“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 ten 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.

Is the world running out of RAM? Why is the Royal Artillery keeping looted treasure behind closed doors? And how can Heathrow’s car park cost £1.3 billion?

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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“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.

Skagen is “a remote fishing port at the northernmost tip of Denmark”, said Chloë Ashby in The Times. A wild beauty spot where the North and Baltic seas meet, it is today a magnet for Copenhagen’s elites in the summer. But in the late 19th century, it was home to “a thriving community of international artists” attracted by Skagen’s landscape and the qualities of its light. Anna Ancher (1859-1935) was its innkeeper’s daughter, aged just 12 when this bohemian influx to her home village began. Clearly, it sparked something: Ancher went on to make herself one of Denmark’s best-loved painters. The young Anna, keen to learn how to paint, had “unofficial teachers on tap”.

Later, she married an artist, Michael Ancher, and lived in Copenhagen and in Paris, where the efforts of the impressionists inspired her to return to her hometown and paint similar scenes. She painted portraits, seascapes, still lifes and interior scenes, all meticulously recreating the village’s famous light. Bringing together more than 40 paintings, this exhibition gives British audiences previously unacquainted with her work an introduction to Ancher’s bold and singular art.

Entering the exhibition “feels like walking into a pat of butter, or perhaps, more aptly, a ray of sunlight”, said Eliza Goodpasture in The Guardian. The gallery’s “luscious pale yellow walls” set the tone for this exploration of Ancher’s “practice of painting light”. Most of the works on show record “her home or that of other members of the Skagen community”, revisiting the same subjects again and again but refining them every time. Some of “the most moving” paintings here depict her mother: in one, she’s a “shawl-swathed figure” dissolving into abstract tones of red and thence raw canvas. Another sees her leaning over the coffin of her daughter Agnes, “drenched in shadow” while the deceased is “almost completely washed-out in white”.

Ancher avoided grandiosity, said Lucy Waterson in Apollo. Instead, she gave her pictures a “softer, more domestic focus”. The people in her paintings – a working woman in “The Maid in the Kitchen”, or “patient mothers and their squealing children” in “A Vaccination, Study” – are shown performing “mundane tasks, painted without drama or exaggeration”. But it’s the light in her works that really grabs the attention: it “streams in through windowpanes or shines bright through linen curtains”, but is best captured in “pared-back studies” such as “Evening Sun in the Artist’s Studio at Markvej”, depicting a corner of her workspace patterned with light on a wall. Among a handful of landscape studies, meanwhile, is the gorgeous “Moorland” – in which a green plain stretches out below a “candy-coloured sky” – and “Blue Sunset”, capturing a rare moment of stillness on Skagen’s beach. This exhibition wonderfully showcases Ancher’s “virtuosic handling of the shifting Nordic light”.

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London SE21. Until 8 March

Indonesia’s vast archipelago is covered with the fingerprints of human history: ancient cave paintings.

But on an island just off Sulawesi, archaeologists have now identified the world’s oldest known example of rock art to date: the outline of a handprint. Using new laser techniques, scientists dated the faded red imprint back to “at least 67,800 years ago”, said the study, published in Nature. That’s about 1,100 years earlier than hand stencils in Spain, previously thought to be the oldest (although that’s disputed).

Crucially, the tip of one finger appears to have been deliberately “narrowed”, researchers say, creating a “claw-like effect” that suggests complexity of thought – and a Homo sapiens artist. The finding adds to growing evidence challenging the “Eurocentric views of ancient intelligence that once dominated archaeology”, said National Geographic.

A window into the past

The handprint was first spotted in Liang Metanduno, a popular cave on the tropical island of Muna, in 2015. Sulawesi has a “rich history” of palaeolithic art, said The Guardian. But the “ancient hand stencil” had “gone unnoticed” among more recent, eye-catching paintings, being “faded and partially obscured”.

“There’s a lot of rock art out there, but it’s really difficult to date,” said project leader Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia. “When you can date it, it opens up a completely different world. It’s an intimate window into the past, and an intimate window into these people’s minds.”

The stencils were created by “spraying mouthfuls of ochre mixed with water” over a hand pressed flat against the cave wall. When the hand is pulled away, the negative outline is left in the pigment.

Like some other stencils on Sulawesi, the Liang Metanduno imprint has “narrow, pointy fingers”, which the researchers believe was intentional. “Whether they resemble animal claws or more fancifully some human-animal creature that doesn’t exist, we don’t know,” said Adam Brumm, who co-led the fieldwork on Sulawesi. “But there’s some sort of symbolic meaning behind them.”

It’s “a complicated thought”, said Aubert. “They are drawing something that doesn’t really exist.”

A new way of thinking

Cave art is “seen as a key marker of when humans began to think in truly abstract, symbolic ways”, said the BBC. It demonstrates “the kind of imagination that underpins language, religion and science”.

Many archaeologists believed art and abstract thinking “burst suddenly into life in Ice Age Europe and spread from there”. They argued for a mental “big bang” in Europe, because cave paintings, carvings and new tools “all seem to appear together in France and Spain about 40,000 years ago”. As Brumm said: “When I went to university in the mid to late 90s, that’s what we were taught.”

But a “new consensus is being shaped”, said the BBC. A series of discoveries in South Africa and Sulawesi has “overturned the old idea” and suggested “a much deeper and more widespread story of creativity”.

We’re seeing “traits of modern human behaviour, including narrative art”, in Indonesia, said Brumm. That makes the “Eurocentric argument very hard to sustain”.

In 1810, the warrior chief Kamehameha I united the Hawaiian islands into a single kingdom. That same year, said Evgenia Siokos in The Telegraph, he dispatched an extraordinary cargo to the other side of the world, along with a formal appeal to King George III to make Great Britain his own island nation’s “natural ally”. “Should any of the powers which you are at war with molest me,” he wrote, “I shall expect your protection.” The letter was sent with “a gift of astonishing splendour”: a cloak fashioned from “hundreds of thousands of red and yellow bird feathers” – which was worn by only the highest-ranking chief, and which “embodied sacred authority”.

It has not been on public display since 1900, but now takes “pride of place” in a “thrilling” new show that illustrates both the range of the British Museum’s Hawaiian collections, and the friendly relations between the two kingdoms until Hawaii’s official annexation by the US in 1898. There are a wealth of spectacular exhibits, including a trio of feathered akua (gods), which encapsulate a chieftain’s power and “exude a ferocious energy”. The exhibition “treats artefacts as living objects”, and gives voice to a “fascinating, rarely heard culture”.

At the heart of this tremendous show is a “desperate tragedy”, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. In 1824, Kamehameha’s son Liholiho and his wife Queen Kamamalu travelled to London, where they were received with full honours, celebrated by society and slotted in for an audience with the profligate George IV – “one of the worst monarchs in British history”. We see a lithograph of the Hawaiians “beaming” through a performance at the Theatre Royal, and Regency portraits of the couple, dressed in the English fashions of the day. But, unused to foreign climes, they both contracted measles and died within a week of each other; they never met George IV, though he did at least pay their hotel bills, and ordered a ship to transport their bodies home.

The show’s narrative isn’t the easiest to follow, said Laura Freeman in The Times: “I felt somewhat walloped by the history and the who’s who of Hawaiian royal genealogy.” Yet the artefacts it contains are “dazzling”. Highlights include textile panels decorated with “chevrons, stripes, steps and zigzags”; helmets woven from climbing plants; even a “tiny, endearing turtle ornament carved from whale ivory and set with tortoiseshell eyes”. Best of all is a cabinet full of “feathered cloaks, capelets, chokers, tokens, garlands and fans”, many embellished with feathers from the now-extinct o’o bird. It’s a grown-up event that recognises our Georgian ancestors as humans, rather than demons; yet never lets them off “scot-free” for their plundering ways. In short, it’s an exemplary British Museum show – “handsome”, “intelligent” and never less than interesting.

The British Museum, London WC1. Until 25 May.

Far from the neon lights of Tokyo, temples and shrines of Kyoto and the Osaka street food scene is Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost — and westernmost — prefecture. Here, expect a slower pace, where the hardest decision you’ll make is which beach to visit.

What to know about Okinawa

Okinawa is Japan’s sole subtropical region, attracting visitors seeking white sand beaches and swaying palms. Of the 160 or so islands, about 40 are inhabited, and the prefecture comes by the nickname “Caribbean of the Sea” honestly, said Travel and Leisure.

Popular spots include the jungle-filled Iriomote Island and Miyako Island, where travelers can swim and kayak through the turquoise waters. Going island hopping is easy, thanks to ferries and flights that connect through Naha Airport. Pack light and consider leaving the jacket at home — the weather is warm and humid year-round, comparable to Hawai‘i and Miami.

While most visitors come to Okinawa for the scenery and activities, some also want to learn more about its status as a Blue Zone. These areas have the highest proportions of centenarians and lower rates of diseases like cancer, diabetes and dementia. Two practices that may be linked to Okinawan longevity are hara hachi bu, which means eating until 80% full, and being part of a moai, a social support group that typically forms during childhood and continues through life.

Hit the beach and appreciate local art

Many activities in Okinawa “revolve around water,” making it a paradise for scuba divers and snorkelers, said Travel and Leisure. The underwater sights are “incredible,” thanks to coral reefs “known for their biodiversity,” arches, caves and wildlife like manta rays and sea turtles.

Aharen Beach and Tokashiku Beach on Tokashiki Island are two of the “most sought-after” spots for diving because of the marine life, said Travel and Leisure. Cape Higashi Henna on Miyako Island is where the Pacific Ocean meets the East China Sea and boasts more than 200 plant and flower species and views from its lighthouse that will "take your breath away,” the BBC said.

History is everywhere in Okinawa, which from 1429 to 1879 was the Ryukyu Kingdom, a tributary state under China’s Ming and Qing dynasties. Bingata, a traditional dyeing technique going back hundreds of years, “reigns supreme” in Okinawa, and this “endemic craft is also a key to its identity,” said Condé Nast Traveler.

Artisans — including some whose families have been perfecting the labor-intensive process for centuries — create “intricately patterned” bingata kimonos, handbags, cushions and tea towels. Workshops dot the islands, and items can also be purchased in many of the souvenir shops.

The epicenter of Okinawan pottery, called yachimun, is Tsuboya Yachimun Street in Naha. Explore the shops that line the road on a tour or solo (many open their studios to the public), and look up to see yachimun shisa dogs peering down from building entrances and roofs; these figures, found across Okinawa, are believed to offer spiritual protection. For a crash course on all things yachimun, and to see early examples of the earthenware, check out the Naha City Tsuboya Pottery Museum.

Dive into the dining scene

Seafood is fresh and plentiful, with skipjack tuna, tiger prawns and sea grapes (green caviar) regularly appearing on menus alongside Okinawan staples like goya champuru, a stir-fry containing bitter melon, and rafute, or braised pork belly. The “iconic” Okinawan taco rice was created in the kitchen of King Tacos, a chain specializing in “hybrid cuisine born out of the long intermingling of American, Japanese and Okinawan culinary traditions,” said The Wall Street Journal. Consisting of “liberally seasoned” minced beef, tomatoes, shredded lettuce and cheese on top of white rice, the dish’s reach has extended beyond Okinawa and can now be found in restaurants across Japan.

