monarch, and George was thus “redacted”.

Whatever the truth, both works are “magnificent”. Seeing them together, though, “Scrub” strikes me as an even more impressive picture. Set against a landscape of “a misty English morning with a river flowing through it”, the horse has “a kingly demeanour” absent in the other portrait. He’s also “more accurately painted”, his “dark chestnut sides” bulging with muscles and veins.

The supporting pieces include some “spectacularly” precise horse drawings and several smaller paintings that show off Stubbs’ ability “to endow them with personalities”. It amounts to a small but “tasty display”.

National Gallery, London WC2. Until 31 May

Is Britain rethinking its big break with the EU? Will Banksy survive (another) unmasking? And is battery technology about to take a leap forward?

Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days.

A podcast for curious, open-minded people, The Week Unwrapped delivers fresh perspectives on politics, culture, technology and business. It makes for a lively, enlightening discussion, ranging from the serious to the offbeat. Previous topics have included whether solar engineering could refreeze the Arctic, why funerals are going out of fashion, and what kind of art you can use to pay your tax bill.

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The world-famous graffiti artist Banksy has finally been unmasked as Robin Gunningham from Bristol, following a months-long exposé by Reuters, which took investigators from Ukraine to London to New York.

His identity has been “debated, and closely guarded, for decades”, but the news agency said its story was in the public interest because it was vital to understand “the identity and career of a figure with his profound and enduring influence on culture, the art industry and international political discourse”.

‘The police could find him and arrest him easily’

The only problem is that Banksy’s real identity has been an open secret for nearly two decades, with Gunningham’s name first linked to the artist in the Mail on Sunday in 2008.

“If you google Banksy and Gunningham you get something like 43,500 hits”, said Steve Le Comber, co-author of a 2016 study at Queen Mary University of London that used geographic profiling to cross-reference 140 Banksy artworks in London and Bristol with the 10 names most commonly associated with the artist.

Because Gunningham’s name has been linked with Banksy for so long, there may be a temptation to respond to the Reuters report “with a shrug”, said The Telegraph. But his outing, and revelations he legally changed his name to the more common David Jones, “may have more serious consequences than providing titillation for the arts crowd”.

This is in part because his “uniqueness stems from the fact that his work is often done using subterfuge, under cover of night or with a team of operatives equipped with fake filming permits or disguised as builders”.

Much of his work could be considered as acts of criminal damage, said Will Ellsworth-Jones, the author of two books on Banksy and his work. This revelation “makes it much more difficult for him… He’d be easy to find now and easy to be charged,” he told The Telegraph. “The police could, if they wanted to, find him and arrest him easily.”

‘People want him to be anonymous’

It may not be new news but it’s still “big news, because Banksy is big news”, said Eddy Frankel in The Times. His work may not appear in any major art institutions but “his influence is pervasive”. The “fascinating thing” is that despite his true identity being public knowledge for close to two decades, “the public want him to be anonymous, covert, secretive”.

“They would rather believe his identity is a mystery than admit that their favourite anti-establishment art rebel is a shortsighted bloke from Bristol called Robin.”

Banksy’s lawyer Mark Stephens has said the Reuters investigation “would violate the artist’s privacy, interfere with his art and put him in danger”, as “working anonymously or under a pseudonym serves vital societal interests.”

The artist has chosen to keep his identity unknown as “a way of continuing to work without the constraints of fame” and “an anonymity which also served as a means of protection from police prosecution”, said David Mouriquand on Euronews. Additionally, “part of the appeal resides in the riddle” so once it is solved “you inadvertently dent the artist’s tantalising elusiveness and his/her/their sense of unpredictability, as well as endanger his freedom of movement and expression”.

“Giving a name to the most famous street artist of our time also means taking something away from the myth – reducing the distance between the work and its creator, transforming a nearly symbolic figure into a person that can be debated, mocked, or judged,” said Anna Frattini on culture website Collater.al.

The painter Rose Wylie “is one of the great personalities” of the British art world, said Lucy Davies in the Financial Times – but until she was in her late-70s, “she was barely known”. Although she trained at art school in the 1950s, Wylie (b.1934) gave up painting while she raised her children; it was only once they were grown up that she took to the easel again.

