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

“‘A Painter’s Secrets’ is that rare, magical exhibition that casts a storybook spell,” said Lance Esplund in The Wall Street Journal. It brings together 55 of the paintings of Henri Rousseau, a self-taught and widely misunderstood French artist whose popularity blossomed shortly after his death in 1910. The show “aims to dispel myths about Rousseau,” casting him as alert to the potential commercial advantages of being seen as naive. But the appeal is largely in the work and the “beautifully abundant” make-believe world it conjures. In Rousseau’s paintings, evocations of folk art and pre-Renaissance Christian religious painting merge with “magical thinking and the candid spontaneity of children’s art.” From the first gallery, we’re enchanted. Rousseau’s “early enigmatic masterpiece,” 1886’s Carnival Evening, depicts two small, costumed figures walking arm in arm out of dusky woods. The image is “a harbinger of surrealism,” and it’s both “eerie and romantic.

“What Rousseau did best was recast elements from his cultural milieu in his own personal idiom,” said Kelly Presutti in Art in America. To achieve his storybook-like images, he flattened the pictorial space, played with scale, and gave his human figures “an almost caricatural stiffness.” In 1908, when France performed well in a rugby match with England, Rousseau created an image in which four players seem to be dancing on a field framed by two rows of trees, the men “appearing both of the moment and suspended entirely outside of it.” Rousseau, a former customs agent, struggled to support himself as an artist after turning fully to the field when he was nearly 50. But he was most successful in selling his jungle scenes, which he devised not by traveling but by visiting zoos and botanical gardens and perusing magazine photos. Though some of the resulting images are clichéd, they’re imbued with “a luminosity and strangeness that still fascinates.”

“While his work may seem simple at first glance,” said Elisa Carollo in The Observer, “walking through the exhibition reveals the astute social commentary woven into his paintings.” Those jungle images are “deeply allegorical works that critique modernity and colonialism,” and Rousseau is “equally insightful” when his subjects are war or bourgeois life. The Barnes exhibition “culminates with some of Rousseau’s most elusively mystical works”—The Sleeping Gypsy (1897), Unpleasant Surprise (1899–1901), and The Snake Charmer (1907). The three paintings “blend fantasy with fear, inviting viewers to consider the deeper mysteries of human experience at its most primordial essence.” Rousseau’s insights into human nature and modern society were “ahead of his time,” as was his method.

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”.

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

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

A large Andy Warhol portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat in a jock strap is the first thing you see at “Downtown/Uptown.” And the choice is fitting, said J. Scott Orr in Whitehot, because the towering electric-red silk-screen image “captures everything about ’80s art: the need to shout above cultural noise, the wholesale packaging of sexuality, and the commodification of, well, everything.” Warhol, then in his 50s, was the new generation’s spirit guide and Basquiat a rising star, about to lead a New York City–based cohort including Julian Schnabel, Keith Haring, David Salle, and Barbara Kruger to a level of pop celebrity that was unknown a decade earlier. Those artists and roughly 20 more are featured in this all-star group gallery exhibition co-curated by 1980s gallerist and impresario Mary Boone, who helped blur the lines between art and commodity, rebel and entrepreneur. The show succeeds “because it refuses to sanitize that legacy.”

Though the show includes 78 works by 26 artists in all, it’s “nowhere near exhaustive,” said Max Lakin in The New York Times. It highlights the return of figurative painting in a style that critics called neo-expressionism, a label that didn’t please most artists. Basquiat, Schnabel, Haring, Francesco Clemente, and Eric Fischl all belonged to this “hot-blooded” group and were shown at Boone’s downtown gallery. Many of the era’s cerebral photographers and appropriation artists instead showed at Metro Pictures, but their kind is represented here by Kruger, Cindy Sherman, and Jeff Koons. Women are underrepresented, said Veronica Esposito in The Guardian, because “the plague of sexism” remained virulent in the ’80s. But the Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous art collective, have some of their wittiest posters displayed, each one challenging men’s domination of the art world.

The vibrant scene captured by “Downtown/Uptown” is “colored a bit by survivorship bias and nostalgia,” said Marion Maneker in Puck. Because co-curator Brett Gorvy was a London teenager when all these artists burst into prominence, “the exhibition is very much the 1980s New York of his imagination.” Several of the era’s most controversial works even share their own room, bringing together two Sally Mann photographs of her nude children, a Richard Prince image featuring a nude 10-year-old Brooke Shields, and Andres Serrano’s photograph of a crucifix immersed in his own urine. But the show as a whole celebrates the explosive creativity of the era, providing a useful lesson for today’s U.S. art scene, currently in a lull nowhere near as deep as that of the ’70s. “Even when the art world is at its bleakest, you never know what’s coming next.”

“Is it trivial to think of flowers in times like these?” asked Kelly Presutti in Art in America. Certainly not if the blossoms were painted by Rachel Ruysch, a Dutch artist who outsold Rembrandt in her day but has not been the subject of a major museum exhibition until the current traveling show, now at its final of three stops. Ruysch (1664–1750) painted floral still lifes “with an exquisite touch,” and “pure pleasure abounds” in any stroll through the show. But Ruysch also seemed to understand that beauty is “a reminder of our vulnerability,” of the fleetingness of life. In a typical Ruysch painting, “stems are snapped, leaves yellow and wilt,” and “a lizard prepares to pounce on a nest of freshly laid eggs.” She shows us bountiful bouquets. And yet “the world holds together in its wondrous beauty, Ruysch’s work suggests, because we will it to be so.”

Describing Ruysch’s paintings as still lifes “feels like a misnomer,” said Murray Whyte in The Boston Globe. “They teem with slimy insects and reptiles,” examples of which her naturalist father kept in jars at her childhood home in Amsterdam. The exhibit’s “dazzling” first gallery simulates what it would have been like to grow up amid that globe-spanning menagerie. The room, “lit like a sideshow of macabre delight,” displays butterfly, beetle, and reptile specimens on loan from Harvard, and reminds us that Ruysch was a product of an age when Dutch explorers were “hauling back all kinds of exotica,” stirring wonderment. You could argue that still life painting, the only genre open to women, flattered its patrons by reflecting back their new wealth in all its excess. But in Ruysch’s work, you sense “the riotous curiosity of an active mind trying to capture the shock of the new in a world freshly without limits.” And beyond that, her routine inclusion of scavengers, predators, and decay suggests that she recognized “the perils of progress alongside its bounty.”

“In some ways, Ruysch, though too long neglected by posterity, was like the lucky bees she painted,” said Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post. She gorged on the beauty of the flowers and fruits the era presented her with, and meanwhile gave birth to 10 children, kept her maiden name, worked as a court artist, took a hiatus when she and her husband won the lottery, then continued painting nearly into her 80s. Portraits of female artists were rare at the time, but Ruysch appears in three, said Cullen Murphy in Air Mail. One on display is a collaboration with an established male painter 20 years her senior. He rendered Ruysch at work at age 29, palette in hand and flowers nearby. Like the duet albums Tony Bennett recorded with Lady Gaga, the pairing of the two artists “acknowledges Ruysch’s stature in a realm of her own creation.”

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.

“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

“A master of form, fun, lightness, and surprise,” Alexander Calder is “the one 20th-century artist whom probably no one has ever disliked,” said Willard Spiegelman in The Wall Street Journal. With the opening in September of Calder Gardens in Philadelphia, the American titan of kinetic art (1898–1976) joins the select group of artists worldwide who have museums all their own. Except that in this case, “‘museum’ is the wrong word,” because Calder Gardens is so unique. On an “eccentric spit of land” tucked amid the city’s extensive museum row, the building is mostly hidden below a new public garden, and visitors experience the complex as a “splendid” parade of big and small light-filled spaces that create their own sense of Calder-like movement. With his grandfather’s statue of William Penn in view atop City Hall and his father’s Swann Memorial Fountain a block away, Calder, a Philadelphia native, has been awarded a well-earned homecoming, and his works now on display “have already begun to dance.”

“Calder was long dismissed as a sideshow in American art, a toymaker rather than a prophet,” said Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. But his approach “reminds us of art’s primary role, which is not to issue statements but to make things: evocative things, funny things, beautiful things, trivial things.” Spending time among Calder’s mobiles and static but equally playful “stabiles,” a viewer “becomes acutely aware of their sheer variety.” One mobile, “a cluster of white leaf shapes strung along long horizontal arcs,” has “the aloof grace of an albino peacock.” Another “evokes a mechanized Japanese cherry tree.” To display these wonders, as well as complementary works by Calder’s father and grandfather, the architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron designed a “deliberately ‘irrational’ exhibition space” whose main visible wall is sheathed in reflective steel, “mirroring the gardens around it rather than asserting its own profile.”

It’s surely “one of the strangest cultural complexes to be built anywhere in recent years,” said Oliver Wainwright in The Guardian. “Part barn, part cave, and part rolling meadow,” this “beguiling” new attraction compresses “a whole universe of gallery types into one compact encounter.” After crossing busy Benjamin Franklin Parkway, visitors climb a hill planted by Piet Oudolf, who’s known for his work on New York City’s High Line. The plantings, unfortunately, are years from maturity, but it’s still remarkable to come upon openings in the earth that offer the first glimpses of Calder’s colorful sculpture. Because the artist himself despised art-world formalities such as nameplates and explanatory texts, I completed the journey beyond “feeling entertained but none the wiser about Calder.” Maybe that’s fine. “Theories may be all very well for the artist himself,” he once said, “but they shouldn’t be broadcast to other people.”