The painter William Nicholson is a largely forgotten figure these days, said James Beechey in The Art Newspaper. Known for his “bravura brushwork” and his singular ability to capture the effect of light falling on metal or glass, Nicholson (1872-1949) belonged to no distinct artistic movement, declined all invitations to join exhibiting societies – and “was steadfastly unrevealing about his own work”. That reticence may well have helped to diminish his reputation; indeed, his contribution has been largely eclipsed by that of his eldest son, the abstract painter and sculptor Ben Nicholson.

This exhibition, the first in 20 years, sets out to prove that Nicholson senior was a “sophisticated and original figure”, and a much more intriguing talent than is generally acknowledged. The show is a comprehensive retrospective of his career, bringing together portraits, illustrations, prints and posters, alongside the “ravishing” still lifes for which he is best known. But can it really make us reappraise a painter so regularly “damned as a minor artist”?

From the show’s first room, it’s clear that Nicholson was never “the dullard of legend”, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. Rather, he was “a precocious fin-de-siècle dandy” who flirted with many currents of London’s early 20th century avant-garde. He first came to prominence with a series of posters and book designs that have an “instant iconic quality even now”: his 1895 poster for “Don Quixote” at London’s Lyceum Theatre, for instance, blends “the quirky silhouettes of traditional English woodcuts” with flourishes borrowed from Aubrey Beardsley and Toulouse-Lautrec. Success as a graphic artist wasn’t enough for Nicholson, who was determined to become a master of “all genres” – an ambition that led him to embrace “much that was very far from cutting edge”. His paintings of Morris dancers are “clunky period pieces”, while his portraits – for which he was most celebrated in his lifetime – now look “dully conventional”.

Much better are Nicholson’s landscapes, said Chloë Ashby in The Times. “A keen walker, he traced the rolling hills and craggy coastline” of southern England, “portable paintbox tucked under his arm” – creating delightful works such as “A Glade near Midhurst” (1937), a “sun-dappled woodland scene” in which tiny figures pick their way through birch trees.

But it’s his still lifes that really dazzle. Nicholson “brings inanimate objects to life” like no other artist, depicting objects such as “pears, poppies and pewter” with virtuosic flair. “I could spend an entire afternoon” with “The Lustre Bowl with Green Peas” (1911), in which the “verdant veg” contrasts against a grey tablecloth, “bright-white gleams” reflecting against the silver, a single open pod revealing “pearly” peas “huddled in a row”. It’s a highlight of a “rich and varied” show that offers “a wide-angle view of a prolific and versatile artist”.

Pallant House Gallery, Chichester. Until 10 May

This year will see the epoch-defining Bayeux Tapestry come to the UK for a not-to-be-missed visit. Other exhibitions to look forward to in 2026 include tributes to artistic legends, as well as opportunities to cast a fresh eye on artists who may be under-appreciated.

Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art, V&A, London

The work of this “most daring of designers”, who celebrated Surrealism with work such as her renowned dresses “Skeleton” and “Tears”, “ripped up the rule book”, said Laura Freeman in The Times. The collaborations of the “boundary-breaking couturier” with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Man Ray and Salvador Dalí are illustrated by over 200 objects, including her couture creations, accessories, paintings, photos and even perfume, which reveal the fashion house’s “extraordinary history” from the late 1920s to its “present-day revival”, said Belle Hutton in Wallpaper.

28 March to 8 November, V&A

Enid Marx, Compton Verney, Warwickshire

She may not be an artist you’ve heard of “but you’ve probably sat on one of her most famous works”, said The Times, because Enid Marx designed the fabric covering the seats of the London Underground. Her contemporaries at the Royal College of Art, St Ives School and Bloomsbury Group include better-known names such as Eric Ravilious, Paul Nash and Bernard Leach, but Marx is also a “force to be reckoned with”. A versatile artist and a “chronicler of British folk art”, she was a “prolific and imaginative designer” whose work spanned textiles, children’s books, wrapping paper, stamps and bookplates. “Set aside a whole day” for this show – “it’s going to be a cracker”.

18 July to 3 January 2027, Compton Verney

Bayeux Tapestry, British Museum, London

Arguably the “art event of the year”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian, is the early medieval piece going on display in the UK in a “once-in-a-lifetime triumph of cultural generosity by France”. At almost 1,000 years old and almost 230 feet long, this “vast embroidery” tells the story of the Norman Conquest, and “all manner of contemporary meanings” can be found in its stitches, from a “condemnation of war to nationalistic nonsense to proof that Britons are Europeans”. Book early – it’s expected to be a blockbuster exhibition, sure to “move and astonish you”.

September 2026 to July 2027, British Museum

James McNeill Whistler, Tate Britain, London

If you know only “Whistler’s Mother” you may believe Whistler to be “dour”, said The Times. If that is your “image of the artist”, then “banish it immediately”. In fact, Whistler was a “radical”, who “pioneered” a new “loose and exact, daring and contained” style of painting that “conjured fireworks from darkness and light from the lagoon”. Away from the easel, he was a “wit, a dandy, an idler and a baiter of fellow artists”. This major retrospective, his first in Europe for 30 years, curates his world-famous paintings, as well as lesser-seen works, bringing Whistler “out of the shadows”.

21 May to 27 September, Tate Britain

Beryl Cook: Pride and Joy, The Box, Plymouth

Celebrating her centenary year, this show is her biggest ever, with more than 80 works, from iconic paintings to rarely seen pieces from private collections. Chronicling everyday life, the work of this “self-taught painter” “may not be great art”, said The Guardian, but it is fun, colourful and larger-than-life, and serves up a “bawdy slice of Plymouth and post-war British life”, capturing scenes of “drinking and smoking and ogling and people getting up to all sorts”.

24 January to 31 May, The Box

Gwen John: Strange Beauties, National Museum, Cardiff; National Gallery of Modern Art Edinburgh

This year is the 150th anniversary of the birth of the Welsh painter Gwen John. During her lifetime, the “visionary art of this quiet hero of modernism” was eclipsed by that of her brother, Augustus John, and her lover, Auguste Rodin, said The Guardian. However, her “luminous, introspective and quietist works” offer a vision that still feels strikingly modern, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. As the first major showing of her work for 40 years, this is an “unmissable retrospective”.

7 February to 28 June, National Museum, Cardiff; 1 August to 4 January 2027, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Edinburgh

Marie Antoinette Style, V&A, London

This exhibition “brings you as close as it’s possible to get to the real Marie Antoinette”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. On display are portraits by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, costumes, gold-trimmed chairs from her pastoral retreat, Petit Trianon, and even a piece of an original guillotine, along with a wealth of items created after her death that speak of her enduring significance as a cultural icon. While this is nominally a show about fashion history, it adds up to “a superb lesson in how history can be understood through images and objects”.

Until 22 March, V&A

After 20 years under construction, the Grand Egyptian Museum officially opened to the public last month. Located nine miles from central Cairo, and just a mile from the pyramids at Giza, the complex covers some 5.4 million square feet – making it the largest archaeological museum in the world – and cost an estimated $1.2 billion (£888 million).

Read on for more on the milestone museum, as well as the other big stories in the arts world in 2025.

Gift to the world

At its grand opening (which had been repeatedly delayed owing to revolutions, economic crises and the pandemic), President Sisi described the museum as “a gift from Egypt to the world”. Its 12 galleries hold some 100,000 artefacts covering seven millennia of Egyptian history, from pre-dynastic times to the Roman era.

The showstoppers include a monumental, 30ft-tall statue of Ramesses II (pictured above), dating to around 1200BC, and the entire contents of King Tutankhamun’s tomb, about 5,500 pieces, some of which have never been seen in public before. Of equal interest to many, however, are the exhibits shedding light on the daily lives of ancient Egyptians – from statues of bakers at work to hi-tech displays that bring ancient images of hunters and farmers to life. As an added bonus, the building’s huge windows offer astonishing views of the pyramids.

The museum is expected to attract five million visitors a year, giving Egypt’s tourism industry a much-needed boost; and its opening has already led to renewed calls for the repatriation of Egyptian artefacts held in public collections abroad – including the Rosetta Stone, at the British Museum.

Looted art

An 18th-century portrait stolen by the Nazis 80 years ago was found in Argentina this autumn – thanks to the dogged efforts of a retired Dutch systems specialist. It all started in 2010, when Paul Post read in his father’s wartime diaries about the confiscation of the Netherlands’ diamonds. Intrigued, he started to investigate, and homed in on Friedrich Kadgien – a Nazi official who was also suspected of having looted art.

Working with Dutch reporters, Post discovered that Kadgien had fled to Argentina after the war, and that his daughter still lived there. She did not engage with them, but this year, she put her house on the market – and in the estate agent’s photos, reporters spotted a missing portrait by Giuseppe Ghislandi hanging above her sofa. It is now in the hands of the authorities, pending its likely return to the heirs of the Jewish dealer from whom it was stolen.

Protest art

Banksy confirmed that he had struck again in London in September, after an image (pictured top) of a judge beating a protester with a gavel appeared on an exterior wall at the Royal Courts of Justice.

The stencil was presumed to be referring to the banning of the Palestine Action group, and the arrest of hundreds of its supporters. Security guards swiftly covered up the Banksy, and it was later removed. Officials said they’d had no choice as the building is listed. Legal experts pointed out that British judges don’t make the law, they just interpret it, and that they don’t use gavels.

Sold, at record-breaking prices

Global art sales fell a further 12% in 2024, to $57.5 billion (£42.5 billion), as geopolitical tensions continued to affect the top end of the market. And in the first half of this year, sale results from the leading auction houses were down again, and more major private galleries closed. But in the autumn, there were signs of a rebound.

In September, Pauline Karpidas’ surrealist collection sold for $100 million (£74 million) at Sotheby’s in London, nearly double its estimate; and in November, Sotheby’s New York sold 24 paintings from the collection of the late Leonard Lauder for $527 million (£393 million). The highlight of the sale was Gustav Klimt’s life-size “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” (pictured below), a young woman who was the daughter of one of Klimt’s most important patrons. The Lederers were Jewish, and to avoid Nazi persecution following the Anschluss, Elisabeth claimed that Klimt, who’d died in 1918, was her biological father.

This tactic saved her life, and also saved the painting: it meant that it was kept in Vienna, to await reclassification as Aryan art (as opposed to degenerate art), when the Nazis sent the rest of her parents’ priceless collection out of the city. Believed to have included at least 10 Klimt paintings, the Lederer collection was held at the Schloss Immendorf – and was destroyed when SS troops set fire to the castle at the war’s end. The surviving portrait sold for $236 million (£176 million), the highest price ever paid at auction for a modern work, and the second-highest for any work.