In recent years, her giant canvases with bold colours, naive cartoon-like images, painted texts and wild juxtapositions – she paints football players, film stars, Old Testament prophets, totalitarian symbols, chocolate biscuits – have captivated audiences young and old.

This show is her biggest yet, a thorough retrospective of her painting since 1989, since when she has been producing canvases at a prodigious rate from “her ramshackle cottage in Kent”. The colours alone make it a worthwhile experience: “ballerina pink”, “marzipan yellow”, “zingy, toothpastey green”. Viewers fall for her paintings “because they are so full of self and energy”, but it’s the “collisions” she creates between “wildly different things” that make them so memorable. This show is a fascinating insight into her “magnificent, unruly inner world”.

Wylie is “unstuffy, funny and forthright”, said Laura Freeman in The Times. She paints exactly what she likes. At best, her works exist in a “larky” universe of their own, borrowing from film stills or press cuttings and accessorising them with “arrows, annotations and titles”, often painted in bold capital letters. 2015’s “Pink Skater (Will I Win, Will I Win)”, for instance, radiates a sense of “gliding elation”; the four canvases of “Park Dogs & Air Raid”, meanwhile, capture a unique child’s-eye view of a wartime dogfight over Kensington Gardens. The subject matter – dogs, ducks, propeller planes – seems exactly the sort of thing that might attract the eye of a little girl.

Yet the “duds” here are numerous. “Often, there’s a sense that a Christmas cracker has been pulled. The painting goes off with a bang… then nothing falls out. There’s an immediate visual impact but little lasting reward.”

The “wilful roughness” of Wylie’s approach gets up some people’s noses, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph: her paintings can resemble “graffiti in a public toilet”. Yet when Wylie is good, she’s really good. She can summon art “from almost anything”: from a photo of Nicole Kidman on the red carpet to “berries on a bowl of porridge”; and her seemingly childlike style belies a wealth of complexity, erudition and art-historical reference. Her paintings frequently call out misogyny with “subtle, cunning wit”: one here sees the disembodied bust of an actress splayed out next to an axe; “she could be a victim on the chopping block”.

At her best, Wylie is “irreverent, irrepressible, anarchic” and “intensely charismatic”. “It’s rare to find yourself inside a gallery having this much fun while being made to think.”

Royal Academy, London W1, until 19 April.

The Hollywood star Timothée Chalamet is facing the surprisingly hostile wrath of the ballet and opera communities after suggesting that “no one cares” about the genres.

“I don’t want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though like no one cares about this anymore,’” he said in a live conversation with his “Interstellar” co-star Matthew McConaughey on Variety and CNN. “All respect to all the ballet and opera people out there.”

‘Disappointing take’

Ballet and opera fans “seem pretty pissed off about Chalamet’s tongue-in-cheek comments”, said William Hughes on AV Club. He’s “facing some fairly stiff punishments”, including “the possibility of actually having to go see an opera himself”, because the English National Opera gave him “an open offer of tickets” to “help change his mind on the artform”.

Some ballet and opera folk were not very “live-and-let-live”, with “many reminding” Chalamet that “their craft is insanely hard work” and it “doesn’t get any easier when film actors start punching down”.

The US opera singer Isabel Leonard said she was “shocked that someone so seemingly successful can be so ineloquent and narrow-minded in his views about art while considering himself as [an] artist”, said The Hollywood Reporter. Only a “weak person/artist feels the need to diminish” the “very arts that would inspire those who are interested in slowing down, to do exactly that”.

Deepa Johnny, the Canadian opera star, called Chalamet’s remark a “disappointing take” and said “we should be trying to uplift these art forms, these artists and come together across disciplines to do that”.

‘Clear-sighted’ and ‘practical’

“Of course, everyone threw a fit because everyone gets offended over every little thing”, said Sasha Stone on Awards Daily, but Chalamet is “100% right”. The actor “doesn’t want to see movies become a niche cultural event”.

I “hope” he just “lets it roll off his back” because “when they decide to come for you”, there’s “no fixing that. Don’t apologise. Be yourself. Be unique.”

Chalamet “isn’t the person you would expect to put down ballet and opera – especially ballet”, said Gia Kourlas in The New York Times. His mother and his sister “studied at the School of American Ballet” and “he wore a New York City Ballet baseball cap in Paris”.