At long last, an exhibition of 1960s art has arrived that “makes the decade weird again,” said Jerry Saltz in NYMag.com. For too long, museums have been mounting tributes to the era suggesting that pop art, minimalism, conceptualism, land art, and feminism were the only languages spoken. Happily, “Sixties Surreal” is “not the same old same old.” It uses an elastic definition of “surreal” to bring together some 150 works by 111 artists who plugged into the madness and openness of the period. The “electrifying” first sight that greets visitors is a trio of enormous double-humped camels created in 1969 by sculptor Nancy Graves. A bright-orange backdrop makes the display pop all the more, and “this blast of fresh air only intensifies as you make your way through the rest of the show.”

“‘Sixties Surreal’ might seem like a mea culpa on the part of the Whitney,” said Deborah Solomon in The New York Times. The museum played a major role, after all, in pushing many of these same artists to the margins of the story it told about postwar American art. Many of them arguably did carry on the surrealist project of celebrating the less rational realms of consciousness, often by way of psychosexual paintings and sculptures that “thwacked conventional standards of beauty.” Christina Ramberg, a Chicago painter, specialized in close-up images of women’s bodies constrained by bandages and tight corsets. Martha Edelheit, another of the 47 women in the show, is making her Whitney debut at age 94 with a 16-foot-wide painting she completed in 1965. In Flesh Wall With Table, nude female figures “sprawl from edge to edge of the canvas, their flesh graced with a rainbow of color that progresses from delicate ivories and pinks to dense ceruleans and purples.”

“If there’s a problem with the show, it’s that everything becomes surrealism in the end,” said Marion Maneker in Puck. There are plenty of worthy flag bearers here, including Martha Rosler, who was ahead of her time in creating photomontages that highlighted the sexual politics and global violence undergirding U.S. consumer culture. But the inclusion of well-known artists as varied as Faith Ringgold and Kenneth Anger “makes you wonder where the boundaries of surrealism lie.” And that’s true as well of one of the featured works: a 39-foot-wide reclining male nude by the painter Harold Stevenson. “Once dismissed as a gargantuan art-world curio,” Stevenson’s The New Adam “is now being considered as an ahead-of-its-time, era-defining masterpiece,” said William Van Meter in Artnet. Just be ready for it. When the Guggenheim Museum declined at the last minute to include the painting in a seminal 1963 group show, the curator told Stevenson it would be too distracting to exhibit “a phallus the size of a man.”

“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.”

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)

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

From the start of her career, “creating an aura of mystery has been Lorna Simpson’s generative MO,” said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. The latest chapter of her career finds her focused on painting rather than the conceptual photography that initially won her acclaim. While the 65-year-old New York City native still often centers Black female figures in her work, the figures in her paintings are often taken from vintage issues of Ebony and Jet magazines, enabling her to “edit and play with the female ideals that the magazine photos were intended to represent and promote.” Those images can be striking. “More interesting, though, is the presence in the exhibition of a kind of poetically haunting imagery not previously associated with this artist.” Some incorporate news photo images, such as of 1967 Detroit burning. Others, including her large-scale, blue-washed paintings inspired by glacial landscapes, create a mood that’s “as bleak as it is beautiful.”

The entire show is “a testament to how an artist’s vision can transcend media,” said Brian P. Kelly in The Wall Street Journal. Simpson’s early photographs, which often combine high-contrast black-and-white images with snippets of text, explored Blackness, gender, and identity. By 1990, she’d earned the distinction of being the first African American woman to have her work appear both at the Venice Biennale and in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. But her “omnivorous creative appetite” has compelled her to venture into film and installation, and she excels at painting as well. Each of her blue arctic paintings is “a symphony of color.” The 2021 diptych For Beryl Wright is “slightly menacing,” yet “it calls to us, siren-like, impelling us to draw closer to the mysterious scene.” Similarly, in her large 2024 painting of a meteorite found in 1922 by a Black Mississippi sharecropper, the rock, depicted as if floating or falling, appears “solid, imposing, and seemingly out of time.”

Two paintings hung at the entrances to the Met’s exhibition “juxtapose the bestial and the refined,” said Ariella Budick in the Financial Times. In True Value (2015), a “retro-chic” female figure wrapped in cheetah skin walks a cheetah, though with the faces of the woman and the cat swapped. Like Nightmare?, at the other end, True Value is “lushly executed” and “psychologically unnerving.” It “strikes deep notes that viewers can’t always make sense of but can feel in their bones.” In between those two gatekeepers, though, this show “rises only intermittently to the expectations they set.” Simpson “has a knack for existential dread,” but she hasn’t yet allowed herself to fully express passion in her paintings. “The surfaces remain restrained, the depths elusive.” Even when she selects found images for their potential emotional impact, she “keeps herself at a remove.”

"The case of Jean-François Millet's 1859 painting 'The Angelus' is one of the strangest in all art," said Laura Cumming in The Observer. Depicting two peasants pausing work in a field, called to prayer by a bell from a distant church spire, it shows the pair "heads bent in prayer, bodies haloed by golden evening rays" as shadows "lengthen over the spreading fields". This small, "modest" image has been held up as "the ideal image of la France profonde"; it has attracted endless, far-fetched critical scrutiny; it has repeatedly shattered auction records; and has been "used to advertise everything from cheap cigarettes to camembert". It marks a historical turning point – when the Industrial Revolution led to "a steady exodus of peasants from French farms to the city", and a nostalgia for the rural way of life; but the power of this "sonorous" work remains mysterious. Normally on display at Paris's Musée d'Orsay, "The Angelus" is currently the centrepiece of a small but fascinating – and free – exhibition at The National Gallery. Featuring several of the artist's most celebrated works, the show demonstrates how Millet (1814-1875) memorialised the forgotten peasant class, endowing the downtrodden rural labourers he painted with heroic dignity.

The son of wealthy Norman farmers who described himself as "the peasant's peasant", Millet saw the peasantry as "a class that had been denied full humanity", said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. He painted "lives of backbreaking toil but wants you to see that, behind the hoe, is a human being with a mind, a body, desires". "The Faggot Gatherers", for instance, sees women lugging bundles of sticks through "Stygian gloom" in a scene "that could just as easily have been in the 1370s as the 1870s". The drawing "Man Ploughing and Another Sowing" has a "broken-looking" sower stumbling across the foreground as a flock of black crows rises into the sky. Looking at it, you can see why van Gogh was such a fan of Millet.

People have projected all sorts of readings onto Millet's art, said Jackie Wullschläger in the Financial Times. Salvador Dalí offered a "bizarre" Freudian interpretation of "The Angelus", while communist revolutionaries in 1930s China claimed his painting "The Sower" as their "icon". The latter work, also on display here, depicts "a huge, commanding figure" descending a slope, over which he throws seeds from a bag slung over his shoulder. Yet the artist himself "resisted political, religious and artistic labels". Certainly, his sympathy with the rural poor "is vital to his appeal", but just as important is his "theatrical" flair for constructing images. Nowhere is this clearer than in "The Angelus", in which the two figures are "firmly outlined, massive, silhouetted in a twilight glow", "frozen" in devotion as they recite the evening prayer. It's a bona fide "masterpiece" – and the highlight of this "absorbing" exhibition.

The National Gallery, London WC2. Until 19 October; nationalgallery.org.uk

It's time to face the music. Conservative ideals have made their way back into mainstream pop culture. For the first time in more than 10 years, songs based on faith have been dominating the charts. This aligns with society's shift toward more "traditional values."

The past

Pop culture and music have long been a bellwether of the political climate. Summer 2024 was "defined by the ascendance of boundary-pushing female pop stars like Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan and Charli XCX, whose 'brat summer' trend was embraced by Kamala Harris' presidential campaign," said Semafor. However, "rising in a parallel fashion to pop women," country music resonated with "young white people, some who might not even describe themselves as conservative but may have been searching for a watered-down, digestible form of populism," said Rolling Stone.

For some listeners, country music has served as an "art form to latch on to when progressive artists (and their politics) alienated them a little too much," said Rolling Stone. Much of this was attributed to President Donald Trump's campaign, which was "based in part on nostalgia for a formerly 'great' time period in U.S. history when white identity was unthreatened and women held traditional roles." Since Trump's victory, Christian and Christian-adjacent music, especially by men, has broken its way into mainstream culture, capturing the zeitgeist of this political era. "In a time of increased polarization around religion, Christian-coded music has finally broken containment and conquered the airwaves," said Vox.

The present

Summer 2025 has been a "stark cultural contrast from last summer," said Semafor. This summer has been dominated by "tradpop," a term "used to describe a hybrid of traditional pop infused with spiritual and country music elements," said Artistrack. Songs under this umbrella "often include lyrics centered around family, faith, personal values and resilience." Some examples include Benson Boone's "Beautiful Things" and Alex Warren's "Ordinary," which is a "love song that easily doubles as a Christian worship song" and has become one of the biggest hits of 2025, said Vox. Christian artists like Jelly Roll and Brandon Lake have also been featured on the Billboard Hot 100.

"It used to be that Christian music felt like a lesser version of whatever was popular," said Holly Zabka, the president of Provident, a Sony subsidiary dedicated to Christian music, to NPR. In the music scene today, Christian artists "can now simply exist on the same level as all the other artists in the world."