Leonard Lauder, the son of Estée Lauder and the former CEO of the cosmetics giant, was a great art collector and philanthropist. In the years before his death in June, aged 92, he gave $1 billion (£742 million) worth of cubist art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and millions to the Whitney Museum of American Art. His collection helped Sotheby’s to hit $706 million (£569 million) in sales that night, the biggest haul in its 281-year history. Days later, the auction house notched up another record, when it sold Frida Kahlo’s surrealist self-portrait “The Bed (The Dream)” for $55 million (£41 million), smashing the 2014 record for a female artist at auction ($44 million, around £32 million, set by a Georgia O’Keeffe).

The hammer price, however, was not a surprise: surrealist works by female artists are currently highly sought after, and “Kahlomania” has lately reached new heights, with numerous major exhibitions around the world dedicated to the Mexican artist. Sotheby’s had given the 1940 painting an upper estimate of $60 million (£44 million).

Year of Turner

If 2025 belonged to anyone in the art world, it was J.M.W. Turner. The artist was born in April 1775, and his 250th anniversary was marked by events all over the UK. Most have closed, but in Liverpool the Walker Gallery’s “Turner: Always Contemporary”, exploring Turner’s work and its impact on later artists, runs until February, while Tate Britain’s “Turner & Constable: Rivals & Originals”, which features “The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons”, on loan from a gallery in the US, runs until April. And the Turner Contemporary in Margate has his oil sketch “Waves Breaking on a Lee Shore at Margate” on loan from Tate Britain, also until April.

Forgery factory

Italian police raided a clandestine workshop in the northern outskirts of Rome in February, where paintings falsely attributed to the likes of Picasso, Rembrandt and Jean Cocteau were being churned out, allegedly for sale online.

Officers from a specialist art unit found some 70 paintings in the workshop, as well as hundreds of tubes of paint, brushes, forged stamps from historic private galleries, and a typewriter that appeared to have been used to create fake letters of authenticity.

The property reportedly belonged to an art restorer, who was suspected of being behind the enterprise. Police said the suspect had sold “hundreds” of paintings of dubious authenticity on auction sites such as Catawiki and eBay.

The Turner Prize is “the cockroach of art”, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Established some 40 years ago, it has proved remarkably resilient: “however bad it gets, it survives the hammering and comes back for more”. This year’s iteration takes place at Bradford’s Cartwright Hall, and sees the award “up to its usual cultural nonsenses”. As ever, four artists from (or based in) the UK have been shortlisted: there’s the photographer Rene Matic, aged just 28; the Korean-Canadian multimedia artist Zadie Xa; the Iraqi-born painter Mohammed Sami; and Nnena Kalu, this year’s winner – a learning-disabled Scottish artist with severe autism.

Making an impact

Each gets a room in the gallery to present an emblematic selection of their work, the first of which comes courtesy of Matic. Mixed race, queer and nonbinary, Matic “complains continuously of feeling culturally divided”. Their room contains a lot of empty sloganeering and a display of “wonky” photos of pro-Palestinian demonstrations, gay marches and right-on graffiti. Whatever you feel about those causes, Matic doesn’t transform them “into good art”.

The artists in this year’s show certainly “know how to make a physical impact”, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. A case in point is Xa, whose room feels “more like some psychedelic nightclub than an art display”, with a mirrored golden floor and soundscapes emanating from shells and tinkling bells. Amidst all this are her paintings, “hallucinatory compositions” that channel the shamanic traditions of her Korean heritage. In this vivid context, sadly, they look like “pieces of decorative scene-setting”.

Sami’s much more traditional paintings, meanwhile, evoke the “traumas” of Iraqi history without resorting to the clichés of reportage. They’re eerie things: one “vast” canvas gives us “a blasted palm forest” through “a fog of orange dust”, a human presence hinted at by the green lines of military lasers. The mood is “‘Apocalypse Now’ via computer games, with a touch of Monet”. It is so thrilling that it makes the other artists feel “a shade superficial”.

‘Recognising artistic excellence’?

Sami should have won the prize, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. His “haunting” contemporary history paintings are like “half-remembered nightmares” of Iraq’s recent conflicts. They stand head and shoulders above Kalu’s efforts: namely, a number of “cocoon-like” abstract cultures hewn from materials such as fabric and VHS tape. They have “a festive, exuberant quality”, but there’s not much more to them. Her win is a milestone for disabled people, but a “maddening” decision nonetheless. Is the Turner, in the end, “about recognising artistic excellence or not”?

Comparisons between Kalu and the others “are not much help”, said Adrian Searle in The Guardian. She has limited verbal communication; her works suggest “a constant flux between objects and space, herself and others”. Each sculpture is born of “drive and urgency and intent”; they are “so full of life and energy, you think they might burst”. She is a worthy winner.

Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, Bradford. Until 22 February

If the Tudors “exercise a stronger hold on the public imagination than their Plantagenet precursors or Stuart successors”, it is largely “because we can all picture them so clearly”, said Peter Marshall in Literary Review. And that, in turn, is down to one man: the German artist Hans Holbein. Between the late 1520s and the early 1540s, Holbein lived mostly in England and produced an “extraordinary sequence of portraits and drawings” of Henry VIII, his wives and courtiers.

Today, as Elizabeth Goldring explains in her “superb and groundbreaking biography”, it is hard to “appreciate just how novel Holbein’s portraits appeared to the first people who saw them”.

Before he emerged, portraiture was a fairly underdeveloped art form in northern Europe. Yet suddenly, as Goldring puts it, here was a painter who made viewers feel that they’d been “granted access to the sitter’s inner thoughts and feelings”. No wonder that Holbein – a “workaholic” and also a “relentless pragmatist, willing at the drop of a brush to change artistic direction or abandon sinking patrons for rising ones” – thrived in the cut-throat Tudor world.

Holbein was born in Augsburg in 1497, the son of an artist, Hans Holbein the Elder, who specialised in altarpieces. He got his “big break” in 1523, when the humanist scholar Erasmus commissioned him to paint his portrait, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. Erasmus introduced Holbein to Henry VIII’s courtier, Thomas More, who became his chief patron during an early stint in England in the late 1520s.

Returning a few years later, Holbein had to navigate More’s execution in 1535 – at which point he “shrewdly pivoted towards the new man Thomas Cromwell” – and then Cromwell’s downfall in 1540, said Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian.

Despite such ructions, Holbein remained in Henry’s favour until his death, from the plague, in 1543. Thanks to Goldring’s “careful analysis” of his work, aided by more than 250 high-quality reproductions, “Holbein the artist comes vividly to life”, said Katherine Harvey in The Times.

The man himself remains more elusive, but “there are glimpses of a less than exemplary private life”: Holbein effectively abandoned his wife, Elsbeth, and their children in Germany while he pursued success in England, and while here he “fathered at least two children”.

In both life and art, Holbein had a “talent for catching every rising tide”, said Mathew Lyons in The Spectator. Goldring’s “superbly scholarly biography” will surely prove the “definitive account” of this remarkable figure “for many years to come”.

One of the world’s most prestigious art prizes has been awarded to a 59-year-old Glaswegian artist with autism and learning disabilities. Honoured by the 2025 Turner Prize for what the judges called her “bold and compelling” work, Nnena Kalu becomes the “first learning-disabled artist to be nominated” for the prize, “let alone win it”, said art critic Mark Hudson in The Independent.

Kalu’s large, hanging, cocoon-like sculptures, made from old VHS tape, rope and fabric, and her bright, swirling “vortex” drawings in pen and pastel, beat the work of three other shortlisted artists. Her win “breaks down walls” between “neurotypical and neurodiverse artists”, said Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson, chair of this year’s jury.

‘Seismic’ victory

“Kalu’s forms come at you with their almost alien unknowable presence,” said Adrian Searle in The Guardian. You become entangled in the work’s “roaring, spilling, snaggling details” and can’t help but wonder about your “own boundaries, the body’s beginnings and its endings”.

Her work is “so embodied, so sensuous”, it “is not reducible to anything we might call a technique”. It is “the product of drive and urgency and intent”. Her own verbal communication is limited, so her work “has to speak for itself” – and it has quite a bit to say.

“Much has been made, and rightly so,” of Kalu’s win but her victory is “seismic” beyond reasons of equality and diversity, said The Independent’s Hudson. Her work places an emphasis “on the visual, tactile and experiential in art – values that have lost primacy in recent years”. The recognition of her artistry “seems to herald the welcome return of artists physically making things”.

‘Maddening’ decision

Kalu’s “triumph will be hailed as a watershed moment for Britain’s disabled community”, but the judges’ “decision is also maddening”, said art critic Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. The shortlisted Mohammed Sami, who “makes vast, haunting contemporary history paintings, like half-remembered nightmares”, will “feel that he’s been cheated”.

Her “lumpy sculpture, fashioned from brightly coloured gaffer tape and discarded bubble wrap”, was “up there with the worst art” ever nominated for the Turner Prize, Waldemar Januszczak, art critic of The Sunday Times, said on his website in October.

Maybe “it wouldn’t be the Turner Prize without a soupçon – or rather a bucketful – of provocation”, said The Telegraph’s Sooke. But “did the jury really consider her the strongest artist” on the shortlist? Farquharson, the jury’s chair, said the decision “wasn’t about wanting, first and foremost, to give the prize to Nnena as a neurodiverse artist”. It was “a real belief in the quality and uniqueness of her practice, which is inseparable from who she is”.

Ultimately, Kalu’s work goes “over and above the disability issues surrounding her win”, said Hudson in The Independent. It serves as a reminder that “no matter how much art may illuminate our perspectives on history, politics, human relationships and the natural world, the visual and the sensual come first”. Kalu “demonstrates that lesson against all odds”.

Now aged 94, Bridget Riley has been remarkably “consistent” over her long career, but is often misunderstood, said Lily Le Brun in The Observer. Back in the 1960s, her “bold, geometric, abstract” monochrome paintings caused a sensation. To her fans and critics alike, they seemed to hint at “fashionable, cutting-edge concerns: new technologies, space, psychedelics”. Riley’s real inspiration, however, was “very different”. In 1939, when the artist was eight, her mother moved her to “a damp cottage on the Cornish coast to see out the War”, and her experiences of observing the sea have formed what she calls “the basis of my visual life”.

This show in Margate brings together 26 paintings that represent nearly every stage of Riley’s career, and it seeks to investigate how the artist has repeatedly returned to the subject in her work over the past 60 years – evoking the patterns of the waves not directly, but through basic shapes and geometry. Hung within view of the gallery’s “tripleheight windows”, perched on the harbour wall looking out onto the North Sea, can her work really “stand up” to its inspiration?

At her most successful, Riley’s paintings remind you “that sight is a physical sensation ... it’s something you actually feel”, said Eddy Frankel in The Times. They “make you look at the world again, rewired, reconfigured”; and the best do evoke the watery world just beyond the gallery walls. There are canvases filled with triangles that somehow recall “gentle waves lapping at the shore”; a number of “curving, wobbly paintings ... loom over you like big washes of marine turbulence”; one red, blue and green example from 1980 “looks like it’s about to bulge off the canvas”. “At her worst”, though, Riley merely offers “dull minimalism”. Some recent works, painted directly onto the walls, are “lifeless” arrangements of dots with “no visual hum, no eye-melting shock of colour and shape”. Some canvases are just arrangements of stripes in pastel colours; they’re “closer to home decor than anything else”.

