David Hockney writ large
A huge retrospective gives the authorised version of this prolific artist’s career.
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The problem with landscape paintings
Also this week: my deep dive into the underground worlds of boardgames and vegetarianism.
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Munch the social animal
The painter’s portraits reveal less a tortured loner than a man who thrived in company.
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Siena’s artistic revolution
In the 14th century, Duccio and others developed ways of painting that had never been seen before.
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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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