His point “wasn’t that ballet and opera don’t matter”, rather that they aren’t “really part of mainstream culture”. The “value” of ballet and opera, and “people’s perception around their value”, are “two different things”. What Chalamet said “wasn’t untrue” – it was “clear-sighted” and “practical”.

“Still,” said Hughes, “at least people are talking about ballet and opera now, right?”

What does France’s nuclear policy shift mean for Europe? Why is the dinosaur market booming? And can North Korea regain its place at the top of women’s football?

Olly Mann and The Week delve behind the headlines and debate what really matters from the past seven days.

A podcast for curious, open-minded people, The Week Unwrapped delivers fresh perspectives on politics, culture, technology and business. It makes for a lively, enlightening discussion, ranging from the serious to the offbeat. Previous topics have included whether solar engineering could refreeze the Arctic, why funerals are going out of fashion, and what kind of art you can use to pay your tax bill.

You can subscribe to The Week Unwrapped wherever you get your podcasts:

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In 1972, the artist L.S. Lowry, then in his 80s and a “reluctant celebrity”, sat down in his living room for an interview with a young fan, said James Jackson in The Times. It was meant to be a one-off encounter, but it turned into an ongoing “four-year project”.

In this one-hour BBC2 programme, Ian McKellen appears as “the great Mancunian observer of ordinary lives”, lip-syncing to the freshly unearthed audio from those meetings. This takes some “getting used to”, but after a while it is “impossible to look away”.

We learn about Lowry’s relationship with his parents, “how he found his niche painting Pendlebury’s townscapes after his family were forced to downsize from their middle-class neighbourhood”, and his bachelorhood. But the film is not just about him; it also serves as “an epitaph” for his subject: “an industrial Manchester obliterated by the slum clearances”, a place “of hurrying crowds and tightly bonded communities. A vanished North.”

“Lip-syncing can be toe-curling to witness,” said Chitra Ramaswamy in The Guardian. But McKellen’s “is a thing of bleak and beautiful northern wonder, all obfuscating harrumphs and carefully placed blows on his hankie”. The show tells a “fascinating” story, about the artist and our “attitudes to art and heritage”, said Nick Curtis in The Independent. When he died, Lowry’s estate was valued at less than £300,000; in 2022, one of his works sold for £7.8 million. The factories he painted are gone; and he “couldn’t have imagined… the sparkling Lowry gallery” that now stands in their place.

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“Drawing is much more to an artist than just another medium,” said Mark Hudson in The Independent. For painters in particular, it’s a means of evolving ideas long before brush touches canvas; and, in some cases, like Lucian Freud’s, it’s an abiding obsession. The artist (1922-2011) was “almost pathologically preoccupied with the act of drawing”, producing thousands of etchings and pictures in pencil or charcoal across the breadth of his long career.

This exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery is an exhaustive trawl through Freud’s life in drawings, featuring everything from childhood doodles to pictures executed in his final years – and exploring their relationship to his portraiture. It’s “full of great things”: sketchbooks, etchings, and portraits of sitters, family and friends; preparatory sketches, and several of the paintings for which they were created. Whether intended for public display or merely as references for the artist’s eyes alone, the works here add up to a “fascinating and essential” portrait of one of our most celebrated modern artists.

There are “bursts of true excitement” here, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Freud’s portraits of his many lovers make for the “most gripping” section of the show. The “key players of his early love life”, Kitty Garman and Caroline Blackwood, figure so heavily that they are treated to “shows within a show”. Shown alongside photos of these women, Freud’s pictures bear little resemblance to their real-life subjects. “If you look at photos of Garman, she is unrecognisable from the human feline fantasised by Freud.” A painting of Blackwood sees her cowering in a hotel bed, as a “creepy” Freud himself looks on.

Elsewhere, however, the show is decidedly patchy. Too many key pictures are missing, and the few paintings here are much more interesting than the drawings. There are drawings of monkeys and thistles included that the curators describe as “portraits”; they are certainly not.

It hardly matters, said Jackie Wullschläger in the Financial Times, when the show is so “original and full of rare things”. We get a real sense of Freud’s “instinct for the essential, the indelicate, the confrontational, his intensification of the real”. His early work is characterised by “a mournful, crystalline exactitude” that led one critic to describe him as “the Ingres of existentialism”; his subjects mostly look “terrified”. Less so Francis Bacon, pictured in 1951 – “sexually aggressive in crayon and chalk”, his shirt and trousers undone. Better still is a magnificent 2002 oil portrait of David Hockney, peering over his glasses to return Freud’s scrutiny.