“However analytical you might try to be”, Riley’s works keep doing things to you on a physical level, said Adrian Searle in The Guardian. She is asking us to consider the way we see things, inviting us to look closer and really scrutinise the dazzling patterns in her art. “The longer you look, the more they reveal and the more they seem to change.” One recent wall drawing, for instance, seems to change colour as you approach, first appearing dun-hued, then developing a “silvery penumbra” when you draw closer. Elsewhere, two separate paintings entitled “Late Morning” – one from 1967, the other from 1978 – both make you register “bulges and falterings where none exist”. Although Riley’s art is very familiar by now, this is “an invigorating and magical ensemble”. She “turns concentration into reverie and leaves me agape, wide open and surprised. I can’t stop looking.”

Turner Contemporary, Margate. Until 4 May

Although they were born within little more than a year of each other, it’s difficult to think of two artists more “profoundly and incontrovertibly” different than J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. The former was “a barber’s son who never lost his Cockney twang”; the latter came from a “genteel” Suffolk mill-owning family. Turner specialised in epic seascapes and Alpine vistas, always aspiring towards the sublime; Constable favoured the “down-to-earth”, painting rural scenes “invigorated with a novel dose of realism”.

Yet for all that separates them, they’re both renowned as our “greatest landscape painters” – and for good reason. Marking the 150th anniversary of their births, this “thrilling” show at Tate Britain brings together around 170 works by both, many of which haven’t been glimpsed on these shores for decades. The result could so easily have been “dutiful and boring”; instead, it’s a truly “absorbing” experience.

It’s an “epic confrontation”, agreed Mark Hudson in The Independent. Turner and Constable’s works are juxtaposed in a way that demands direct comparison – as often happened in their lifetime. Initially at least, Turner has the edge: his “Crossing the Brook” (1815) is a “magnificently atmospheric view” of the Tamar Valley that makes the latter’s “doggedly local” “Dedham Vale” (1828) look rather parochial. Turner’s dramatic seascapes – “Buttermere Lake” (c.1798), “Morning amongst the Coniston Fells” (c.1798) and “Fishermen at Sea” (1796) – place him in the same league as any of the European romantic artists. The locations are British, yet they still encapsulate all that is “awesome and terrifying in nature”. These would suggest that Turner’s was the “larger vision”.

Other juxtapositions, though, lead you to the opposite conclusion. “Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows”, “a great visionary evocation of England”, makes Turner’s “Caligula’s Palace and Bridge” – also from 1831 – look like a mere exercise in “special effects”. Either way, “you’ll want to make your own mind up. Because you absolutely must see this exhibition.”

Turner’s fixation on the “sublime” can look like a “predilection for drama and vaporous emptiness”, said Adrian Searle in The Guardian. Constable, meanwhile, “is always specific, grounded, even when he is just staring at the clouds or into the impenetrable dark on a heath, the Moon half seen emerging from behind a bush, in its pale bloom of scattered light”. His paintings are “filled with stuff” – locks, churches, carts, windmills – celebrating the everyday reality of a “now vanished world”. You can “almost smell the river” in his 1826 painting of a man opening a canal lock. His “small and almost casual” studies of clouds moved me more than anything else here. Both artists were brilliant – but I know who “touches me more”.

Tate Britain, London SW1. Until 12 April

Two hundred and fifty years after his birth, Joseph Mallord William Turner remains an “enigma”, said James Jackson in The Times: “a grunting curmudgeon, an establishment outsider, a visitor of prostitutes”, and an artist whose work “touches the sublime”. This new BBC2 documentary seeks to shed light on Turner’s character through close examination of his rarely seen sketchbooks: not just landscape studies and preliminary compositions that he would later turn into paintings, but also reams of “pornographic sketches”. The result is a show that zips “rather fascinatingly ... in and out of Turner’s id, ego and superego”.

An eclectic range of contributors offer their interpretations, said Roland White in the Daily Mail. Psychoanalyst Orna Guralnik, for instance, suggests that Turner’s detailed early depictions of buildings represented “a search for stability after a difficult childhood”. His background was indeed troubled: his mother suffered psychotic episodes at a time when madness was believed to run in families. Fearing it would hinder his career, he committed her to a hospital and never saw her again.

Not all the observations are worthwhile, said Jack Seale in The Guardian. Ronnie Wood, for instance, says of “Fall of the Rhine at Schaffhausen”: “It’s very dramatic.” But Tracey Emin convincingly discusses Turner’s working-class origins, while Chris Packham is highly insightful about Turner’s view of nature, and the effect of industry on it. This programme “balances accessibility with analytical muscle”, allowing us to see the artist “afresh”.

There are few film directors who are as obsessed with attention to detail as Wes Anderson, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph. From his debut “Bottle Rocket” 29 years ago, to this year’s “The Phoenician Scheme”, via such hits as “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001) and “The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014), his films have been characterised by a “finicky perfectionism” not seen since the heyday of Stanley Kubrick. Every Anderson production has an “unmistakable”, highly stylised aesthetic – whimsical, pastel-hued, crammed with details that “cry out to be noticed”: his hallmarks include “an obsession for symmetry”, “ornate sets” and elaborate costumes.

All this makes him a perfect subject for a retrospective at the Design Museum, an institution that has previously mounted blockbusters devoted to Kubrick and Tim Burton. Bringing together around 700 props, costumes, set designs and all manner of other ephemera, the exhibition traces the director’s three-decade career film by film. It’s full of marvellous things that will be familiar to any fan; and “having the time to pause and pore over them is in some instances an even greater pleasure than watching the films themselves”.

“Wesophiles” will indeed be delighted, said Catherine Slessor in The Guardian. The museum’s galleries have all been appointed in shades of red, “starting with post-box and terminating in maroon”, and Anderson’s weird and wonderful “quirkfest fairly zings out from this incarnadine backdrop”. On display there are “wigs, sketches, models, fictional books, fictional art, a tent, a typewriter and dozens of stop-motion puppets”; an “implausibly intricate” model of the train from “The Darjeeling Limited” (2007); “the luxurious red velvet and mink number” sported by Tilda Swinton in “The Grand Budapest Hotel”; and maquettes of the “mutant sea creatures” from “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” (2004). Less committed fans, however, may find it all a bit much – “like being trapped in a branch of Oliver Bonas crammed with hyper-twee gewgaws”. There’s something “disconcerting” about reducing the kinetic medium of film to a collection of static objects. More often than not, the show feels a little lifeless.

It’s often assumed that the director’s “obsession with style masks a lack of substance”, said Louis Chilton in The Independent. Yet for Anderson, the one is “inextricable” from the other. After all, most of his films can be read as “dryly comic character studies of damaged, emotionally dysfunctional men” whose inner turmoil is at odds with the neatly choreographed worlds they inhabit. Being “an assemblage of collected things”, the show can’t convey this crucial “human element”; nor do we learn much about Anderson himself. Still, even looking at the “actor-less costumes and inert puppets” here, you can’t help but come away with a renewed appreciation for his “impeccable craft”.

Design Museum, London W8. Until 26 July

It’s shaping up to be another season of riveting shows opening at museums across the U.S. Here are six to check out over the winter, including pioneering exhibitions that look at the life and career of Frida Kahlo, examine how lithography changed Hindu art and celebrate Austrian expressionism.

‘Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir,’ Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Otto Kallir is credited with helping “establish" Austrian Expressionism through his “influential” New York art gallery, and over the decades Kallir built up an extraordinary personal collection, said the Los Angeles Times. Recently, his family gave more than 100 of those works to LACMA, including the museum’s first Gustav Klimt painting. This 1897 portrait, “Woman With Fur Collar,” is one of the 24 pieces on display in “Austrian Expressionism and Otto Kallir,” along with newly acquired “seminal” landscape paintings by Egon Schiele. (Through May 31, 2026)

‘Divine Color: Hindu Prints from Modern Bengal,’ MFA Boston

Art is often shaped by emerging technologies, and when lithography made its way to Kolkata during the 19th century, it changed how Indian artists depicted Hindu gods. “Divine Color: Hindu Prints from Modern Bengal” looks at how this form of printmaking “reinvented devotional art” and made divinity prints “more realistic, colorful and accessible than ever before,” said MFA Boston. This exhibition is the first of its kind in the U.S. and features more than 100 prints, paintings, sculptures and textiles, including 38 “vibrant” lithographs from the museum’s collection. (Jan. 31-May 31, 2026)

‘Frida: The Making of an Icon,’ Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Frida Kahlo was “practically unknown to mainstream audiences” during her lifetime — she didn’t became a worldwide phenomenon until her work was rediscovered in the 1970s, two decades after her death, said the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Instead of a traditional retrospective, “Frida: The Making of an Icon” takes a different approach to showcasing her life and art and is the first major exploration of her “transformation” from “local painter to a universal icon and global brand.” More than 30 of Kahlo’s works will be on display, alongside 120 pieces by artists she inspired. (Jan. 19-May 17, 2026)

‘Conversation Pieces: Stories from the Fashion Archives,’ Denver Art Museum

An 1896 ballgown from Paris’ first haute couture fashion house and a groundbreaking Chanel shift dress from 1926 are some of the items set to be displayed in this celebration of finery. The Denver Art Museum acquired its first pieces of women’s clothing in 1942, and “Conversation Pieces: Stories from the Fashion Archives” will use garments from its permanent collection to explain cultural trends, how fashion evolves and how history influences clothing. While there is a global focus, the exhibition will also dive into local fashion and how Denver’s department stores promoted homegrown designers. (Feb. 15-Aug. 30, 2026)

‘Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work,’ Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

Anna Mary Robertson Moses became a prolific painter in her late 70s, giving rise to the nickname Grandma Moses. While she was “met with astounding popular and commercial success,” any type of “critical success eluded her,” said The New York Times. “Grandma Moses: A Good Day’s Work” aims to change that by examining her legacy and reframing the painter as a “serious, workmanlike artist.” The Smithsonian American Art Museum only started collecting Moses paintings within the last decade and now has 33 works. All of them will be on view. (Through July 12, 2026)

‘still/emerging: Native American Works on Paper,’ The Cleveland Museum of Art

The 30 prints and drawings in “still/emerging: Native American Works on Paper” showcase the “unique histories and perspectives” of Indigenous artists from a “number of backgrounds and tribal affiliations,” said The Cleveland Museum of Art. Highlights include “powerful” memorial woodcuts by T.C. Cannon (Kiowa/Caddo), “deeply symbolic” color lithographs by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation) and a multimedia piece by Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke/Crow). (Feb. 1-June 7, 2026)

At the age of 88, David Hockney “is enjoying a volcanic burst of late energy”, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Times. Although he now uses a wheelchair, the artist continues to produce paintings at a prodigious pace; and, if anything, his work rate “seems to be accelerating”. Following his hugely popular retrospective in Paris earlier this year, he has returned to London to show off a “delightful and thrilling” selection of new work – under the title “Some Very, Very, Very New Paintings Not Yet Shown in Paris”.