The meaning

Tradpop has found a keen audience in young men. "What unites all of these songs across a broad sonic range is their confessional stance, as well as the performance of raw vulnerability from each male artist," said Vox. This is a "trait that modern men, especially ones steeped in a culture of conservatism, often have difficulty accessing." It also aligns with phenomena such as the male loneliness epidemic, as well as the growing ideological divide between men and women in the U.S. and globally. "So many of them struggle with depression, and what they are finding in Christian music is another way to deal with things," said Zabka. But it is "perhaps ironic that the regressive male codes of stoic masculinity that leave these male artists seeking outlets of expression are frequently heavily reinforced by the same Christian culture they're trying to find themselves within," said Vox.

The shift to tradpop "reflects the broader cultural and political narrative shift toward traditional and conservative ideals" ever since Trump "returned to power," said Semafor. The genre also "lends itself to the participatory nature of today's social media-led marketing," said NPR. "The musicians currently achieving the greatest success position themselves as co-creators with their audience, much like a pastor communing with their congregation."

If you love a country stroll and you're partial to an exhibition, why not combine the two at a sculpture park? The UK is home to an incredible array of open-air galleries, populated with breathtaking works that have been carefully positioned to work in harmony with the nature that surrounds them. Here are some of our favourite spots.

Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, St Ives

Shortly after her death in 1975, Barbara Hepworth's studio in St Ives was turned into a public gallery. Outside in her "picturesque garden overlooking the sea" (pictured above) lie some of her most striking works, said Time Out, each placed in exactly the spot she felt they belonged. Among the treasures on display is the monumental bronze "Two Forms (Divided Circle)" and the totem-like multi-part sculpture "Conversation with Magic Stones". Inside, her living room and workshop remain virtually "untouched" shining a fascinating light on the working life of the influential English sculptor.

tate.org

Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield

This "vast Georgian parkland estate" is dotted with many "creations" by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, said The Times. Other works to search out include Andy Goldsworthy's "Peter's Fold" – a permanent sculpture built using ancient dry-stone techniques around a common lime tree. There's also an "ebb and flow of temporary exhibits" to explore. If you want to make a weekend of it, consider booking a room at the nearby "pooch-friendly" Bagden Hall.

ysp.org.uk

Forest of Dean Sculpture Trail, Gloucestershire

Nestled within historic woodland in Gloucestershire lies one of the country's oldest sculpture parks. Carefully laid out among the trees over a four-and-a-half mile circular route are 17 sculptures, "many of which interact with the forest setting or are constructed from its raw materials", said Time Out. Perhaps most impressive is "Cathedral": "a 15-foot-tall stained-glass window depicting a woodland scene, hanging among the trees as if part of the landscape". End your walk at the "lovely picnic area" by the Forestry Visitor Centre.

forestofdean-sculpture.org.uk

The Sculpture Park, Surrey

"You might be expecting little" when you arrive at this unassuming park in Surrey, said Country Life. But you'll leave "bowled over" after an afternoon spent "wandering through what feels like miles of winding woodland paths, peppered with bronze gorillas and mirror-shiny steel bridges spanning lakes and streams". Home to over 800 sculptures, all available to buy, there is plenty to see.

thesculpturepark.com

Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh

Situated just outside Edinburgh, this award-winning sculpture garden is a must visit if you're staying in the Scottish capital. Look out for pieces by "luminaries" like Anish Kapoor, Marc Quinn and Phyllida Barlow, said The Times. Every artwork has been "designed for its precise spot", some "swathed in woodland", others overlooking the lakes. Open from April to October, the park hosts an annual arts festival, Jupiter Rising, each August with poetry readings and live music among the sculptures.

jupiterartland.org

Our group is taking a watercolour class on the terrace of Les Lodges, a delightful hotel in Aix-en-Provence noted for its wonderful view of Mont Sainte-Victoire. We are embarking on a futile attempt to replicate the work of the most celebrated resident of the city, the unrivalled Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne.

Capturing the famous mountain – which the restless and eternally dissatisfied Cézanne himself painted more than a hundred times – is not as easy as it looks. My pitiful attempt to paint one of the most recognisable subjects in the history of art looks more like the daubing of a four-year-old than an exquisite depiction of the variegated hues of the Provencal peak. But the fact that we are making an effort to copy the revered artist's work at all underscores his immense reach.

Cézanne suffered an astounding amount of rejection in his lifetime and was even ostracised by his native city, Aix. In 1900, Henri Pontier, the director of the Musée Granet, considered Cézanne’s work too unorthodox and declined to hang any painting by the ground-breaking artist on the museum's walls.

Despite this, Cézanne had a profound spiritual connection to the place. The city was the inspiration for his most memorable work, and he viewed it as his muse. Now Aix, the lovely, light-dappled Provencal city where the great artist was born and died, is returning the favour, paying homage to him in a year-long festival, "Cézanne 2025".

Jas de Bouffan: Cézanne's studio en plein air

One of the centrepieces of the festival is the grand reopening of Jas de Bouffan, the artist's much-loved 12-acre home, which has been closed for renovation since 2017. A splendid 18th-century mansion where the family lived from 1859 to 1899, Jas de Bouffan was never merely a home for Cézanne; it was his studio en plein air, where he learned the art of painting.

In these grounds, he first developed his revolutionary use of colour, structure and perspective. The captivating, verdant landscape surrounding the house is still flourishing at the neighbouring farm is planted with vines, almond, mulberry, chestnut, cherry and olive trees. Cézanne drew on this to create such memorable paintings as "House and Farm at Jas de Bouffan". He also painted his unparalleled "The Card Painters" series at the estate, using local farmhands as models.

Timeless masterpieces at the Musée Granet

Another highlight of the festival is "Cézanne at the Jas de Bouffan", an exhibition that runs at the Musée Granet until 12 October. Underlining the extent to which Cézanne was inspired by the family home, the show displays 130 timeless paintings of Jas de Bouffan.

It homes in on many of his favourite themes: bathers, Provençal landscapes, self-portraits, and still lifes in oil and watercolour. "Cézanne at the Jas de Bouffan" features such world-renowned paintings as "The Four Seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter", "Bather and the Rocks", "Game of Hide and Seek (based on Lancret)", "Self-Portrait in Front of a Pink Background", "Still Life with Cherries and Peaches" and, of course, "The Bathers" and "The Card Players".

Cézanne was a loner who preferred nature to people. But despite his wilful detachment from others, he created myriad works of art that continue to touch the human soul today. Thanks to his groundbreaking deployment of geometric simplification, he helped usher in Cubism, Fauvism and Abstraction. One of his many passionate devotees, Henri Matisse, called Cézanne "the master of us all". I would recommend, then, that you hurry to Aix now to marvel at his wondrous legacy.

James was a guest of Aquabella Hotel, Aix-en-Provence. For more information about the festival, visit cezanne2025.com

"Erecting a statue of a man's hot dream of what a woman should look like is unlikely to promote many women's acceptance of their own bodies."

So wrote Sørine Gotfredsen, a priest and journalist, in the Danish newspaper Berlingske. The 13-foot statue, a voluptuous stone mermaid, has "caused controversy for years due to its exaggerated figure", said The Independent.

But now it will reportedly be removed from Dragør Fort in Copenhagen because it "does not align with the cultural heritage of the 1910 landmark", said The Guardian.

'Too sexualised'

"Den Store Havfrue" (the "Big Mermaid") is no stranger to eviction. It was initially erected in 2006 at Langelinie Pier in Copenhagen, a few hundred yards from the world-famous "Little Mermaid" statue. But the bigger mermaid was removed after locals reportedly complained that it was "too sexualised", said The Telegraph.

It was then moved in 2018 to Dragør Fort, part of Copenhagen's former sea fortifications, until the Danish agency for palaces and culture "intervened in March, requesting its removal", said The Guardian. Mathias Kryger, art critic for the Politiken newspaper, called the statue "ugly and pornographic".

But the "Big Mermaid" is "arguably a bit less naked" than her smaller inspiration, said Berlingske's debate editor, Aminata Corr Thrane. "On the other hand, she has bigger breasts, and that's probably where the problem lies. Do naked female breasts have to have a specific academic shape and size to be allowed to appear in public?"

'Completely normal proportions'

Peter Bech, the restaurateur who commissioned the statue, said he couldn't understand the fuss; that the statue was a retort to tourists who complain that the "Little Mermaid" is too small.

"The mermaid has completely normal proportions in relation to her size. Of course, the breasts are big on a big woman," Bech told TV 2 Kosmopol, a Danish broadcaster. The criticism is "pure nonsense".

Politician Paw Karslund also "echoed that view", said Euronews. "I simply think the argument that the statue should be ugly and pornographic is too primitive," he told the broadcaster. "We shouldn't be so afraid of a pair of breasts."

Bech reportedly offered to donate the statue to the fort – but Helle Barth, chair of Dragør municipality's climate, urban and business committee, told Berlingske: "It's just hard to fit in. It takes up a lot of space."

Andy Goldsworthy has been making art for 50 years, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. He identifies the "magical" qualities of the natural world and fashions "delightful" works from the simplest of materials: rocks, leaves, mud, twigs. He is "imaginative, inventive, poetic, hard-working, big-hearted and brave", a creator of often monumental pieces responding to the natural landscapes that inspire him. I love him and so does the general public – yet for some reason, he has never been given full credit by the art establishment.

