Mickalene Thomas’s ode to Black joy
The American artist turns 19th-century paintings of women into celebrations of friends, family and lovers – with plenty of rhinestones.
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Visions of an English occult
The British surrealist Ithell Colquhoun combined magic and mythology to create art from buried folklore.
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The Pierre Bonnard renaissance
The enigmatic French painter is seen by many as a league below Matisse. But a new book proves them wrong…
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The best art exhibitions to see in 2025
From 14th-century Siena to female modernists, the year’s most exciting exhibitions chart an evolving Western tradition.
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The Renaissance in drawing
Two exhibitions reveal how, for the great Renaissance artists, drawing was both a tool for making paintings and a form…
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Why painting (still) matters
Reports of the art form’s death have been exaggerated – it retains the power to make new worlds.
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The inventor of the Renaissance
Four and a half centuries after his death, we still owe our understanding of art’s greatest period to Giorgio Vasari.
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The 1924 Paris Olympics: when athletes inspired art
The Fitzwilliam Museum’s latest show highlights an era that saw the sporting and artistic worlds converge.
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Love, loathing and Lucian Freud
Rose Boyt’s memoir of her controlling father reveals a relationship defined by cruelty and shame.
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In defence of the King Charles portrait
Jonathan Yeo’s modernist painting captures the weirdness of the monarch.
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Goya’s lessons for a world at war
Why the great Spanish painter’s work still resonates so urgently.
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The last crimes of Caravaggio
Within weeks of finishing his final painting, a murder scene, the artist was himself dead.
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Caspar David Friedrich and the art of kitsch
The German artist, born 250 years ago, and his most famous painting The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog reveal…
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Winter wonderlands: writers on their favourite artworks
Ali Smith, Julian Barnes, Ai Weiwei and others choose seasonal scenes.
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The madness of Claude Monet
Jackie Wullschläger’s exemplary biography reveals the impressionist painter’s obsessive commitment to his art.
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Max Pechstein and the politics of paint
Amid Germany’s 20th-century upheavals, the expressionist’s art brought him both renown and peril.
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Frans Hals and the will to life
Where Rembrandt painted introspection, the Haarlem portraitist showed people as social creatures.
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Mugshots of a nation
After a three-year facelift, the bandages are now off the National Portrait Gallery.
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The RA Summer Exhibition 2023: from the bland to the bravura
Visitors should come prepared: wear comfortable shoes, stay hydrated, put an energy bar in the pocket, and keep hope in…
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Frieda Hughes’s Q&A: “The Bible taught me everything”
The poet and painter on motorbikes, frog migration, and why all politicians are children.
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