The exhibition testifies to his “extraordinary vitality”. Bringing together interiors, still lifes and portraits, it’s “a blast of fearlessness, innocence and the uninhibited enjoyment of colour”. Hockney has always seemed to look at the world with “childlike curiosity”, and these recent pictures find him returning to life’s simple pleasures with renewed vigour. Whether he’s painting a pair of empty chairs – a nod to van Gogh and a touching tribute to absent sitters – or a display of fruit on a rumpled tablecloth in a Smarties-style palette, his colours “pop about with all the fun of a birthday party”.

Any Hockney show is worth visiting, said Rachel Campbell-Johnston in The Times. This one is no exception; it certainly “has its moments”. A series of drawings of the moon the artist created on his iPad “feel as cool as an eye bath”: playing with the tradition of the nocturne, he “conjures a mood of mysterious serenity”, conveying his wonder at the beauty of nature through these “shadowy landscapes”.

Some of his acrylic paintings of furniture are “eye-popping”, all reversed perspective and exuberant colour: “chairs cavort wonkily about empty spaces and bunches of flowers explode like fireworks”. But, for all “the frenzied delight in colour”, they mostly seem like pale imitations of his greatest hits; the excitement “has vanished from paintings that look as if they’ve been dashed off in an afternoon”.

“The portraits are where this show fails the hardest,” said Eddy Frankel in The Guardian. Hockney now takes a pointillist approach to skin tones, “and the result is a bunch of bodies that look as if they’re covered in sores”: they seem more like “fresh corpses” than living humans. The exception is a self-portrait in which we see the artist painting from his wheelchair; the painting works “because it’s so vulnerable but also so funnily self-aware”. You can’t help but dwell on mortality here: where Hockney was once so assured, his brushstrokes now look “shockingly unsteady”, the compositions frequently verging on the chaotic.

Yet they couldn’t have come from another hand, and it’s oddly “affecting” to see one of the great artists of our time ageing before our eyes. We’ve seen a lot of Hockney exhibitions lately. Perhaps we don’t really need another one. Still, these new works, with their “wobbles” and colour and humour, “prove that he’s still at it, and he’s still got it, all these years later”.

Annely Juda Fine Art, London W1. Until 28 February

Music is blending into an algorithm-generated playlist, cinema is dominated by blockbuster movies from decades-old franchises, and the rest of the cultural scene is as flat and bland as a pancake.

That's according to a new book, the “lucid and entertaining – yet despairing” “Blank Space”, by W. David Marx. In it, he argues that 21st-century culture has become an “enthusiastic embrace of selling out”, said The Minnesota Star Tribune. But has he missed the point?

‘Slurry of stagnation’

“Omnivorism” is “one of the primary culprits” that Marx identifies. When “country, R&B, hip-hop and classic rock become interchangeable bits to sample, rather than distinct musical styles”, then “nothing stands out”. He thinks “the understandable desire to cross musical boundaries in once-unthinkable ways has turned into a slurry of stagnation”.

Marx’s “key point about the bland sameness” of today’s art “will resonate with anybody who has a hard time remembering when a new song made them perk up, pay attention and realise they have never heard anything like that before”.

This century “looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering” one for culture since “the invention of the printing press”, said The New York Times Magazine in 2023. “Shockingly few works of art in any medium” have been “created that are unassimilable to the cultural and critical standards that audiences accepted in 1999”.

Misguided and oversimplified

Yes, it feels like there’s a “confounding glut of art”, but “little of the original, startling kind that matters”, said The Economist. Instead there’s “music without instruments and lyrics without meaning”, plus “endless reboots, sequels and superheroes in the cinema”.

But Marx’s “sweeping book oversimplifies a dizzyingly messy picture”, because some of his criticisms “could have been made in the past, and were”. So even if today’s “means of self-publicity are new”, the “attention-seeking grifters are not” and “there has always been more dross than gold”.

Marx’s argument is a “dated, misguided understanding of how history works”, said Art in America. It is “rooted in a 19th-century fallacy called positivism: the belief that history moves in a clean, linear progression of successive innovations”.

But “if history is any indicator”, those “still insisting culture is dead” will “go down” as “conservative curmudgeons very much on the wrong side of history”. You might “think writers so obsessed with the past would have learned as much”.

Joseph Wright of Derby is a painter “all too often underserved in accounts of British art”, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. Born in Derby in 1734, he trained in London but returned to the Midlands to capitalise on the money flowing into the region in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.

A “prodigiously gifted” artist, he developed a style inspired by Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro technique, painting scenes that blended “heightened realism” with “powerful contrasts of light and shadow”, as well as portraits and landscapes that flattered the local industrial elite and their domains. Yet while several of his paintings have become renowned as “seminal” images of the British Enlightenment, he is – possibly on account of the “parochial suffix” attached to his name – often remembered as “a jobbing provincial painter”. This show at the National Gallery seeks to correct that assumption. It brings together many of his best-known works to reclaim him as one of the great British artists of the 18th century, confounding expectations at every turn while creating several bona fide masterpieces. It is “revelatory”.

At the show’s heart are two “spectacular” paintings, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. The first, the National Gallery’s “An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump” (1768), is “an electrifying, life-and-death composition”, depicting a white cockatoo placed within a glass vessel. A red-robed scientist is seen drawing the oxygen from the contraption as the creature thrashes around, fighting for survival. The second is “A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery” (1766), normally on display in Derby. It’s “just as spectacular”, presenting “an impresario-cum-philosopher with flowing grey locks” performing a scientific demonstration with a clockwork model of the solar system. Both works have long been seen as archetypal images of the Age of Reason. Yet, as the wall texts remind us, they may not be “entirely in sync with it”. While apparently championing rationality, they are “animated by childish wonder as much as intellectual enquiry”, and they show off Wright’s virtuosic skill at replicating artificial illumination.

Wright was certainly interested in science and technology, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. But the paintings he made on these subjects make humanity’s new knowledge look terrifying. One girl hides her face from the air-pump experiment, too appalled to look. “This is meant to be a rational exposition of the vacuum, but has become a nightmarish theatre of science, power, cruelty and death.” Wright is perhaps better understood as “the first gothic artist”, using his mastery of light and shade to create truly uncanny pictures. “A Philosopher by Lamplight” (1769), for instance, sees two travellers crossing a moonlit stream to find an old hermit looking at a skeleton, trying to discover what happens when we die. “The bloodcurdling secret at the heart of these paintings is scientific not supernatural.”

National Gallery, London WC2. Until 10 May

Peter Doig is “probably the single most influential painter in the world today”, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. Born in Scotland in 1959, but resident for many years in Trinidad, he is known for blending “different styles of painting and diverse forms of imagery – from Old Master paintings and random found photographs to horror movies”. His approach to painting has been likened to a DJ mixing other people’s records to create something new. So it’s hardly surprising to learn that Doig is “obsessed with music”.

This show sees him bring his “twin passions” together, scattering a representative selection of his paintings through the rooms of the Serpentine Gallery, soundtracked by programmed highlights from the artist’s enormous record collection. Each day of the exhibition’s run, the choice of music will be different, meaning that “no two experiences of the show will be the same”. The result is an “eccentric and entrancing experience”.

The show feels “oddly like a house party where you don’t mind being sober”, said Martin Robinson in The London Standard. There’s an “immediate intimacy” to it, with “easy chairs” scattered throughout, and tables provided for visitors to sit and chat: it’s about “the communal stimulus created when art and music mix”.

The musical set-up itself is a sight to behold, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Doig’s records – from Aretha Franklin to Kraftwerk – are played through “immense” cinema speakers, designed in the 1920s and 1930s. These objects are “sculptures in themselves, with gaping mouths of wood and metal that once boomed behind the screens of British picture houses”. They find a mirror in Doig’s painting “Maracas”, in which a vast sound system towers over a jungle scene, a tiny figure at its edge revealing its “monstrous scale”. Doig’s “eerie” paintings repeatedly evoke “misty musical dreams”: one sees an old musician plucking at a guitar; another is “a more than three-metre-wide vision of a lakeside party venue at night”, filled with “people and lights, clubhouses and umbrellas”.

It’s more of an installation than a painting exhibition, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Indeed, amid the “atmospheric feng shui” of the gallery set-up, Doig’s canvases can initially feel “incidental”. Yet eventually, they work their magic on you. Doig’s magpie approach injects old-fashioned artistic traditions with his interest in Black culture. This is particularly evident in a suite of paintings that features lions – a ubiquitous symbol in Rastafarianism – stalking past prisons in Venice and in Port of Spain. Without explicitly mentioning slavery and captivity, Doig’s paintings evoke “historical darkness”. Despite these themes, the show is “a joy to wander through”, combining music and art to create “a transportive gallery moment that feels like a Caribbean journey”.

Serpentine South Gallery, London SW7. Until 8 February

Should we be eating less fat – or more? Who will benefit from the surprise Dutch election result? And how can art improve our health?

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

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In October 1960, Nigeria won full independence from the UK, said Anny Shaw in London’s The Standard. This landmark moment sparked “a period of enormous cultural fecundity”, as artists sought to create a “visual identity” for the country – one that embraced indigenous traditions and the “buzz” of modern life, while reckoning with Nigeria’s “fraught colonial past”.

Now this cultural “renaissance” is the subject of a new exhibition at Tate Modern, which brings together some 250 pieces – including paintings, sculptures and textiles – by more than 50 artists, to examine Nigerian art pre- and post-independence. The result is a show that is sprawling but compelling, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. Other exhibitions of African art have tended to shy away from showing “the first gropings towards modernity from artists working in isolation from the international art world”, for fear of reinforcing the view that they are “folksy”, but this one lets “the work of those early explorers shine out”.

There is, unfortunately, a rather “dutiful” tone to this nine-room show, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. The work of important artists such as Ben Enwonwu (who sculpted Elizabeth II in 1957) is foregrounded, but several galleries are given over to various “schools”, as the exhibition strives to be properly “in depth”. Along the way there are “flashes of artistic magic” including Demas Nwoko’s “mysterious” paintings, and J.D. ’Okhai Ojeikere’s “astonishing” black and white 1970s photographs of women’s “intricate hairstyles”. But between them are a host of “middling” works, including too many early 20th-century pieces reflecting African artists’ new interest in naturalism. It becomes a bit wearing, like double history on a sunny afternoon.

I completely disagree, said Jackie Wullschläger in the Financial Times. The show is full of brilliant things – and “what shines throughout is a sparkling diversity of making”. A piece by Asiru Olatunde, who came from a family of blacksmiths, is a sheet of aluminium hammered into “a massive, exquisitely detailed frieze” depicting village life. We also see the Yoruba gods that Adebisi Akanji, who trained as a bricklayer in his youth, sculpted in cement, while the riders in Jimo Akolo’s “Fulani Horsemen” (1962) “gallop right against the picture plane and off to the future”.