Goldsworthy's work is simply too "easy to love", too rural and too popular to be fashionable; and its apparent simplicity is misinterpreted as a lack of profundity. His doubters would do well to visit this superb career retrospective in Edinburgh, which confirms him as one of our finest landscape artists. Bringing together more than 200 works produced since the 1970s, including photographs, films, drawings and some of the major installations for which he is best known, the show is a corrective to the idea that Goldsworthy is merely a crowd-pleasing "softie".

Although Goldsworthy loves nature, he doesn't "sentimentalise" it, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Instead, his work plunges you into "the raw sadness and beauty" of the British countryside. The first thing we see here is a long sheepskin rug laid up the classical gallery's grand staircase; it's made from the scraps thrown away after shearing, stained blue or red with farmers' marks, all stitched together with thorns. At the top of the stairs, there's what appears to be a perforated screen, through which you can just glimpse the galleries beyond. It feels "mystical and calming" – until you realise that he has fashioned it from "rusty barbed wire" strung between two columns.

Similarly, he presents a "seductive" group of purple watercolours – made "with hare's blood and snow". Since much of his work has been created specifically for outdoor settings, many pieces are represented by photos and videos – of his "Grizedale Wall", for instance, an "elegantly curving stone line in a forest", or the giant snowball he brought from the Scottish Highlands to London's Smithfield meat market in June 2000.

Goldsworthy's critics also miss the political dimension in his art, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. He is an artist of "agricultural land and labour", addressing "contentious rural issues" including land ownership and access. He represents this with evocations of walls, fences, "cracks and fissures", all recurring motifs here. And sometimes he deals with loftier themes still: "Gravestones" (2025), for instance, is an "expanse of lumpy stones" displaced from cemeteries across Dumfries and Galloway, where the artist lives. It's a moving meditation on the "inevitability of death". Goldsworthy's art is both "beautiful and raw". This wonderful exhibition gives a misunderstood artist his due.

A National Galleries of Scotland exhibition in the Royal Scottish Academy building, Edinburgh. Until 2 November

"If it's true the flame that burns twice as bright burns half as long, Noah Davis is that flame," said Jordan Riefe in Art & Object. The Seattle native briefly studied art in New York City, arrived in Los Angeles at 21, and "400 artworks later," died of cancer at just 32. He had earned his first New York gallery show in his mid-20s, and with his wife, the sculptor Karon Davis, he also founded the Underground Museum, in an art-starved Black and Latino section of L.A. His first museum retrospective, which has already shown in London and will move to Philadelphia in January, gathers 60 of his works, many mixing quotidian moments in the lives of Black Americans with touches of magic. "So many of his paintings," said Hunter Drohojowska-Philp in Alta, "are made as though he's seeing everything as a miracle of the moment."

Given how young Davis was, "the show's three dozen paintings are understandably uneven," said Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times. "But when Davis was good, he was very good indeed." In an early painting, 40 Acres and a Unicorn, a young Black man sits astride the mythical creature, and it reads both as a rebuke of white America for its broken promises and as Davis' assertion that art will make his own dreams come true. Here and elsewhere, Davis subtly references past masterworks of Western art to put his images in conversation with that history. Nowhere are the resulting tensions more evident than in 1975 (8), the "knockout" eighth painting in a 2013 series based on photos Davis' mother took in the mid-1970s. This canvas depicts a young Black male swimmer diving into a public pool, and it nods to the many paintings from the past in which bathers evoke "a pastoral, prelapsarian paradise." But it also brings to mind not-so-distant conflicts in which white communities drained their public pools to avoiding having to share them with their Black neighbors.

"Are these paintings political?" asked Walker Mimms in The New York Times. As you move through the exhibition, the curators' wall placards are "drip-feeding the notion that this is, generally speaking, activist art." But Davis' paintings "do so much more than make strategic corrections of representation." He created "a sophisticated folk modernism" that suggests he's best understood as a formalist carrying on in the line of Edward Hopper—or even Mark Rothko, if you focus on "the quietness of Davis' colors." In any case, a "quivering luminescence" enlivens "the most beautiful of Davis' work," and seeing this show "leaves you with some heartache for the 50 years this star ought to have had left."

"Nothing is quite what it seems in the work of William Kentridge," said Hannah Silver in Wallpaper. The South African artist, born in Johannesburg in 1955, works across a bewildering range of media, "from drawing, to tapestry, theatre, films and opera", to forge a stylistically diverse but distinctive body of art. He is often said to be one of the most significant contemporary artists. Although focused on politics, colonialism and the unreliability of historical narrative, particularly in relation to his native country, Kentridge's art is never heavy-handed or sloganeering: instead, it approaches these weighty subjects in "unexpected, culturally curious ways".

His distinctive "fluidity" and playfulness are present and correct at this new exhibition, which foregrounds his less-well-known work as a sculptor. Bringing together more than 40 sculptures and films created between 2007 and the present, it takes place both indoors and outside, with "bold, sculptural works", some monumental in scale, spread out across the "lush acres" of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in a celebration of "form and scale".

For all his restless experimentation, Kentridge's style is "unmistakable", said Nancy Durrant in The Times. He has constructed "a unique visual lexicon": he often begins with a drawing, then tears the shapes from the paper and adapts them to his chosen medium. He uses "everyday objects such as hand tools" and turns them into sculpture, in the tradition of Picasso: one sculpture from 2021 was a mess of bronze coils until he realised it resembled a goat; so he added a goat's head, in open-ended homage to the Spanish master. Another work is "a mass of bronze scribbles" which, seen from one angle, resembles "a scrawny cat"; from another, a coffee pot. Still other pieces began life as "kinetic props" for his theatre productions: the "captivating" "Singer Trio" (2019) consists of three sewing machines attached to gramophone horns. They really do "sing at you when you approach".

Kentridge's sculptures, such as his ampersand, are "dark and stark, yet funny and warm", said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. But his films are even better – and there some superb ones on show here. There is an animated history of Soviet Russia, a grippingly "menacing farce". "More Sweetly Play the Dance" (2015) is an "elegy to the victims of Ebola", in which a procession marches through "a blasted landscape" to a soundtrack of jazz and African music, waving banners and sculptures made by Kentridge.

Best of all is "Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot" (2023), an autobiographical documentary in which two versions of the artist himself argue over the details of his life. "As they argue, they draw, and the drawings flow exquisitely" – "remembered landscapes, self- portraits, still lifes". Kentridge is about the only artist today who, like Picasso, can dizzy you "with the abundance of his creativity".

Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Yorkshire. Until 19 April 2026

"There's both power and peril in claiming an identity," said Julian Lucas in The New Yorker. That's one of the lessons of a "monumental" exhibition in Chicago that traces the emergence of modern ideas about sexuality and gender through art that was created between 1869 and 1939. The show's lead curator, art historian Jonathan D. Katz, titled the survey "The First Homosexuals" because its focus is on the decades after Karl Maria Kertbeny, an Austro-Hungarian journalist, coined the terms heterosexual and homosexual and inadvertently transformed same-sex desire into the defining trait of a new identity. As the show illustrates, "'homosexual' quickly became a pathological diagnosis" even as the word "opened a space for collective self-consciousness." The exhibit ends with the rise of Germany's Nazi Party and its attempt to exterminate this recently defined populace. But the more than 300 works that precede that grim conclusion prove art to be "the world's greatest archive of sexual difference, preserving subtle shifts that language evades."

The show "follows so many lines of inquiry that in places, inevitably, it feels thin or tendentious," said Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post. "But no single strand is less than fascinating," and the works themselves are "consistently dazzling." The curators describe an 1879 Pascal Dagnan Bouveret drawing as the first known image of a modern homosexual couple in European art. And 15 years later comes a double portrait of "breathtaking tenderness" in which the Swedish painter Andreas Andersen depicts his brother and a male friend apparently climbing out of bed one morning after sleeping together. But don't expect a simple progression in artists' interest in queer desire, because "the show's insistence on complexity is precisely what makes it brave, provocative, and unexpectedly poignant." Tellingly, no museum in the U.S. has shown an interest in mounting the exhibition after it closes in Chicago, despite the Wrightwood gallery's offer to pay the costs. I blame that on the current political backlash to recent gains in matters of sexual liberation, all of it motivated by "a pervasive psychological craving for simplicity."

Surprisingly, "some of the show's most fascinating moments are when it reveals queer people lacking a unified sense of political consciousness," said Micco Caporale in the Chicago Reader. In Romaine Brooks' 1923 Self-Portrait, done in the artist's "signature chilly gray scale," the New York City–raised artist looks aloof, and the text below "emphasizes that Brooks, a trust-fund lesbian who rooted her identity in some idea of eccentric genius, had fascist sympathies." Elsewhere, a series of "elegiac" photographs and paintings introduce viewers to Elisàr von Kupffer, a German spiritualist who "saw transness and homosexuality as an expression of God's infinite imagination—provided one is white and able-bodied." Besides creating "excitedly androgynous" work, he "wrote a lot of fan letters to Hitler." Humanist ideals, apparently, only ever go so far.

Over the past dozen years "Hilma af Klint has become a cultural force," said Jay Cheshes in Smithsonian. "Touted as an early feminist, a queer icon, a prophet, a witch—whatever your worldview wishes," the Swedish artist and spiritualist (1862–1944) is foremost known as the forgotten woman who invented modernist abstract painting before the men who were long credited with the innovation. An exhibition of her towering, brilliantly colored paintings toured Europe before their 2018 U.S. debut at New York City's Guggenheim, drawing record crowds at every stop. Af Klint had a skilled hand, said Natalie Haddad in Hyperallergic, and her "gossamer touch" elevates each of the 46 botanical drawings that are appearing in a follow-up exhibition at MoMA. But the artist's technique "can't fully account for the enthusiastic crowds examining the works with MoMA's magnifying glasses," supplied to help reveal every detail of af Klint's renderings.

