The Week in Art

After descending on London last week, the art world arrived in Paris this week, with the main attraction being the Art Basel Paris art fair—now staged in the renovated Belle Epoque masterpiece, the Grand Palais. An editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper, Jane Morris, was at the VIP opening and tells us more. As always, alongside the fair are a number of eye-catching museum shows and projects. Among...

The Frieze London art fair has a new look for 2024 as it looks to keep its freshness amid increased competition with the new kid on the art fair block, next week’s Art Basel Paris. So how effective is the re-design? Ben Luke talks to Kabir Jhala, the art market editor at The Art Newspaper, about this year’s fair and about the auctions which have also taken place in London this week. The duo The Wh...

This week: a huge survey of the work of the late linchpin of the Los Angeles contemporary scene Mike Kelley has arrived at Tate Modern in London. We speak to its co-curator Catherine Wood about this enormously influential artist and his visceral and absurd response to popular culture and folk traditions of the US. A major show of Indian art made between 1975 and 1998, a pivotal period of political...

This week, three major international shows: Claude Monet’s Thames views in London, the Henri Matisse retrospective in Basel and Helen Frankenthaler in Florence. An exhibition that Claude Monet hoped to see in his lifetime but which never happened has at last become a reality. A gathering of Monet’s views of the Thames—looking from his hotel room at the Savoy and from across the river on a private...

This week: the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, UK, has invited the US artist Glenn Ligon to explore its history and collections, and his interventions are revealed this week. Ben Luke goes to Cambridge to talk to Ligon about the project. Few artists’ lives prompt as much discussion as that of Paul Gauguin, and a new biography of the French artist by Sue Prideaux has just been published. We talk t...

This week: the Van Gogh blockbuster in London, a new book on the birth of Impressionism, and Juan Pablo Echeverri’s performative self-portraits. As the exhibition  Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers  opens at the National Gallery in London as part of its bicentenary celebrations, The Art Newspaper’s special correspondent and resident expert in the Dutch painter, Martin Bailey, takes a tour of th...

The Week in Art is back. In this first episode of the season: on Tuesday it was reported in the Financial Times that Sotheby’s core earnings are down 88% in the first half of this year. This is the latest evidence to suggest that the art market may be in a far more serious economic rut than its major players have previously indicated, after disappointing sales and job cuts at the major auction hou...

On Thursday 4 July, the UK will hold a general election, with the Labour party currently far ahead in the opinion polls. Dale Berning Sawa, a contributor to The Art Newspaper who is also commissioning editor at the online news site The Conversation, joins Ben Luke to reflect on the effects on culture of 14 years of Conservative or Conservative-led governments, and what they and the other parties a...

This week: Just Stop Oil’s Stonehenge protest. On Wednesday, two activists sprayed orange powder paint made from cornflour on to three of the boulders at Stonehenge, prompting outrage and some support. Before this latest action, in an article for the July/August print edition of The Art Newspaper, John Paul Stonard had argued that Just Stop Oil’s museum-based protests add up to “one of the most su...

This week: it’s arguably the best loved of the major art fairs among collectors and dealers, but what have we learned about the art market at this year’s Art Basel, in its original Swiss home? The Art Newspaper’s acting art market editor, Tim Schneider, tells us about the big sales in Switzerland amid the wider market picture. The journalist Lynn Barber has a new book out, called A Little Art Educ...

This week: we explore the Art Institute of Chicago’s exhibition dedicated to what Georgia O’Keeffe called her New Yorks—paintings of skyscrapers and views from one of them across the East River, which marked a turning point in her career. Sarah Kelly Oehler, one of the curators of the show, tells us more. One of the most distinctive of all London’s contemporary art spaces, Studio Voltaire, is cele...

The publication in April of Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Index Annual Report has provided the art world with much food for thought. We look at the implications for artists and institutions with Louis Jebb, the managing editor of The Art Newspaper and our technology specialist. As the Centre Pompidou in Paris is taken over on all its floors by what it calls the “ninth art”—graphic...

As the Louvre’s director admits that the Paris museum wants to move its most famous painting away from the crowded gallery in which it is currently displayed, we ask the Leonardo specialist Martin Kemp: does the museum have a Mona Lisa problem? We also talk about the painting’s continuing allure and the ongoing efforts to explain its mysteries. In London, remarkably, Judy Chicago has just opened h...