The show’s “star piece”, however, is the series of towering wooden sculptures that Enwonwu made for the forecourt of the Daily Mirror’s London HQ in 1960. There are seven of these figures, each possessed of “traditional attenuated Igbo features” and five of them holding an open newspaper. They disappeared later that decade, and were only rediscovered in 2012, in a garage at a secondary school in east London. This is an “entrancing, enlightening exhibition” – Tate’s “most revelatory in years”.

Tate Modern, London SE1. Until 10 May

The theft of eight items from the Louvre, including Napoleonic-era jewellery, has left Paris reeling from one of the “most spectacular” but “brazenly simple” heists of the last century.

It comes at a time when museums and art collections are “increasingly being targeted by criminal gangs”, said the BBC, inspired by some of the most daring, and peculiar, art heists in the modern era.

‘History’s biggest art heist’

The Louvre, the most popular museum in the world in 2024 with nearly 9 million visitors, has a “long history of thefts and attempted robberies”, said The Associated Press.

One of the most famous incidents involved the theft of the prized “Mona Lisa” in 1911, after a former worker at the museum “walked out with the painting under his coat”. It is thought he wanted to repatriate Da Vinci’s work to Italy, but the painting was recovered in Florence two years later and reinstated in the museum. The mystery and uniqueness of the painting, and the drama of this heist, arguably “helped make Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait the world’s best-known artwork”.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the aggravated robbery of 13 artworks from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 shocked the world. To this day, it is “history’s biggest art heist”, with more than “half a billion dollars” of art vanishing into thin air, said CNN.

Two security guards were “bound in duct tape” and subsequent intelligence led police to suspect that the “Corsican mob” was behind the operation. This line of investigation “fell apart” when the art they were trying to sell ended up being from a robbery at a Nice museum instead. Despite the scale and value of the heist, “not a single motion detector was set off”, with rumours since circling of “ghost robbers”, or perhaps more likely “an inside job”. None of the art has since been recovered.

‘The Scream’ and a golden toilet

Perhaps the second most famous artwork in this list, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” was stolen from the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo just four years later in 1994.

Using a ladder to gain entry in the dead of night, the robbers “made a beeline” for the piece and used wire cutters to access the work in “50 seconds to be precise”, said The Collector. Allegedly, the assailants left the guards a note saying “Thanks for the poor security”, and the whole escapade was caught on camera. Fortunately, within three months the police arrested four men, with the ringleader receiving six years in prison. The painting was safely recovered from a “hotel room in Aasgaarstrand”, 60 miles away.

A painting stolen once is shocking enough, but one taken four times borders on comical. “Jacob de Gheyn III” by Rembrandt, housed at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in south London, was stolen in 1966, 1973, 1981 and 1983, in “one of the more bizarre cases of art theft” ever recorded, said Euronews.

The piece has gained the nickname the “takeaway Rembrandt”, but was recovered “after every theft” and it is still on display today. In 2019, the gallery was closed following the attempted theft of two Rembrandts, which was “thwarted” thanks to the gallery’s “robust” security systems, said The Art Newspaper. It is still unknown which Rembrandts were targeted.

Most recently, the theft of a £4.75 million golden toilet from Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire captured the imagination of the British public in 2019.

Two men were jailed this year following the “bold and brazen” stunt, said The Guardian. The “18-carat fully functioning lavatory” by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan weighed “around 98kg” and was taken away by “sledgehammer-wielding thieves”. The gold has never been recovered and was “probably melted down”, said The Telegraph. The artefact had been on display “for just under a week before it was taken”, and the palace has since replaced it with a “replica with which visitors can pay £10 to take a selfie”. The new attraction is designed to be a “fun focal point for visitors to sit down for a selfie with a difference”, Blenheim Palace said.

Gilbert & George met as art students in 1967; and their entire life and career since then “can be seen as a single piece of performance art”, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. Now in their 80s, George Passmore (born in Plymouth in 1942) and Gilbert Prousch (born in northern Italy in 1943) project a carefully cultivated image as “crusty but lovable eccentrics”, who live in the same east London house they moved into in 1968, still dine at the same restaurant every night, and vote Tory to “wind up the liberal-left-veering art establishment”.

Nor has their art changed much: since the 1980s, they have been producing large-scale, brightly coloured photo works composed across multiple panels. Usually featuring the artists themselves posing amid the “detritus of the East End streets”, they’re a bizarre collision between “faux-medieval stained glass and hyper-contemporary street art”. But this exhibition of 60-plus pieces made since 2000 shows that their more recent work has become “more complex, fluent and multidimensional”, with a “dazzling” interplay of imagery reminiscent of Hindu art. They may be pensioners, but their art feels “quite hectically of the moment”.

The tone is “lurid, provocative” and “profoundly odd”, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. It’s like walking through a “bewildering amusement arcade or bazaar”, full of synthetic colours and images of street debris – nitrous-oxide capsules, pornographic flyers, adverts for faith healers. In the middle of all this appear Gilbert & George, staring out deadpan or adopting “hammy poses”, playing witness to “modernity’s follies”. Taken individually, the best of the works are “powerful”, “radical” and – as is the case with “Bed-Wetting” (2019) – even beautiful. But seeing so many of the works together dulls their impact and feels overwhelming: “by the end, I felt as if I’d been hosed down with radioactive slurry”.

Gilbert & George are “scabrous chroniclers of London in the tradition of Hogarth”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. “Like him, they dive into the dirty alleys of a city that can be brutal and they come up laughing at it all.” All human life is here: sex, race, murder, religion (which “gets their goat”). Surreal newspaper headlines blare out at us: “LIFE AFTER DEATH PROVED”. “VICAR FIGHTS BROTHEL CLOSURE”, for example, is a particular “gem”. You’ll be “carried along in a rush of cheeky provocations and ludicrous juxtapositions of word and image”. “Ages” (2001) shows the pair blandly smiling on a red and yellow slab, surrounded by adverts for sex workers: “SKINHEAD JOE, 26. East End/10 mins. Liverpool St. Administers firm service.” It makes you laugh, but it also makes you wonder about the lives of these men. “Some sophisticates may be a bit sick of their antics, but to rip off Dr Johnson on London itself – to be tired of Gilbert & George is to be tired of life.”

Until 11 January. Hayward Gallery, London SE1; southbankcentre.co.uk

“You’re not allowed to lick paintings in museums, which is cruel when you’re faced with something as mouthwateringly tempting as Wayne Thiebaud’s art,” said Eddy Frankel in The Guardian.

The American artist dedicated his decades-long career to painting cakes and sweets carefully laid out on counters, tempting viewers to “take a big, juicy bite”. But he didn’t just paint to make you drool.

On display at the Courtauld Gallery in central London for his first UK museum show, Thiebaud’s work is both an “update on the long legacy of the still life, and a deep dive into burgeoning consumerism and the capitalistic euphoria of the mass-produced, mid-century American dream”.

Thiebaud’s background as a cartoonist and motion picture animator gives the “biggest clue” to where his “kitschy universe” of doughnuts and ice cream sundaes came from. Painting for a mainstream audience gave him the skills to get his ideas across directly and powerfully, “like a cream pie to the face”. Then he met a group of abstract impressionists in the 1950s, and within just a few years everything “clicked”.

His works on display at the Courtauld are “beautifully and thickly painted”. From “oozing cakes” to mustard-drizzled hot dogs, they are “exercises in painterly precision” with a keen awareness of art history, continuing, in his own way, the radical legacy of Cézanne and Chardin. “It’s still life painting at its modern best.”

Thiebaud’s “luscious yet unsettling” still lifes make for an “excellent” exhibition, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. His depictions of ordinary snacks are both “irresistible and brilliantly peculiar”. Below the sweetness – “which is meant to cloy – there’s a tang of melancholy and a dash of Cold War anxiety”.

Sorrow “creeps into unexpected places”, said Florence Hallett in The i Paper, from a solitary slice of leftover pie that “pulls at the heartstrings” to a “sausage having an existential crisis” in “Delicatessen Counter” (1963).

But the “visible brushmarks keep every surface alive”, said Laura Cumming in The Observer, and there’s a “benign delight” in Thiebaud’s celebration of everyday items and his “harmoniously balanced compositions”. Unlike Andy Warhol – whom he first exhibited alongside in New York – he renders each cake or ice cream cone in a row as different from its neighbour, highlighting every item as entirely unique.

“No artist has ever more brilliantly captured the idea that such a trivial object can be beautiful, that it can be – and of course would become a thousand times over in his paintings – the stuff of art.”

Until 18 January at the Courtauld Gallery, London; courtauld.ac.uk

It’s difficult to imagine “a more compelling biography” than that of Lee Miller, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. Born in upstate New York in 1907, she found fame as “an androgynous fashion model” in 1920s Manhattan, but soon decided (as she put it) that she would “rather take a picture than be one”. Her next act saw her decamp to Paris, where she became involved with the city’s flourishing modern art scene, falling in love and then collaborating with the surrealist photographer Man Ray.

But Miller was an artist in her own right: an unsettling, surrealist-tinged photographer, and a celebrated wartime photojournalist who captured everything from the London Blitz to the liberation of Dachau. One much-reproduced portrait, taken by her colleague David E. Scherman the day Hitler’s death was announced, pictured her in the bathtub of the dictator’s Munich apartment. This show is the biggest retrospective ever devoted to Miller’s singular talent in this country, bringing together around 230 exhibits that trace her career from start to finish. Featuring some deathless images, it’s a “sexy yet devastating” show that does justice to her art while keeping her “scintillating life story front and centre”.

The exhibition recounts Miller’s story “through her own impeccable eye”, said India Block in The London Standard. We begin with a gallery documenting her brief but stellar modelling career, in the course of which she posed for many famous photographers: Edward Steichen, for example, would sell a portrait of her to Kotex, making her “the unwitting face of sanitary pads”. But things really warm up once Miller arrives in Paris, where she honed her eye for the city’s “unusual and macabre” side: she records an oil slick on a pavement, “rats with tails dangling in a row”, a hand against scratched glass, creating “the illusion of an explosion”. A particularly sinister image sees a dissected human breast “plated up against a chequered tablecloth”; Miller was moonlighting as a surgical photographer, and made use of the result of a mastectomy for the prop.

There’s plenty of celebrity glamour here, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. Miller apparently “knew everyone” in Paris, her famous friends included Picasso, Charlie Chaplin and Jean Cocteau – all of whom we see here in photographic portraits. But in the aftermath of the Second World War, she married the British surrealist Roland Penrose and moved to London. If anything, that conflict only amped up the oddness of her pictures: she staged fashion shoots in the rubble of Blitzed-out London and, from 1944, chronicled the US army’s march through Europe as an official photographer. Some of the scenes she recorded are genuinely shocking: an “angelic female figure” pictured in 1945 is in fact the corpse of a German girl who had been given cyanide as Allied forces approached; American soldiers are seen peering at an emaciated corpse at Dachau, their faces registering not horror but “bombed-out resignation”.