Compared with the blockbuster 2018 show, "What Stands Behind the Flowers" is "a different affair," said Ariella Budick in the Financial Times. It's a show "full of quiet delights, puzzling codes, and a background hum of spiritual intensity that may resonate more with others than it does with me." Af Klint, shortly after World War I, announced that she was tired of being "lectured to" by the spirit guides that had allegedly directed her in the creation of the giant abstractions she's now celebrated for. As she approached 50, she turned to looking for insight into her own soul by seeking its reflection in nature, and from 1919 into 1920, she painted delicate portraits of flowers and other native plants while ascribing to each a particular spiritual state that's noted by the inclusion of a small pictogram or two. "These glyphs must mean something," but af Klint wasn't consistent in her use of this secret language. "Treat these drawings as a code to be cracked and you'll leave the galleries in frustration; savor the randomness and you come closer to the confounding expressiveness of a deeply original artist."

A notebook kept by af Klint translates the pictograms' meaning in "charmingly factual prose," said Walker Mimms in The New York Times. She credits a particular creeping vine with "spiritual initiative that uplifts the organs of our soul and body." She calls sedge a manifestation of gluttony and purple lousewort an avatar of self-interest. These, as well as a few earlier of the artist's works, "reveal her fixation on the possibility that a numinous reality underpins our visible one." This show closes with a wall of energy paintings from 1922, and "they are sloppy and fun, like cannonball dives into the placid surface of a lake." Oddly, "they are also less interesting."

There's something joyful about looking at a photo of a painting on an iPad and seeing the real-life location over a century-and-a-half later. The artwork in question is Monet's "Le Pont Neuf" (1872). Standing on the banks of the Seine on almost the exact spot where the Impressionist master would have painted it en plein air all those years ago, it's fascinating to see how little has changed. Apart from the horse and carriage, and clouds of steam floating up from the boats below, Paris' oldest bridge looks virtually the same.

I hopped on the Eurostar at St Pancras for the French capital to experience Le Meurice's latest private art trail, "Monet – Revolutionary Brushstrokes". The opulent hotel launched the walking tour to celebrate the radical art movement's founding father; last year marked the 150th anniversary of the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris.

Versailles-inspired luxury

Le Meurice has close ties to the Parisian art world. Since opening back in 1835, it has hosted an array of notable figures, including Salvador Dalí, who famously stayed for a month every year for over three decades, and Pablo Picasso, who held his wedding banquet in the hotel's lavish Salon Pompadour. There are playful nods to this rich history dotted throughout – from the beckoning hand on the ceiling above the reception desk (a detail from Baron François Gérard's portrait of Madame Regnaud de Saint Gene D'Ageny that is in the Louvre) to the winking eye of Dalí that you'll spot peering at you from a corner of the wood-panelled bar.

The walking tour includes an overnight stay at the hotel; we spent the night in a beautiful, spacious suite overlooking the Tuileries Garden with magnificent views across the Paris skyline. Expect serious luxury: esteemed French designer Philippe Starck is responsible for the elegant Versailles-inspired interiors. Rooms are decorated with rich fabrics and Louis XVI-style furnishings, while the generously sized bathrooms are clad entirely in Italian marble.

If you want to splash out on a gourmet meal, book a table at the two-Michelin-starred Alain Ducasse restaurant. Breakfast is also served here; you'll feel like royalty nibbling freshly baked pastries and sipping orange juice beneath the crystal chandeliers and gold-leaf ceiling. We dined at the more laid-back Restaurant Le Dalí, which is also overseen by Ducasse, with executive head chef Amaury Bouhours at the helm. Dishes here are carefully built around seasonal ingredients, celebrating local cuisine. The hearty French onion soup, topped with a thick crust of Gruyère, was packed with flavour, as was the roast chicken, drizzled with a rich jus and served with buttery girolle mushrooms.

A bespoke tour

After an excellent night's sleep in the plush, king-size bed, I met my guide Marta in Le Meurice's grand lobby. One of the best things about the experience was the charming art historian's passion for her work; she carefully tailored the two-hour tour to my interests, sharing countless fascinating anecdotes about Monet's rivalries and relationships as we strolled through the city.

We set out from the hotel across the immaculate Tuileries that Monet painted from the balcony of a nearby apartment in 1878. After making a quick stop at the Church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois for a crash course in French architecture, we ambled down to the Seine, pausing to marvel at more locations Monet had painted along the river (he was known to paint the same place over and over to capture it in various light and weather conditions).

As we crossed the Pont Neuf, Marta transported me back to 19th-century Paris, entertaining me with tales of Monet's first defiant exhibition and the conservative art world's horrified response to the new works, which they denounced for their unfinished and sketch-like quality.

After stopping off for more breathtaking views of Paris that form the backdrop to many of Monet's most iconic works, we made our way back to the Tuileries Garden for the last – and most exciting – stop of the tour at the Musée de l'Orangerie. The gallery has, since 1927, hosted a permanent collection of eight of the artist's colossal water lily murals, and also contains works by Picasso, Cézanne and Matisse among others.

"Monet is only an eye – but my God what an eye!" Cézanne said, implying his friend and fellow artist's work lacked emotional depth. But as I stood in front of the Impressionist master's giant curving water lily panels, the famous back-handed compliment felt unfair. Monet was indeed remarkably skilled at capturing the ripples on the pond's surface or the soft, hazy purples of twilight. He was also, however, able to evoke great emotion through his work. It's hard to remember when I last felt so moved by a piece of art. I'll remember that feeling – of awe, calm and a tinge of sadness – for many years to come.

Irenie Forshaw was a guest at Le Meurice, dorchestercollection.com; Eurostar trains depart to Paris from London St Pancras, eurostar.com

"Plenty of artists have dreamed they could somehow be van Gogh," said Mark Hudson in The Independent. Few, however, would have "the bottle" – or the resources – to mount an exhibition pitting their works against van Gogh's, essentially putting themselves on the same pedestal. Yet Anselm Kiefer (b.1945) has never been one for "false modesty", and that is precisely what the immensely successful German artist has done.

Now 80, Kiefer is best known for his "vast" sculptural installations and deadly serious meditations on the darker chapters of German history. He has idolised van Gogh since his teenage years, when he retraced his forebear's steps across southern France and sketched what he saw. Those sketches are on show in this exhibition, which pairs 11 of van Gogh's paintings and drawings with a selection by Kiefer.

The first painting you see is "The Crows (2019)", his huge reinterpretation of "Wheatfield with Crows" (1890), which is long believed to be van Gogh's last piece. Not content with painting the ripe corn stalks, Kiefer "grafts bundles of actual corn stalks onto the canvas", embedding them in splodges of black and gold paint. The show, overall, is by turns fascinating, "heroic" and "absurd".

The Royal Academy could hardly have come up with a weirder pairing, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Kiefer's "dark and doomy slabs of Teutonic angst" look preposterous alongside van Gogh's delicate, closely observed canvases, which themselves take up only a fraction of the wall space. The most glaring example of Kiefer's folly comes with his homage to "The Starry Night", itself absent from the show. Taking up an entire wall, his version of that "tiny", deathless painting is "a colossal sprawl" of wood, wire and straw, in which van Gogh's stars have been replaced by something resembling "the shattered remains of an African village hit by a tornado". Everything about it is wrong: an image that in van Gogh's "gentle hands" captured the magic of "a fabulous night sky" has somehow been transformed into "a grim, effortful slab of doom". If Kiefer thinks he shares "a special affinity" with van Gogh, he is much mistaken.

Kiefer and van Gogh are obviously very different artists, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. But the juxtaposition sheds new light on both, each inviting you to pay closer attention to the practice of the other. There are some fabulous pictures by both, too. Van Gogh's drawing of a country road by night gives us a picture of "wintry melancholy", his pen catching "skeletal leaves and bare ruined trees with fragile acuity".

Nearby, Kiefer gives us a landscape of a road stretching through "burned-out fields of charred stalks, blackened stems and scorched earth". Devastating as it is, it still echoes van Gogh's "amazing radiance". Spectacular and beautifully put together, this is "a remarkable double act".

Royal Academy, London W1 (020 7300 8090, royalacademy.org.uk). Until 26 October

The 454 photographs on exhibit in "Diane Arbus: Constellation" are presented "blissfully, almost scarily, free of guidance," said Max Norman in The New Yorker. Hung on tall lattices, her "uncanny" images of sideshow performers, celebrities, average New Yorkers, cross-dressers, and the developmentally disabled lack any chronological or thematic organization. This "disorienting" effect, replicated from the show's 2023 debut in France, proves "revelatory" as the images, unyoked from backstories, reward unfiltered contemplation. Arbus' best photographs "haven't lost a watt of their power," including Xmas tree in a living room in Levittown, L.I. 1962, a "tragedy starring a tinseled pine and a plastic-wrapped lampshade," made as Arbus shifted from artsy street photography to an "unvarnished aesthetic of everyday life." Formally, she employed the "crime-scene chiaroscuro of Weegee," but she also engendered electrifying intimacy through "prolonged, trusting encounters with her subjects." This culminated in her most "straightforwardly beautiful picture," an untitled shot from 1970-71 depicting "a radiant girl emerging from a swimming pool like Venus from the waves."