His depictions of the young are often cruel but his treatment of old age can be “heartbreaking”: witness a marvellous 1975 portrait of his mother reading. This is a superb exhibition, one that reveals Freud’s draughtsmanship to be on a par with that of the Old Masters. Don’t miss it.

National Portrait Gallery, London WC2. Until 4 May

“Walking into Tate Modern’s huge Tracey Emin retrospective is like walking in on her crying, naked, sobbing and snotty,” said Eddy Frankel in The Guardian. It feels as though “you have stumbled into something painfully private”.

This isn’t an “easy thing to pull off” in such a “cavernous” space but the fact that she can is what makes Emin “such a special, important, era-defining artist”. She first “shocked the nation” in the early 1990s and, ever since, has been making “art so raw, so visceral, so emotionally honest that she forces you to feel what she feels”.

The new show is a “fitting tribute” to Emin’s “brand of belligerent resilience”, said Laura Freeman in The Times. Other members of the loose group of Young British Artists who “established a mouthy reputation” 40-odd years ago “have had their Tate tributes”. Now it’s Emin’s turn.

“Moody” Farrow & Ball paint and low-level lighting have “tamed and tidied up” Emin’s show into a “tasteful affair”. But the “rawness” of her art “still comes roaring through. This is a show that gets under your skin and into your bowels.” Emin reveals her wounds, “holds up blood-stained canvasses”, “offers up the bottle of painkillers she took after an abortion in 1990”, and shares zoomed-in photos of her stoma (she was diagnosed with aggressive bladder cancer in 2020 and is now in remission).

While the “relentless focus on self could be exhausting”, Emin eschews self-pity, instead delving into her regrets and displaying a “tender embarrassment“ for the little girl she was. “Mostly, though, there’s a sense of eff-off defiance. Past isn’t destiny. Second lives are possible.”

Emin’s later paintings are “highly seductive”, said Mark Hudson in The Independent, with “beautifully fluent lines”. But the “narrowness” of the predominantly red and blue colour palette becomes “monotonous” and I was “left wanting a lot more”.

Her recent acrylics are “impassioned” but “samey”, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. And “I soon tired” of the “many framed sheets of writing paper covered with her stream-of-consciousness prose”. Showcasing “intimate” photos of her “post-operative body is brave, but how are these images transformed in any way into art”?

Still, her monochromatic embroidered blankets pack “an aesthetic punch”, and her famous “My Bed” (1998) – a recreation of Emin’s unmade bed, complete with cigarette butts, vodka bottles, used condoms, “stained mattress and bedraggled sheets” – looks as “squalid as ever”. It is, by far, “the rawest, most powerful thing Emin has assembled”.

“Don’t come here looking for a good time – you won’t find it,” said Frankel in The Guardian. But if you’re after “pure, unapologetic, undiluted, full-frontal love, grief, heartache and sadness”, you will feel it all in spades at this “wildly emotional” exhibition.

During her lifetime, Gwen John’s achievements were rather overshadowed by those of her younger brother Augustus, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Today, though, she is arguably Wales’ most famous artist – and, to mark the 150th anniversary of her birth in 1876, she is now the subject of this “superb, daunting” retrospective in Cardiff. It does not give us a blow by blow biography of the artist, who grew up in Haverfordwest and followed her brother to the Slade art school, before moving to France. Instead, the show plunges us straight into her “spiritual, austere existence”.

We meet John in Paris, painting cats, the sparse rooms she rented “and women alone in moments of calm thought”. In a series started in the early 1910s, a young woman in a blue dress – a convalescent – sits “weakly in an armchair”. The brilliance of these canvases lies in what they do not show; there are no “chatting crowds”, no gaudy hats, no omnibuses. In her work, John cut out the “social flab”, to focus on the inner experience – in this case, a woman’s “sorrow, illness, despair, recovery”. It is not that she is an artist without passion or desire (she had a decade-long affair with the sculptor Auguste Rodin); it’s simply that in her quest to escape the repressive dishonesty of the world into which she was born, she stripped it all back, and painted only what was essential.

