The year 2025 marks the 75th anniversary of the most influential of all art books, Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art. The way things appeared back in 1950 is, however, very different to the way they look now. Gombrich’s book went on to sell eight million copies and run to 16 editions (and counting), and while it remains a fascinating primer for Western art, it has fallen out of step with the times. Importantly, the first edition contained no female artists and very little on international art or contemporary practitioners. Today, these three concerns are dominant in the wider art world.
As if to corroborate, what are notably scarce among the exhibitions scheduled for 2025 are solo shows devoted to white, male artists firmly established in the canon. There are some – for example, on the 250th anniversary of his birth, JMW Turner gets a showing at the Whitworth in Manchester (“In Light and Shade”, 7 February – 2 November) and is paired with his great rival in “Turner & Constable” at Tate Britain (27 November 2025 – 12 April 2026) – but elsewhere Italian or northern European artists from the 15th to the 19th centuries are as rare as hens’ teeth.
The underappreciated Carracci clan will have a moment in the sun at the National Gallery with “The Carracci Cartoons: Myths in the Making” (10 April – 6 July) and the always magnetic Caravaggio is represented at the Wallace Collection in “Caravaggio’s Cupid”, which focuses on a single enigmatic and unsettling painting (26 November 2025 – 12 April 2026). Among modern masters, no year passes without its Picasso shows and he can be found at Tate Modern, with one of his most significant and knotty pictures, “Picasso: The Three Dancers” (17 September 2025 – spring 2026) and at the revivified National Gallery of Ireland (“Picasso: From the Studio”, 11 October 2025 – 22 February 2026). These, though, are the exceptions.
The other shows of males and pales take a more contemporary line. “Edvard Munch Portraits” (National Portrait Gallery, 13 March – 15 June) highlights psychological complexity, while “Andy Warhol: Portrait of America” at the innovative MK Gallery in Milton Keynes (15 March – 29 June) samples his love of celebrity culture – a theme reinforced in “Iconic: Portraiture from Francis Bacon to Andy Warhol” at the Holburne Museum in Bath (24 January – 5 May).
The sheer dreamlike oddity of the graphic work of the novelist Victor Hugo will be on display in “Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo” at the Royal Academy (21 March – 29 June), which promises to open eyes to the multifariousness of the creator of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, who conjured phantasms from ink blots and coffee grounds. Another artist with an unsettling undercurrent to his work was Edward Burra, a lesser light of mid-century British art who receives a welcome showing at Tate Britain (13 June – 19 October). Bucking the trend is William Nicholson, better known as the father of the modernist Ben but a painter of luscious pictures of great skill and quiet satisfaction (Pallant House, Chichester, 22 November 2025 – 31 May 2026).
Meanwhile, two contemporary American artists will offer complementary versions of the black experience: Mickalene Thomas (“All About Love”, Hayward Gallery, 11 February – 5 May) and Kerry James Marshall (Royal Academy, 20 September 2025 – 18 January 2026). Both work in the pop idiom and nod to or play with the traditional art-historical narrative. Thomas makes her surfaces of powerful black women glitter with sequins as they offer a challenge to the viewer, and Marshall paints everyday idylls of people gathered in parks, urban gardens and communal spaces.
Thomas is one of many intriguing female artists who will reach a British audience in 2025. Another is the Danish painter Anna Ancher (1859-1935), whose work centred on the rural and seafaring people of the coastal town of Skagen (Dulwich Picture Gallery, 4 November 2025 – 8 March 2026). A sympathetic observer and adroit colourist, Ancher continues the gallery’s welcome focus on Scandinavian artists.
Emily Kam Kngwarray (Tate Modern, 10 July 2025 – 11 January 2026), a matriarch of the Anmatyerre people of Australia’s Northern Territory, also offers a distinctive albeit very different vision of time and place. She started painting only in her late seventies and her large, complicated works – both paintings and batiks – are repositories of folklore, landscape and experience.
Tate’s female-centric remit is also bolstered by an exhibition highlighting Ithell Colquhoun, an unsung British surrealist who, during the 1930s and 1940s, made haunting pictures involving sexuality, the occult and ecology among other shifting themes. She starts the year at Tate St Ives (1 February – 5 May) before heading up the A30 to Tate Britain (13 June – 19 October).
The photographer Lee Miller was part of the wider European surrealist group and her career, from fashion and landscapes to her indelible war photography, will be laid out at Tate Britain (2 October 2025 – 15 February 2026). The recent biopic Lee with Kate Winslet effectively narrated her life, and this show reveals the fruit of a remarkable trajectory that took her from modelling for Vogue to documenting what the liberating troops discovered at Buchenwald and Dachau.
Among the most significant women artists at work today is Jenny Saville, and her often gigantic nudes and meditations on the theme of the Madonna and Child will be given due space and reverence in “The Anatomy of Painting” (National Portrait Gallery, 20 June – 7 September). In her work, flesh is unapologetic – simultaneously sensual and lumpy, biological and spiritual. It may be true that she confronts contemporary ideas about feminine beauty but that would count for little if she wasn’t so extraordinarily adept with paintbrush and colour.
Two other female artists who knew Paris in the 1920s were the Irish modernists Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone. The National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin is currently enjoying a new lease of life under Caroline Campbell and “Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone: The Art of Friendship” (10 April – 10 August) promises to bring to notice these two women who helped spread the modernist creed through traditional subjects such as religion and landscape.
Modernism in its more colourful and vibrant guises is also explored at the Royal Academy (“Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism”, 28 January – 21 April) and Tate Modern (“Nigerian Modernism”, 8 October 2025 – 11 May 2026). And among the other exhibitions that offer great promise are the poetic paintings of Wayne Thiebaud (“American Still Life”, Courtauld Gallery, 10 October 2025 – 18 January 2026), a great gathering of neo-impressionist works from the choice collection of Helene Kröller-Müller (“Radical Harmony”, National Gallery, 13 September 2025 – 8 February 2026), and a potent pairing in “Kiefer/Van Gogh” (Royal Academy, 28 June – 26 October).
However, the show of which Ernst Gombrich would most heartily approve is “Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350” which will turn the National Gallery into an emporium of gold and jewel colours (8 March – 22 June) as it brings together long-dispersed works of throat-catching beauty by the likes of Duccio, Simone Martini, and Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti. These were painters with a new conception of what art could do – and be. From narrative deftness and architectural detail to human emotion and spiritual gesture, the works were revelatory in the early 14th century and, in this exhibition, promise to be so once again.
[See also: Tirzah Garwood’s English satires]
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