Arbus drew most of her subjects from her native New York City, making this largest-ever collection of her work "feel something like a homecoming," said Joanna Solotaroff in Vogue. Born in 1923 to a wealthy family, she took up photography after marrying her childhood sweetheart, Allan Arbus, also a photographer, and the two ran a commercial studio. In the late 1950s Diane, encouraged by her mentor Lisette Model, began taking the candid photos she became known for. One expects "ripples of unease" at an Arbus exhibit, so "I averted my gaze at the monkey cradled like a baby and the angry glares of certain men." Instead, I locked on to a "jolly, moneyed woman whose apparent pride in her appearance evoked both a wave of embarrassment and terrific affection." These are the "confrontations of beauty, tenderness, and strangeness" that New Yorkers experience every day.

Indeed, "every Arbus portrait is its own primordial encounter with otherness," said Will Heinrich in The New York Times. Even without the unusual layout, "confronting all these people at once would be overwhelming." At first, I had the impression that Arbus' "real subject may have been simply the color black." The background of her portrait of Bertolt Brecht's widow "has the inky grandeur of outer space" while James Brown backstage at the Apollo Theater, N.Y.C. makes the singer look "like a supernatural shadow come to life." Yet the 1970s image Masked woman in a wheelchair, Pa. spoke clearly to me. Holding a witch mask to her face, the elderly subject seems "to be revealing her real self rather than hiding it." As Arbus said months before her 1971 suicide: "A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know."

"I believe that Jenny Saville is a genius," said Cal Revely-Calder in The Daily Telegraph; and of the 45 works in this "stunning" retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, there are "at least a dozen" paintings that confirm my view.

Born in Cambridge in 1970, Saville studied at the Glasgow School of Art and caught the eye of collector Charles Saatchi at her graduation show; he "bought her entire collection on the spot". Since then, she has proved herself as one of our greatest figurative painters, renowned for her confrontational and densely textured depictions of nude figures, and for the virtuosic way in which she conjures the texture of flesh in her canvases.

Bringing together a selection of work that spans her entire career, this retrospective is a testament to her brilliance. It demonstrates how through colour, form and masterful manipulation of paint alone, Saville "brings her subjects to glowing, shifting life. This is portrait painting as electricity."

Saville is "the natural heir to the great British figurative tradition of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach", said Mark Hudson in The Independent. It's clear from her earliest works here that she had the technical skill "to become a highly successful conventional figurative painter". But during the 1990s, the era of the Young British Artists, such painting was unfashionable in the extreme. So she complicated her portrait painting by fragmenting and distorting her figures, and blowing them up to "massive scale".

It won her "immediate acclaim" – and you can see why. "Propped" (1992) sees the artist sitting on a sculptor's modelling stand, "as though her exuberantly plastic flesh is about to be manipulated into a work of art". We see her from a low angle, so that her hands and knees seem to "bulge" from the confines of the painting. The 9ft-tall self-portrait "Plan" (1993), meanwhile, gives us a "towering female torso" over which Saville has drawn contour lines, as if the artist herself were a landscape.

These early pictures are bona fide "masterpieces", said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. There are a good three dozen of them here, and they are the show's highlights. Thereafter, things get "problematic".

Saville's early 2000s paintings see her producing "billboard-sized" heads. Alas, that's what they look like: "billboards – adverts for a zombie movie". Her next stylistic change sees her painting naked men and women writhing in bed: she's emulating the Old Masters, of course, but the effect is off-puttingly pornographic. Latterly, her work has concentrated on "giant human heads", jumbled into "constituent eyes, noses and mouths".

She is a wonderful painter of all of these things, but still they don't quite work. It's thus impossible to escape the feeling that Saville has never really equalled the "splash" with which she arrived as a painter. But none of these reservations stop this "being a must-see event".

The Uffizi Galleries in Florence will set "precise limits" on visitors taking selfies after an 18th-century portrait was damaged by a tourist who fell into the painting after posing for a photo in front of it.

The director of Uffizi, Simone Verde, said the number of people visiting the gallery to "make memes or take selfies for social media" had become "rampant", and in response, the institution will introduce as-yet-unspecified restrictions to help protect its "cultural heritage".

The renewed debate over behaviour in galleries and museums follows several high-profile incidents, including a tourist who broke a crystal-studded chair by Italian artist Nicola Bolla at the Palazzo Maffei gallery earlier this year after losing his balance while posing over the piece for a photo.

'An inescapable part of 21st-century life'

The two recent incidents, both caught on camera, are part of a "long line of tourists behaving badly" during visits to "historic and beautiful destinations of Italy", said Olivia Allhusen in the Daily Mail. Many of those caught "defacing and desecrating ancient relics" or causing a "public nuisance" have "faced the wrath" of the country's authorities, who take a dim view of such misbehaviour.

Most breaches of etiquette can be blamed on the mere "stupidity" of ordinary visitors, but even if unintentional the consequences can be as "destructive as the wilful vandalism of protesters", said Richard Morrison in The Times. And "such crass behaviour is not confined to Italy", with museums around the world full of visitors far more intent on "taking selfies" than "looking at the masterpiece itself".

While many view this behaviour as a "lack of appreciation, ignorance or even a touch of narcissism", including several museums that have already "banned selfies altogether", people taking photos in front of famous works is an "inescapable part of 21st-century life," said Rebecca Carlsson at Museum Next. When practised responsibly, it can be a "fun and harmless way to engage with the exhibits", and for some visitors it can even "enrich the entire museum experience".

'Risk of alienating their core clientele'

Some galleries and museums have tried to "ingratiate themselves with the young" by making themselves "selfie-friendly", otherwise fearing a "crackdown would deter visitors", said Celia Walden in The Telegraph. But that approach runs "the risk of alienating their core clientele". A ban could instead encourage visitors to take in their "cultural heritage" as well as "respect it".

Alternatively, it could be considered "pure snobbery" to "assume anyone is failing to appreciate art" because they are taking a selfie, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Passing judgment on how others enjoy the works on display in galleries is "a dubious activity", especially when most people take photos "responsibly and politely: taking turns, not hogging".

The occasional "selfie disaster won't spoil the incredible Italian art legacy" and the selfie trend will eventually fade; the history of tourism is rife with "fads, absurdities and ignorance" that have never stopped it offering a "culturally uplifting experience".

'America's greatest export may be its culture'

Megan Beyer and Gregory Houston at the Chicago Tribune

One of "our most effective yet underused assets is American culture," say Megan Beyer and Gregory Houston. The arts are "powerful drivers of economic growth, job creation, urban revitalization and global influence." Investing in "arts and culture is good policy — plain and simple. It strengthens our tax base, supports small businesses, enhances public health and well-being, and reinforces America's leadership on the world stage." America's "creative edge remains one of its most valuable assets."

Read more

'ICE has no right to anonymity'

Jamelle Bouie at The New York Times

ICE officers "aren't anonymous commentators on a social network; they are representatives of the state, acting on its behalf and empowered to use force if necessary," says Jamelle Bouie. The "people have the right to know who is operating in their government." If an "ICE officer does not want to risk identification — if he does not want the public he serves to hold him accountable for his actions — then he can choose another line of work."

Read more

'Will the Democrats learn from Zohran Mamdani's victory?'

Bernie Sanders at The Guardian

The Democratic Party "can learn the lesson that the Zohran Mamdani campaign taught us on Tuesday," says Sen. Bernie Sanders. And "that is: Have the courage to address the real economic and moral issues that face the majority of our people, take on the greed and power of the oligarchy and fight for an agenda that can improve life for working families." You "don't get a Mamdani victory without the extraordinary grassroots movement that rallied around him."

Read more

'NATO's 5% spending pledge is a threat to people and the planet'

Nick Buxton at Al Jazeera

NATO "agreed this week to invest 5% of their countries' gross domestic product (GDP)" on defense, says Nick Buxton. This "certainly is historic in terms of military escalation, but will it deliver security?" It "reflects a huge escalation of military expenditure over the next decade from an already very high level." The "money will be diverted — most of all from social and environmental spending — even though 30% of Europeans report difficulty in making ends meet."

Read more

Forgive me for adding to the undue attention that Adrien Brody's current gallery show is receiving, said Alex Greenberger in ArtNews. Unfortunately, "I can't stop thinking about how bad this art is." The two-time Oscar winner is exhibiting nearly 30 paintings that are visually ugly and thematically "about as subtle as a sledgehammer." A Queens, N.Y., native, Brody has adopted a "faux naïve aesthetic" that evokes the hectic city of his 1980s youth. His collage-like canvases juxtapose images of cartoon characters and weapons, with graffiti-like streaks of paint partially obscuring newspaper clippings and other detritus of our visual culture. Nothing that he attempts "adds any nuance to his commentary on the American zest for carnage." And in several works, he makes "cringeworthy" allusions to '80s art star Jean-Michel Basquiat, nominating himself as a spiritual heir.