Throughout, her “unflappably cool eye” never deserts her. The strain began to show after the War, however: she all but abandoned art, succumbing to “alcoholism and depression” and dying in 1977. I’m not sure this exhibition entirely succeeds in isolating Miller’s work from her status as an “iconic beauty and muse”, but it is “revelatory” nonetheless.

Tate Britain, London SW1. Until 15 February

“It’s been a long time – several years – since an event as stimulating as this opened at Tate Modern,” said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. It pulls off a difficult trick: reframing the work of Pablo Picasso in a “fresh” and “adventurous” way. These days, the Spaniard is unfashionable because of his attitudes towards women; “he’s generally the coconut and angry damsels throw the balls”. The Tate, in “a nimble bit of curation”, has asked the trans performer Wu Tsang and the writer Enrique Fuenteblanca to mount a display dedicated to his love of theatre, which invites us to reconsider his work as a series of performances. Its focus is not on the disappointing theatrical sets that Picasso designed, but on his love of play-acting in general: his “taste for dressing up and his appreciation of other people’s roleplaying”; on his penchant for painting performers such as flamenco dancers and matadors. It brings together some 45 works by the artist; in short, the Tate has found an interesting way of “showing us every Picasso it owns”.

The show is certainly unconventional, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. Its design masquerades as the backstage of a theatre, complete with “spotlights, clattering music and surging voices”, “wings, ramps and footlights”; a screen shows a video of Picasso himself playing Carmen in a lace mantilla, while 16 “stupendous” images of “young lovers, pensive women and goatish old men” hang from mesh grids “like posters at Ikea”, and 1968’s “fierce and lustful” “Nude Woman With Necklace” bursts out of the theatrical darkness. It’s great to see so many works by the artist grouped together, but the show feels “muddled” and “sententious”. It completely swerves the question of Picasso’s cruelty to women, instead trying unconvincingly to make him “into our non-conforming contemporary”. It’s “contrived and contradictory”, and only confirms what we already knew: that Picasso “does not need to be updated for a new generation”.

The curators have made some terrible choices here, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. The show’s most important work, “The Three Dancers” (1925), is hidden away behind a wall; and what little analysis of the works there is “feels blinkered and wrong-headed”. It’s heavy on “opaque academic jargon”, much of it relating to contemporary identity politics. But if you ignore the “brain-aching” theorising in the explanatory texts, it’s really quite impressive, said Mark Hudson in The Independent. The “quasi-fictional setting” makes you look at the paintings afresh, and it gives an impressive sense of Picasso’s “protean chopping and changing”, the way he repeatedly reconfigured the human figure while quoting from everything from Rembrandt to African sculpture. I’ll admit that I expected “to hate this exhibition”, but it entrances the eye “spectacularly”.

Until 12 April at Tate Modern, London SE1

Kerry James Marshall “sits at the pinnacle of American contemporary painting”, said Nancy Durrant in The Times. Now 70, he has since the 1980s been producing a “visually and intellectually rich” body of work that “largely builds upon, continues and subverts” the once prestigious genre of history painting. Marshall, who is African American, uses this genre – which tells a story from the Classics or the Bible – to confront the near-total absence of black subjects in the Western artistic canon. He combines a “staggeringly deep understanding” of Western art with a wide-ranging knowledge of African artistic traditions. This retrospective at the Royal Academy explores his career to date, bringing together a dazzling selection of paintings “that consider what it means to be black, particularly in America, with a rigorously inquiring breadth and curiosity, never hectoring nor shying away from complexity”. I hope many people will see this very pleasurable show.

“To introduce black subjects into the tradition of Western painting, Marshall evolved a precise, luminous style” reminiscent of the Old Masters, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. His first significant effort in this style, a 1980 self-portrait, was painted in egg tempera – “a medium last in vogue in Italy circa AD1400”. It’s an “enigmatic” work that satirises “racial stereotypes”, in which the artist “appears so dark-skinned against a black background” that – apart from his eyes and teeth – “he’s practically invisible”. Marshall’s more mature paintings are “complex as well as gorgeous”, “finessed with a classicist’s obsessive attention to detail and technique”. The ephemera of modern life feature like the “symbolic objects” in Renaissance art: a rap lyric, say, might sprout from a radio “like a Latin inscription”, while the distorted skull from Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors is repurposed as Disney’s Sleeping Beauty in his painting of a hair salon, School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012). All in all, this is “the exhibition of the autumn”.

Marshall is by turns “biting, funny, astonishing, difficult, surprising, erudite and hugely ambitious”, said Adrian Searle in The Guardian. “He takes us from the bar to the bedroom, to the Middle Passage” – with scenes of enslavement and abduction – “from the studio to the academy, from the beauty parlour to the dancehall”. There are episodes of horror and portent, but also delightful, pastoral scenes of a black family enjoying a picnic in a park, or “elderly ladies in their parlours, golden-winged like angels at an annunciation” as they mourn the death of Martin Luther King Jr, Bobby Kennedy and JFK. He is wonderful in a technical sense, too, rendering the spaces between housing projects with “pustules of paint ... like flowers blooming in a riot”. Marshall’s art is “as necessary as it is unmissable”; and this show is both “exhilarating” and “moving”.

Royal Academy, London W1. Until 18 January

“Man Ray didn’t consider photography to be a form of art,” said Marion Maneker in Puck. That notion may surprise some visitors to the Met’s survey of one of the artist’s most fertile periods, because it’s “easy to get lost” in the 64 experimental photographs that constitute the heart of the show. In 1921, Man Ray moved to Paris from New York City, and he later said he was developing images for a fashion client when he left a couple of random objects atop photographic paper and accidentally exposed the paper to light. Excited by the ghostly images the process produced, he repeated it, dubbed the results “rayographs,” and printed a dozen in a 1922 portfolio, Les champs délicieux, that caused a sensation. Today, those 12 images are “both familiar and otherworldly.” They also suggest how the rayographs provide a key to understanding everything their creator did.

“Conceptual pieces were a part of Man Ray’s practice from the very beginning,” said Rossilynne Skena Culgan in Time Out. Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants grew up in Brooklyn, studied art in Manhattan, and was heavily influenced by the 1913 Armory Show that introduced America to Europe’s postimpressionist avant-garde. Before the rayographs, he created a series of colorful collages titled Revolving Doors, presenting them on a rotating stand that visitors to the Met can spin. He “also had a sense of humor,” as can be seen in 1920’s Catherine Barometer, which looks like a device for gauging weather shifts but suggests a need to monitor its namesake’s moods. By then, he was a friend and collaborator of Marcel Duchamp’s, and took Duchamp’s advice in relocating to Paris to seek greater acclaim.

Before the rayographs, Man Ray was already creating “moody, enigmatic” photographs by focusing on purpose-built everyday objects, said Arthur Lubow in The New York Times. He lit an eggbeater to emphasize its looping shadows in an image he titled Man. He also used an extended exposure to turn accumulated dust into an image that suggests a vast, arid landscape. Similarly, the everyday objects that appear in the rayographs are “transfigured by the artist’s skillful manipulations of luminescence and shadows.” And while those are the works that pushed Ray’s career into overdrive, the “showstopper” in this multimedia gathering of some 160 objects is a variation that also happens to be the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction. In Le Violon d’Ingres, from 1924, his lover Kiki de Montparnasse appears naked to just below the waist and her back, which is turned to the camera, is adorned with likenesses of the f-holes on a violin. The artist used his rayograph process to burn in the suggestive flourishes, and “in its beauty and absurdity,” the $12.4 million work “encapsulates, arguably better than any other artwork, the insouciant wit of surrealism and the originality of Man Ray.”

It’s not a very inviting title, “Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists”, said Nancy Durrant in the Times. “Do many people know what a neo-impressionist is – or, more to the point, who?” But actually, this is a lovely show, which fans of Georges Seurat will not want to miss. He and Paul Signac were leading lights of neo-impressionism, commonly known as “pointillism”, a movement rooted in the idea that certain colour combinations could suggest particular moods. They “used dots of pure colour, contrasted with opposing hues on the colour wheel – yellow with violet, orange with blue – to maximise luminosity, while prioritising the harmony and balance of a composition”. In short, they invented pixellation well avant la lettre. This exhibition is largely drawn from the holdings of the Dutch collector Helene Kröller-Müller. It contains some great pictures, not least a proto-futurist “large-scale image of an iron foundry” by Maximilien Luce, and Théo van Rysselberghe’s portrait of the painter Anna Boch. Personally, I find the painstaking precision of these artists “less thrilling” than the looser work of their impressionist predecessors, but it’s often beautiful nonetheless.

Seurat (1859-1891) “had kaleidoscope eyes”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. “He saw in limitless colours that swarm and bubble on his canvases in galaxies of tiny dots.” Often choosing quite “barren subjects” – a rock, an empty harbour – he “found endless wonder in the most banal reality”, and used his observational powers to reinvent painting. He died aged just 31, but works here such as 1888’s sublime “Port-en-Bessin”, a Sunday “inspired a generation” of followers. Sadly, they weren’t nearly as talented as him, and not nearly as revolutionary as the exhibition makes them out to be. His disciple Signac, for instance, may have been politically radical, but as an artist he was anything but. “Most of the portraits here are highly conventional under a thin pointillist veneer.”

Detractors of the neo-impressionists called them “bubonistes” – plague spreaders, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. Critics thought that they were “responsible for the death of painting”, which “makes them sound more exciting and heavy-metal than they were”. The pointillists were, in fact, “clean and fastidious”, and sometimes rather “detached from messy human passions”. But there are luminous moments in this show, and “flashes of poetry”, too. These are best observed in the one genuine masterpiece here, Seurat’s “Le Chahut” of 1889-90. The work depicts the gas-lit interior of a Montmartre cabaret, with a quartet of can-can dancers on stage. In the corner lurks a “creepy” onlooker, complete with “porcine snout and phallic cane”, gazing upwards. “Le Chahut” is the principal reason for visiting this otherwise “demanding” and slightly disappointing exhibition.

The National Gallery, London WC2, until 8 February 2026, nationalgallery.org.uk

Buying up to four pairs of shoes per week while her subjects were starving, France’s final queen remains both a “vacuous profligate” and a “style icon for a consumerist cult” to this day, said Laura Cumming in The Observer.

The V&A’s exhibition – the first in the UK solely devoted to her – brings together iconic pieces worn, and inspired, by Marie Antoinette: a character of haute-culture adorned with controversies.

Married at just 14 to the late-teens Sun King, Louis XVI, the young Austrian later became a spearhead of extravagance, a vision of “white cotton frocks”, “towering hair and a fresh pastel palette”. During her reign as consort, her decorative force was felt by all in France, with a “grotesque 13% of the state budget” devoured entirely by the royal family.

Even following her death aged 37, the “queen of fashion” became immortalised through her style. Following the blow of the guillotine, red-ribbon chokers became a visceral Paris craze; the porcupine hairstyle echoing her “shorn hair” – known as “coiffure à la guillotine” – a poignant, if less lurid, reminder of her fate.