We take a tour of Tate Britain’s new exhibition, Now You See Us, featuring more than 100 women artists who worked between the 16th and 20th centuries, with Tabitha Barber, its curator. The Dia Art Foundation has reached its half century and its director, Jessica Morgan, tells us how it has changed in that time, and especially how it has radically expanded the range of artists it shows and collects...

We talk to The Art Newspaper’s reporter Sarvy Geranpayeh about her conversations with six Palestinian artists about their daily lives amid Israel’s ongoing military offensive in Gaza. Frank Stella, one of the key artists in the history of American abstraction, has died, aged 87. We speak to Bonnie Clearwater, the director and chief curator of the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who wor...

After years of decreasing public funding, the lingering effects of the Covid pandemic and enduring questions around the ethics of corporate sponsorship, UK museums are facing unprecedented financial pressures. Some commentators are suggesting that the time has come to abandon the policy of free admission to museums that is viewed by many as key to the cultural fabric of the UK. Among those arguing...

The last painting made by Gustav Klimt, left on his easel when he died in 1918 of illnesses relating to the Spanish flu epidemic of that year, has sold at auction in Vienna for €35m including fees. But much remains unclear about the picture, including its sitter, its commissioner and what happened to it in the Second World War. Ben Luke talks to Catherine Hickley, The Art Newspaper’s museums edito...

We are back in Venice for the latest edition of the biggest biennial in the world of art. The 60th Venice Biennale comprises an international exhibition featuring more than 300 artists, dozens of national pavilions in the Giardini—the gardens at the eastern end of the city—and the Arsenale—the historic shipyards of the Venetian Republic—and host of official collateral exhibitions and other shows a...

This week: after 80 years in business, Marlborough Gallery, one of the most historic commercial galleries in London, New York and beyond, has announced that it is closing. Host Ben Luke talks to Anny Shaw, a contributing editor at The Art Newspaper, about what happened and what, if anything, it tells us about the market. The New Mexico-based sculptor Rose B. Simpson revealed newly commissioned pub...

The convicted art fraudster Inigo Philbrick is out of prison and possibly seeking a return to art dealing. How is that possible? Tim Schneider, The Art Newspaper’s acting art market editor, tells us about Philbrick’s story, why the art trade is a natural habitat for fraud, and why a criminal past need not lead to art-world banishment. In the wake of the first Art Basel Hong Kong art fair to take p...

Richard Serra, one of the greatest artists of the past 50 years, a linchpin of the post-minimalist scene in late 1960s and early 1970s New York and later the creator of vast steel ellipses and spirals, died on Tuesday 26 March. We mark the passing of this titan of sculpture with Donna De Salvo, the senior adjunct curator of special projects at the Dia Foundation, whose Dia Beacon space has several...

This week: the Whitney Biennial reviewed. Host Ben Luke discusses the show with Ben Sutton, The Art Newspaper’s editor, Americas, and the critic Annabel Keenan. Our annual survey of visitor numbers at museums is published in the next print edition of The Art Newspaper and Lee Cheshire, the co-editor of the report, joins us to discuss the findings. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Pieter Brue...

Four years after Tate Britain closed its restaurant because Rex Whistler’s murals on its walls contained racist imagery, it has unveiled the work it commissioned in response to Whistler’s painting by the artist Keith Piper. We talk to Piper about the work. The annual Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report was published on Wednesday and, as ever, reviews the status of the international art market. W...

To coincide with International Women’s Day on 8 March, the South London Gallery is opening the exhibition Acts of Resistance: Photography, Feminisms and the Art of Protest. Activism and photography have long gone hand in hand but this collaborative exhibition, organised with the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), attempts to capture a new chapter in this distinguished history, with a particular...

As Frieze Los Angeles opens its fifth iteration, The Art Newspaper’s associate digital editor, Alexander Morrison, talks to our correspondent in LA, Jori Finkel about the changing landscape of the city’s art scene. In London, the Royal Academy has finally opened an exhibition dedicated to the 18th-century painter Angelica Kauffman, a show that was threatened with cancellation as Covid ravaged the...