Last month, a Brody painting sold for $425,000 at a benefit auction in France and instantly "became a source of mockery online," said Rachel Sherman in The New York Times. The derivative, Andy Warhol–inspired image centers a blue-eye-shadowed Marilyn Monroe against a muddled background featuring the letters of the Hollywood sign. Critic Annie Armstrong had recently revived the phrase "red-chip art" to describe work that celebrates styles that were once considered tacky and that fetch blue-chip prices from a new breed of collectors. The Eden Gallery show prompted her to label Brody an avatar of the trend. "The only difference between Brody's efforts and any garden-variety red-chip artist is how often he peppers in his own visage," said Annie Armstrong in Artnet. "It's kind of an interesting move. Red-chip art relies on celebrity iconography, so it's intriguing to see a cutout of Brody himself plastered to a canvas with an outsize Basquiat crown painted over his head. He understands the canon."

In a twisted way, "Made in America might be one of the most significant shows of the past 10 years," said gallerist KJ Freeman in her Substack newsletter. "Not because it's groundbreaking," but because it makes clear that the market for fine art is not a mechanism for identifying and celebrating talent. The system was "never built to recognize anything outside the glow of celebrity, money, and myth." Usually, it's a celebrity buyer that lifts an artist's market value. Brody brings the celebrity buzz himself, and shouldn't be faulted for that. As the son of celebrated photographer Sylvia Plachy, he has probably dreamed of making memorable art for decades, and now he has won the market's blessing. "In a broken game, Adrien Brody is a great artist. Maybe that's what pisses everyone off the most."

John Singer Sargent was the pre-eminent society portraitist of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, said Andrew Pulver on Air Mail. Indeed, "sitting for – and paying for – a portrait by Sargent was a mark of social clout in itself". And the American expatriate painter (1856-1925) was well placed to become the chief artistic chronicler of a "phenomenon" that thrilled fin de siècle London: dozens of "wealthy American heiresses" arriving in Britain to marry into the aristocracy.

Collectively – and somewhat dismissively – known as the "dollar princesses", these women "were the reality-TV stars of their day", stalked by gossip columnists and satirised by novelists and songwriters. They were often regarded with snobbery by the British upper classes, and castigated for disloyalty back home. But Sargent, "never slow to spot an opening in the market", painted 30 of them. This show at Hampstead's Kenwood House (briefly home to the "dollar princess" Daisy Leiter, later the Countess of Suffolk) features 18 portraits – eight in oil, ten in charcoal. It is the first exhibition ever devoted to this side of Sargent's career, and gives a "revelatory" glimpse into the Belle Époque.

The social history is certainly "riveting", said Laura Cumming in The Observer. We read about the heiresses' fascinating life stories: there's Grace Hinds from Alabama, who married Lord Curzon and later became the lover of Oswald Mosley (who married one of her stepdaughters and slept with two others); and there's Nancy Astor, Britain's first female MP, depicted here in both youth and in old age. And everything is "beautifully displayed". What a shame, then, that the pictures themselves are often "as glib as Sargent could be when churning them out". His charcoal drawings "make every sitter look roughly the same: pert nose, expensive jewels and hairdo". The works feel "transactional", and sometimes plain bad: the hands in a likeness of Louisiana heiress Cora Smith, for example, "are so casually botched, you'd think she would have asked for her money back".

Yet "when Sargent was good, he was really good", said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. All the pictures here are skilful and "pleasing". And some "are genuine Sargent triumphs of old-style portraiture": his "eye-storming" likeness of Edith, Lady Playfair, originally from Boston, sees her "calm and confident", looking down on us from "divine painterly heights", and wearing "an apricot top in shiny satin that stings the eyes with its tangy orange intensity". For decades, Sargent was unfashionable: though his talent was obvious, he was seen as out of step with the modern art of his time, lightweight, decadent – a "flashy, quick-wristed, heiress-hunting society lapdog". Now opinion has shifted; he is recognised as "the van Dyck of the Edwardian era, an old master among the modernists". This "elegant event" represents another step on that "reputational journey".

Kenwood House, London NW3. Until 5 October; englishheritage.com

"John Singer Sargent loved people, and it shows," said Lisa Yin Zhang in Hyperallergic. Born to American parents who'd become cosmopolitan wanderers, the painter was only 18 when he moved from Florence to Paris in 1874, and an inspiring exhibition now at the Met captures how and why the young man took the city by storm. Across the next decade, Sargent befriended socialites, celebrities, and fellow artists such as Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Auguste Rodin, and though some of his early student work is stiff, his potential was obvious, and soon burst through. Portrait of Frances Sherborne Ridley Watts, the 1877 painting with which he made his debut at the Paris salon, catches a family friend "shifting in her seat, the buttons of her dress snaking sinuously around her body." The image turned out to be a harbinger of many great Sargent portraits to come, his subjects "almost always depicted asymmetrically, and captured mid-movement, as if to underscore that they surpass the boundaries of the frame."

"The flow from his easel in the following years was masterly," said Judith H. Dobrzynski in The Wall Street Journal. Among the brilliant portraits we encounter is the Met's own Dr. Pozzi at Home, a "spectacularly sensuous" 1881 painting that depicts a handsome gynecologist known as "Dr. Love" wearing embroidered slippers and a scarlet red dressing gown. "It recalls the papal and princely portraits that Sargent would have admired in Italy, but has greater vigor and more than a scintilla of eroticism." A year later, Sargent paid tribute to Diego Velázquez's Las Meninas with The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, scattering his four young subjects around a large room, none fully connected with another, creating "an ambiguous portrayal of family relationships."

All other galleries in this show lead to the masterpiece Madame X, a full-length 1884 portrait that "still startles," said Brian T. Allen in National Review. But don't rush to the end without taking in the many wonderful paintings in between and the way they upended the hierarchy of art genres in 1880s France. Because Sargent is so famed as a portraitist, "it must surprise visitors to see that his earliest Salon submissions were scenes of everyday life from his travels." And when he painted portraits, he chose everyday contemporary settings that make the images more immediate, blurring the lines between genres. The curators suggest that during his travels Sargent sought to capture anthropological types. But look closely. His Setting Out to Fish, from 1878, isn't a study of Breton oysterers. It's "about a sparkling sky, shadows, and light reflecting from puddles of water in the sand." Likewise, Among the Olive Trees, Capri, from the same year, isn't about the young peasant woman at its heart. It's "about a vaporous, romantic ambiance."

"Artists owe their inspirations to more than just their great, individual genius," said David McAllister in Prospect. They depend heavily on "those who get it" – "friends, family or romantic partners", who more likely than not "will often also be artists". Unsurprisingly, these collaborators frequently end up painting each other. This new exhibition at Pallant House in Chichester takes this "simple conceit" and runs with it, bringing together more than 150 portraits of British artists as depicted by other British artists across 125 years – from Augustus John and Francis Bacon to Tracey Emin and the YBAs. Featuring works by household names and lesser-known figures, it contains "wonderful" and "surprising" moments aplenty, resulting in a show that gives "a fascinating glimpse of what feels like the whole living world behind British art" across the past century.

"Seeing Each Other" "darts and dives between artistic movements and the booze-fuelled social coteries and amorous liaisons that sustained them", said Mark Hudson in The Independent. We see Barbara Hepworth, for example, depicting her first husband John Skeaping in a "muscular chalk and charcoal drawing", only to be portrayed herself first in a "delightful" painting by Cedric Morris, then by her second husband Ben Nicholson in a semi-abstract linocut of 1933. There's some great stuff here, said Evgenia Siokos in The Daily Telegraph. One intimate moment comes with Celia Paul's portrait of Lucian Freud sleeping, itself juxtaposed with Freud's own likeness of Paul. Yet the sheer number of works by middling mid-century artists soon makes the show feel incoherent: it's difficult to digest the connections between the artists and their sitters. Indeed, "the cacophonous hodgepodge of works on the walls" made me feel "as though I had been abandoned at a party full of strangers, only I didn't have a drink, and everyone at the party was inanimate".

Well, I thought it was a "riveting" exhibition, said Laura Cumming in The Observer – "beautifully choreographed", with many fascinating instances of painterly reciprocity. We see Roger Fry's portrait of the painter Nina Hamnett, then a likeness she painted of Walter Sickert, and then Sickert's own painting of her. We get a real sense of how artists were "connected through each other's eyes and works" – in Eric Ravilious's "startling" but rather comic depiction of his friend Edward Bawden working, and in Freud's "breathtakingly acute" portrait of doomed fellow painter John Minton, his eyes downcast and "mouth half-open". Johnnie Shand Kydd's photographs of the YBAs show them "drinking, dancing, snogging" and "laughing their heads off", while Ishbel Myerscough's double portrait of herself and Chantal Joffe painting each other's faces provides a wonderful denouement. This is "an enthralling show, vivid with life stories as well as their expression in art".

Pallant House, Chichester, West Sussex (01243 774557, pallant.org.uk). Until 2 November

School is just about out for summer, but that doesn't mean learning has to end. Expand your mind at one of these six new museum exhibitions, including a look at 1940s design and an unprecedented display of Johannes Vermeer paintings.