A bygone age

The V&A’s collection presents a number of exceptional loans never seen outside Versailles, such as “silk slippers, jewels from her private collection” and, remarkably, “the final letter she wrote”, said Anna Murphy in The Times.

Despite relatively little surviving the almost 250 years since her “tragically-ever-after” death, perhaps the most elucidating item is the “single be-bowed beige shoe” she lost while fleeing the Tuileries, pursued “by a revolutionary mob in 1792”.

Another “jaw-dropping exhibit” is an adaptation of her wedding dress for Duchess Hedvig Elisabeth Charlotta, later Queen of Sweden. Its pannier – a type of hooped petticoat – appears so decadently wide “as to render only the most palatial doorway navigable”. Equally impressive is the “epic bling” of the Sutherland diamonds, whose jewels are the “size of Galaxy Minstrels”.

A peek behind the curtain

At a time associated with failed foreign wars, constant political discontent on home soil and financial decline, Marie Antoinette exercised a desire for freedom rather than “magnificence”, said Matthew Dennison in Country Life. Where Louis avoided the “costly building projects” of former kings, or commissioned practical creations – such as round-cornered furniture to tackle his shortsightedness – Marie Antoinette exercised the expansive “cultural leadership associated with consortship”.

Hers was not a life associated with subtlety: she ordered “300 hyacinth bulbs” to perfume her bedchamber in the winter of 1778, and “bespoke scents” straight from Montpellier.

Counter-intuitively, though, these acts reflected a desire to escape, reminding her of the “freedom she had forfeited through marriage”. A tour-de-force, the exhibition shows that “she, not her husband, was responsible for the evolution of the Louis XVI style”, creating an unrivalled “world of beauty”.

Marie Antoinette Style is at the V&A, London SW7, from 20 September, vam.ac.uk

When it comes to new museum exhibitions, this fall has it all — Impressionism, mid-century American modernism, historical Black art, manga and a showcase of British landscapes from fierce rivals. Here are eight standouts.

‘Fra Angelico,’ Palazzo Strozzi and Museo di San Marco, Florence, Italy

In Florence, visitors can see several of Renaissance painter and Dominican friar Fra Angelico’s “lush religious scenes,” but this “once-in-a-lifetime” show at Palazzo Strozzi and Museo di San Marco is the city’s first major exhibition in seven decades entirely “devoted” to his work, said ARTnews. Among the two museums, 140 works will be displayed, including paintings, sculptures and drawings on loan from the Louvre, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Vatican Museums. (Sept. 26, 2025-Jan. 25, 2026)

‘Art of Manga,’ de Young Museum, San Francisco

Manga, a style of Japanese comic books and graphic novels, is a “worldwide obsession,” said KQED, but “despite its ubiquity,” it’s rare to see the original drawings on display. Until now. “Art of Manga” is the first major U.S. museum exhibition focusing on what goes into creating this work and includes more than 600 drawings from some of the most influential manga creators. Longtime fans and newbies alike will appreciate the behind-the-scenes look at how this art is made and how the storytelling touches on important social issues. (Sept. 27, 2025-Jan. 25, 2026)

‘Architects of Being: Louise Nevelson and Esphyr Slobodkina,’ Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock

For the first time, these pioneering artists who helped shape mid-century modernism in the U.S. are being showcased side by side, with special attention to their similarities. Both were immigrants who launched their careers during the Great Depression, and “each woman’s story amplifies the other’s,” said the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition will include found object sculptures, collages, paintings, jewelry, mixed media reliefs and clothing, all revealing their shared appreciation of “cubism, surrealism and constructivism.” (Oct. 3, 2025-Jan. 11, 2026)

‘Reimagine African American Art,’ Detroit Institute of Arts

The Detroit Institute of Arts will christen its four new African American art gallery rooms with this assemblage of Black masterpieces from its collection. The “reimagined” galleries were moved to the “heart of the museum” to “better showcase” the contributions of local Black artists, said the Detroit Free Press. Sculptures, paintings, photographs and furniture from 1840-1986 will be on display, highlighting multiple styles and genres. (Opens Oct. 18)

‘The Honest Eye: Camille Pissarro’s Impressionism,’ Denver Art Museum

Camille Pissarro was the sole painter to showcase his work at every Impressionist exhibition in Paris and “left a mark” on his peers and post-Impressionists like Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Cézanne, said Apollo Magazine. “The Honest Eye: Camille Pissarro’s Impressionism” is the first major U.S. retrospective of the artist in 40 years and will feature over 80 of his paintings from more than 50 museums and private collections. Expect landscapes, cityscapes, figure paintings and “remarkable” urban scenes. (Oct. 26, 2025-Feb. 8, 2026)

‘Of Light and Air: Winslow Homer in Watercolor,’ Museum of Fine Arts Boston

The Museum of Fine Arts is home to the world's largest collection of watercolors by Winslow Homer, one of “America’s greatest artists” who with “just washes and brushes on paper” could “evoke profound emotions,” said Boston Magazine. “Of Light and Air: Winslow Homer in Watercolor” provides a rare look at almost 50 pieces that have been in storage and are “so fragile” they have not been exposed to daylight in nearly five decades. Because of their safekeeping, the works are in beautiful condition, guaranteeing a “spectacular show.” (Nov. 2, 2025-Jan. 10, 2026)

‘Korean Treasures: Collected, Cherished, Shared,’ Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, D.C.

This stunning exhibition of Korean masterpieces spans 1,500 years and boasts 200 works of art once found in Buddhist temples, Confucian academies and royal palaces. The pieces — sculptures, furniture, ceramics, landscape paintings — are from the vast collection of Lee Kun-Hee, former chair of Samsung. Following his death in 2020, his family donated a treasure trove of 23,000 objects to South Korea, and the priceless items displayed in “Korean Treasures: Collected, Cherished, Shared” have never before been viewed in the U.S. (Nov. 8, 2025-Feb. 1, 2026)

‘Turner and Constable,’ Tate Britain London

The rivalry between British painters J.M.W. Turner and John Constable is “one of the greatest in art history,” said Artsy, and this landmark exhibition shines a light on their individual and shared approaches to creating landscape paintings. Both men were born 250 years ago, and critics from their era called the contemporaries a “clash of fire and water,” the Tate Britain said. Paintings, sketchbooks and personal items will be on view, including bold later works by Turner that inspired Claude Monet and Constable’s takes on puffy clouds. (Nov. 27, 2025-April 12, 2026)

The National Gallery’s plans to build a £400 million extension and expand its displays to include 20th century works are being seen by some in the art world as a direct threat to its London rival, the museum group Tate.

Some £375 million “has already been quietly raised behind the scenes” for The National Gallery’s Project Domani – an “astonishing achievement”, said The Art Newspaper. But the decision to start collecting more modern works could create “bad blood” with Tate, one source associated with the group told The Guardian. Another said it could put the two museums “at each other’s throats”.

‘Old rivalry’

The National Gallery is best known for its collection of Old Masters and 19th century paintings, including works by Renoir, Monet, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Turner and Van Gogh. But “for decades”, there’s been “tension” with the Tate over which institution “should be allowed to collect ‘modern’ art”.

Thirty years ago, there was an “official” agreement that The National Gallery would stick to a “cut-off point” at 1900 but that “has never sat well with bosses at Trafalgar Square”. The announcement that the gallery now plans to start collecting paintings from across the entire 20th century is a “shift that could revive an old rivalry”.

“As 1900 gets further and further away, it will be natural for us to tell the bigger story,” said The National Gallery’s director Gabriele Finaldi. And he insists that the new acquisition strategy will be enacted in “collaboration” with Tate.

‘Dazzling coup’

The funds raised by The National Gallery so far include "the two largest ever known cash donations to any cultural institution, not just in Britain but globally”, Finaldi told The Art Newspaper. It's a “dazzling coup”, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph but, when the “applause dies away” there'll be “fundamental questions” over whether Project Domani will “throw into confusion the respective roles of The National Gallery and Tate".

Although Tate “officially might be all smiles”, behind the scenes it “must be bricking it” because the plans surely represent “a land grab”. This is a “bold decision” from The National Gallery, said The Art Newspaper, but hopefully it will lead to “an even greater exchange of loans” between the two galleries.

News of Project Domani comes at a particularly sensitive time for Tate, which has suffered a fall in visitor numbers and a “cash crisis” leading to redundancies, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. The museum group has put a brave face on the situation, recently channelling the “mythic rock band” Spinal Tap when it said that “its audience was not shrinking; just becoming more selective”.

Still in her mid-30s, Rachel Jones “is about as successful as a young painter can be”, said Fatema Ahmed in the Financial Times. Since graduating from the Royal Academy Schools in 2019, the artist has seen her work, which “seems wildly abstract at first, then invites you to see new forms and shapes”, sell for hundreds of thousands, and be acquired by institutions including the Tate. She has exhibited widely across Europe and the US, and has even put on an opera.

Now, she has been selected to become the first contemporary artist to mount a show in the main space of London’s Dulwich Picture Gallery. The recurring motif in Jones’s work is the human mouth, said Eddy Frankel in The Guardian – which she renders “in thick swirls of Technicolor semi-abstraction”, with teeth, gums and lips appearing “over and over”, with “smears of red” and “shards of jagged white” adrift in “trippy hazes” of colour. Her Dulwich exhibition features a new body of work, comprising paintings both small and large, as well as other pieces created over the past six years. It’s “a show that looks like a psychedelic bomb has been detonated in a dentist’s surgery”; these are “impressive, imposing, clever” paintings.

Jones is an “exhilarating” painter, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. The new works “radiate self-assurance and charisma”. Among the most striking are eight “vast” pictures in oil pastels and oil sticks which all, confusingly, share the same oxymoronic title: “Gated Canyons”. Consisting of sequential shapes – “like beads on a necklace, or an earthworm’s segmented parts” – they coalesce into “gigantic”, cartoonish teeth and lips, sometimes accessorised by a “lewd” dangling tongue. Colours “bloom like coral”, while some pictures contain “bare swathes of the underlying brown linen” that give them an unfinished air. They look great, these “grotto-like landscapes of feeling”, but what they’re doing in Dulwich is uncertain. The works are supposedly “in dialogue” with the gallery’s Old Masters, specifically a tiny painting of “a reddish-eyed, white-coated hound” by the 17th-century Flemish artist Pieter Boel. That picture contains a mouth, but otherwise, “it has as much in common with Jones’s paintings as I do to the Dalai Lama”.

Jones sees the mouth as “an entry point to the interior self”, said Nancy Durrant in The Times. As the orifice through which we speak, it’s a gateway for us to express emotion. “The unspeaking mouth is remarkably eloquent, evoking the oversexualisation of women or racial caricature.” But intellectualising the artist’s “riotously colourful” work misses the point: these are paintings designed to provoke an “instinctive” response. Stare long enough, and the “vivid reds, spearmint greens, rich purples and emphatic yellows” here will “envelop you”. They are “expressive works that are meant to be felt – and, given time, they leave you tingling”.

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London SE21. Until 19 October