John’s subject matter never deviated far from those paintings, but her style developed over the years, said Alastair Smart in The Telegraph. In 1897’s “Young Woman Playing a Violin”, “attention is paid even to the strings” on the bow. A couple of decades later, influenced by James McNeill Whistler, John’s work has become more ethereal. Aided by the pioneering application of a mix of chalk and animal glue to her canvases, figures such as the praying woman in “The Pilgrim” “seem weightless, almost levitating off the canvas towards us”. But though these latter works are “riveting”, they are not enough to sustain a show of this size. Of the 200 pieces here, too many are rarely shown works on paper – dreary watercolours of nuns, cats and flowers. Their inclusion reinforces the sense that John was a limited artist, a little of whom “goes a long way”.

Some of these works are admittedly weak, said Laura Cumming in The Observer, but the focus of the show is John’s method: how she created, for instance, atmosphere and a sense of presence in empty rooms. One of her best-loved paintings, “A Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris” (c.1907-09), has light filtering in through a curtain and a parasol leaning “against a chair drawn comfortingly close” to a table that is bare save for some flowers, it’s “still, quiet, calm” – a sanctuary for the viewer, too. But then we see a second painting of the same corner. Now the curtain is part open; John has taken a step back; the tones are sharper. This painting feels active. The room is not changed; what has altered is the state of her mind, or of her heart.

National Museum Cardiff. Until 28 June.

The Courtauld Gallery is hosting an exhibition devoted entirely to Georges Seurat’s seascapes. The pointillist painter died in 1891, at the age of 31, probably from diphtheria, leaving behind just 45 paintings. This show brings together 26 of his works, made during summers spent on the northern coast of France between 1895 and 1890. “It is a quietly tremendous exhibition,” said Adrian Searle in The Guardian, filled with “blizzards of light”.

Despite his own claims to science and objectivity, Seurat’s paintings are undoubtedly “peculiar and strange”. His “cumulative little strokes and pustules of pigment” draw your attention to the artistic process, at times creating “a kind of veil of interference between yourself and the image”. But when everything “comes together”, his “unpeopled everyday scenes take on a quivering psychological sense of importance”.

This “revelatory” exhibition is London’s “most brightly enveloping winter show”, said Jackie Wullschläger in the Financial Times. Our “understanding of Seurat’s aims, sensibility, inventiveness and relationship with his peers” is reoriented through this unique bringing-together of his “luminous Normandy seascapes”. The Courtauld’s “coup” is reuniting six canvasses Seurat completed in Port-en-Bessin: these paintings haven’t been displayed as a complete series since their inaugural exhibition in Brussels in 1889. “To experience these works together transforms our responses.”

Seurat’s seascapes are “magnificently weird”, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. With their “glittering sunshine” and “sailboats bobbing about on enticing turquoise water”, they are reminiscent of summer holidays. “But where are the holidaymakers?”

“I confess that I have generally found the neo-impressionists easy to admire (the discipline, the spirit of experiment, the light) but difficult to love (the stiffness, the fixity, the painstaking finickityness of it all),” said Laura Freeman in The Times. But no one could make that accusation here: there are no human figures to look stiff. Instead, Seurat’s subjects are “resolutely the sea, the sky, the almost magically transformative power of strong sun beating on water”.

The Courtauld has a “knack” for this type of intimate show. In these “long, grey” days, filled with relentless rain, there “could be no greater contrast” than Seurat’s “shimmering seas”. “Book tickets. Cast off your preconceptions. Let the light in.”

Until 17 May at the Courtauld Gallery, London

We think of samurai as fearsome warriors – and they were, said Neil Fisher in The Sunday Times. Yet if you visit Nomura Residence, an “elegant” house in the Japanese city of Kanazawa where generations of samurai lived, you’ll find it has delightful features, including an exquisite garden. Inside, you can see a fine piece of calligraphy – a letter written in 1566 to a samurai from his liege lord. “We appreciate that you worked so hard to kill one high-ranked soldier on the fourth of last month at the Yokokitaguchi Battle,” it says. “We are very happy that you brought us his head.”