'Against Time: The Noguchi Museum 40th Anniversary Reinstallation,' and 'Temitayo Ogunbiyi: You will wonder if we would have been friends,' Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York City

Japanese-American designer and artist Isamu Noguchi "found acclaim in everything he did — from sculpture to furniture," Elle Decor said. In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in Queens, the second floor installation curated by Noguchi before his death in 1988 is back on display for the first time since 2009. At the same time, the museum is hosting the first U.S. solo exhibition by Nigerian artist Temitayo Ogunbiyi, whose sculptures, paintings and drawings primarily center on the role of play in society. In addition to varied pieces from her career being on display, Ogunbiyi is also creating site-specific interactive installations. ("Against Time" runs through Jan. 11, 2026; "Temitayo Ogunbiyi" runs June 18–Nov. 2, 2025)

'Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s,' Philadelphia Museum of Art

"Boom: Art and Design in the 1940s" tells a "lot of stories" about a "decade that started austere and ended at the Golden Age of Capitalism in the 1950s," WHYY said. On display are 250 photographs, drawings, textiles, sculptures and other artifacts from the museum's permanent collection that examine a "lesser-acknowledged decade for creative innovation." The dresses section is a "showstopper" and includes three by Elsa Schiaparelli. It is fascinating to see World War II-era swimsuits made of maps and a shift to more "opulent" post-war designs, when fabric was no longer rationed. (Through Sept. 1)

'Gustave Caillebotte: Painting His World,' The Art Institute of Chicago

This special exhibition promises to provide a "fresh look" at some of the French Impressionist artist's "most iconic works," the Chicago Tribune said. Gustave Caillebotte focused his brush on the familiar, painting his family, friends and sports enthusiasts he met while rowing and sailing. The centerpiece of "Painting His World" is Caillebotte's 1877 painting "Paris Street; Rainy Day," a "favorite for Art Institute visitors." (June 29-Oct. 5)

'Photography's New Vision: Experiments in Seeing,' High Museum of Art, Atlanta

The New Vision photography movement emerged in the 1920s, a "departure from traditional photographic methods" that instead favored "extreme angles and unusual viewpoints," the High Museum of Art said. "Photography's New Vision: Experiments in Seeing" takes more than 100 photographs, photograms, photomontages and light studies from the museum's collection and displays them in a way that traces the movement from its European beginnings to world renown. Hungarian photographer and Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy, who gave the New Vision movement its name, is among the featured artists. (June 13-Jan. 4, 2026)

'Vermeer's Love Letters,' The Frick, New York City

After a five-year closure for renovations, The Frick is back open and ready to once again wow visitors. The "deft and elegant" Beaux Arts mansion now boasts larger exhibition spaces and a fresh auditorium "worthy of a museum so beloved by many," Vogue said. "Vermeer's Love Letters" is the first exhibition to open in the new special exhibition galleries and features three works by Johannes Vermeer: "Mistress and Maid," "The Love Letter" and "Woman Writing a Letter, with Her Maid." These pieces, which have never been displayed together before, are a mix of permanent collection items and loans from the Rijksmuseum and National Gallery of Ireland. (June 18 through Aug. 31)

A year ago, Jeffrey Gibson made a splash in Venice, said James Tarmy in Bloomberg. The city's Art Biennale is "not known for its crowds," because the event's many exhibitions are so spread out. But Gibson had been chosen to represent the U.S. in a solo show, making him the first Native American artist so honored, and the 52-year-old Colorado native transformed the U.S. pavilion into a major attraction, covering the "staid façade" with bright red panels and "vivid" geometric designs. Inside the pavilion, the show was "joyous, loud, and, unsurprisingly, a crowd-pleaser," and it has now been moved, nearly intact, to L.A. "Angelenos should consider themselves lucky that such a remarkable display has set up stateside," said Time Out. Gibson, who is gay, often incorporates into his work phrases from the past and present that speak to oppression. But this show is "ultimately a celebration of resilience and empowerment that pays tribute to histories of resistance and looks optimistically forward."

"Gibson is certainly an artist of joy," said Brian T. Allen in National Review. "His format is big, his colors bright and zesty, and his forms geometric and packed." His paintings and wall hangings generally feature hard-edged patterns that have been derived from Indigenous art and blown up to wall size and rendered in neon colors. In his sculptural work, he uses colored beads, "and lots of them," to adorn towering figures, human-scale busts, and one totem-like punching bag. The New York Times has called the work in this show "politically obvious and visually juvenile." The Financial Times dismissed it as "lackluster and one-dimensional." Certainly, it'd be stronger without the distraction of the incorporated word phrases, such as "If there is no struggle, there is no progress" (from an 1857 Frederick Douglass speech) or "We hold these truths to be self-evident" (from the Declaration of Independence). His bead sculptures have "a pagan intensity" that transcends language. Even those, however, come across as deft decorative works "without much depth."

Experiencing the work in person, however, "stimulates the senses and inspires the mind," said David Pagel in the Los Angeles Times. "His exuberant, color-saturated installation serves up an abundance of beauty, awe, astonishment, and fun." Visitors can't help but discover something that delights them, whether it's an array of "lavishly patterned" flags, an evocative phrase from a Roberta Flack song, a giant bird "festooned with thousands of glistening beads," or a trio of 40-foot-long murals that create an almost intergalactic backdrop for milling fellow viewers. No one with an open heart could enter this exhibition and not feel embraced and accepted. "Gibson's art is all about making a place in the world where fear—the feeling of being overwhelmed by the speed and volume of modern life, the seemingly intractable political divide, the malignant racism that plagues the nation—has no toehold, much less a leg to stand on."

About 2,000 years ago, art on the Indian subcontinent underwent "a stunning transformation", said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian.

Where it had previously been "enigmatically abstract", it started to become "incredibly accomplished at portraying the human body – and soul". This extraordinary cultural development, pioneered by Buddhist artisans, is the subject of this exhibition at the British Museum, which examines the region's devotional art reaching back more than 2,000 years, and tells "a passionate story about the three great religions of ancient India – Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism – and their vitality across time".

Featuring around 180 objects (sculptures, paintings, manuscripts and drawings), it is filled with treasures, from a miraculous statue of the elephant-headed Hindu deity Ganesha to a silk painting of the Buddha "set in a dreamworld of deep reds and greens". All three faiths are, of course, still practised by millions worldwide today: videos of contemporary worshippers help to "blast the museum dust off" this ancient art, and give a "sense of its living power". "Ethereal and sensual", this is a fabulous event.

Given its vast geographical scope, the show feels remarkably "compact", said Nancy Durrant in The Times. Separated into four sections and "accompanied by a soundtrack of temple bells and birdsong", it shows how imagery initially developed in the worship of "nature spirits" worked its way first into Jainism, then Buddhism – both of which appeared in India about 2,500 years ago – and finally into Hinduism.

The objects themselves are "gorgeous": we see much "lively, expressive, dynamic sculpture", from "rudimentary" yakshas and yakshis (small terracotta statuettes of male and female spirits), to a "skilful, intricate" depiction of a Jain goddess of knowledge "wielding a pen and a palm-leaf manuscript".

The "rich devotional art" of any of these three religions could easily merit its own show, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. It's a shame, then, that they have been bundled into a single package here, in a way that is often confusing. The contextual notes fail to address "simple, nuts-and-bolts questions". We don't learn why the Buddha was frequently depicted with "elongated ears" or, in the early days, using symbols such as footprints; nor why female deities were sometimes represented "semi-nude" even when wielding objects associated with knowledge.

Elsewhere, important subjects – such as the art of Gandhara in present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan, where a "fascinating fusion" of Greco-Roman and south Asian influences took hold – are "short-changed". Unfortunately, though the subject matter is fascinating, "this isn't, by any stretch, a vintage show". I left feeling "frustrated, disappointed, even cross".

A "quietly joyous" sight currently greets visitors to the Guggenheim when they look up into Frank Lloyd Wright's famous spiraling rotunda, said Holland Cotter in The New York Times. Illinois-born artist Rashid Johnson has hung living plants from the circular skylight far above, putting the architecture in dialogue with a plant-strewn installation he placed at the top of the spiraling ramp to crown his current mid-career retrospective. But the walk up to that level "brings many changes of mood," because Johnson, 48, works in many media and modes, and "creating an art that offers multiple-choice responses is pretty clearly what he's after." Identified as part of a "post-Black" generation of artists who play with signifiers of Black identity, Johnson first became known for photographs like the pair of large heroic portraits of homeless Black men on display here. From there, he's navigated "a slip-slide between serious and comical" that adds to his work's richness.

"When he hits the mark, you feel the presence of an artist granting himself full scope to ask deep questions," said Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post. "His best works are richly imagined" and incorporate "viscerally engaging" materials. He's "at his best when using crumbly shea butter and glossy black soap on mounted wall pieces" because those common grooming products "speak to self-care as a response to anxiety and even brokenness." But "something about this survey put me in a bad mood," because Johnson seems to be using the freedom he's been granted by the art world to dabble in media, such as painting, that he's not very good at. "Mired in academic thinking," his weakest work is both "too esoteric and too casual." Consider Homage to Chinua Achebe IV (Fela Kuti' Zombie'), a 2004 assemblage that consists of two wooden sleds, one broken in half, and ostensibly references artists Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys, novelist Chinua Achebe, musician Fela Kuti, and Kuti's murdered activist mother. "Can these two sleds carry all that meaning? The answer is no."

Granted, "several of Johnson's works feel like they require a doctorate," said Brian P. Kelly in The Wall Street Journal. Still, "there is much to laud in his wide-ranging practice." And "some of the strongest work here grapples with emotion." A monumental Johnson wall work that greets museum visitors, Untitled Anxious Audience (2019), "features 67 grimacing faces created by pouring black soap and wax on tiles and then carving away the features." The visages evoke both the quiet suffering of people around us and the masks we wear to hide our pain. On the museum's top floor, we eventually encounter a towering installation that suggests a room of shelves packed with plants, books, and ceramics. "It's an apt metaphor for a creative mind overflowing with ideas."