The story of the samurai is, you realise, a “bundle of contradictions” – “elegance and formality, banality and butchery” – and that is how it is presented in the British Museum’s “blockbuster” show. It explores the role of the samurai and their pop-cultural afterlife – and in so doing, it clears up a few misapprehensions. The biggest is that the samurai were a “military sect”, when for centuries they were more “a privileged tier of society” that helped ensure the smooth running of the state. During the Tokugawa shogunate (1603-1868), “about 10% of the population counted as samurai class”, half of whom were women.

The show takes you on a “scintillating journey” through “a world of gore, power and artistic beauty”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. The samurai were not the first to believe that, in battle, the warrior is transformed into something other. The Vikings had their berserkers, for instance. “But no culture has ever put quite as much creativity into blood-lust” as this one. When the samurai donned their armour – “so vital, so electric”, with their grimacing black masks – they would have seemed truly demonic. Even empty, the suits here “pulse with menace and mystery”.

There are lots of weapons on show too, and images of samurai in bloody battle – but also a painting of a warrior stopping to smell the blossom he is riding past, and another of a samurai making love to a courtesan while two other women “caress the blade of his unsheathed sword”. That perhaps encapsulates the appeal of this exhibition: the samurai were lethal but sexy, their warfare violent yet theatrical.

For samurai, who “aspired to be sophisticated courtiers and held the arts in high regard, beauty and brutality were intertwined”, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. Some of their armour was positively dandyish; a 19th century quiver here glitters like a disco floor. The show is in three parts. The first covers the rise of the warriors as a fighting force in medieval times; the second – and most engrossing, in my view – is about the peaceful Tokugawa shogunate, when they morphed into bureaucrats; the third explores their impact on popular culture. The effect of this section, which includes comic books and an effigy of Darth Vader, whose helmet was modelled on samurai armour, is bathetic, as if you’ve walked into a teenager’s bedroom. It’s a disappointing climax to an otherwise “riveting” exhibition.

British Museum, London WC1. Until 4 May

Forty years ago, the American photographer Nan Goldin published what became “one of the most influential photo books ever made”, said Jacqui Palumbo on CNN. Entitled “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, it documented life in New York City’s East Village in the 1970s and 1980s, with excursions to Chicago, London and Mexico City. The “searingly intimate” pictures showed Goldin and her “predominantly queer” friends in a variety of locations, from “darkened nightclubs” to “daylit bedrooms”. Their gazes are variously “bright, or disaffected, or longing”, and cigarette smoke hangs in the air.

Goldin conceived the series “as a slideshow timed to songs by ‘The Velvet Underground’ and Dionne Warwick”, which was played in nightclubs. The photos were rarely displayed together. Now, though, they have come to the UK for the first time, and are being shown as framed prints at the Gagosian gallery in Mayfair.

Goldin, who was born in 1953, “was a teenage runaway”, said India Block in The London Standard: after her beloved sister died by suicide, she fled the “stifling” Boston suburb she’d grown up in and moved to New York, where she threw herself into the city’s gritty underground scene. She originally started photographing her friends’ exploits when she discovered drinking (then heroin), “and wanted a record unaltered by mind-altering substances”.

Named after a song by Bertolt Brecht, the “Ballad” series is “glamorous, engrossing and gross (in a good way)”: hyper-saturated images show a heavily pregnant woman in “a sparkly bikini”, a friend masturbating, someone else urinating, “a vulva framed by a surgery scar from an ectopic pregnancy”. Given the rawness of the images, “there’s something rather punk” about seeing them “gussied up and gorgeous” in a gallery; though you do long to see them “in a darkened room with pulsing music”. Still, “with each photograph occupying the same size frame”, your eye is left free to alight on whichever moment it chooses; and all these years on, the pictures are “as fresh, exciting, comforting and confronting” as they were in 1986.

“I’ve been familiar with these images for much of my adult life,” said Adrian Searle in The Guardian, and what struck me on this viewing was how “normal” the lives of Goldin and her friends look today. “We are now used” to people posting photos online as an often “self-conscious and calculated mirage of their lives”. Still, the great power of these photographs – each of which “leaves you on a kind of brink” – is undiminished, and the display here, which covers three black walls, is satisfyingly immersive, sending the eye “pinballing between captured moments and emotions”. The “apparent casualness” of Goldin’s approach is deceptive: there is an “emotional texture and atmosphere” to her work that proves that “not everyone who can hold a phone can take photographs worth looking at”.

Gagosian, 17-19 Davies Street, London W1. Until 21 March.