mon 04/08/2025

Visual arts

Giovanni Battista Moroni, Royal Academy

Written in the 16th century, Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists continues to underpin our understanding of the Renaissance, and its author is blamed, often with some justification, for a multitude of art historical anomalies. But there can be...

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Imagine... The Art That Hitler Hated, BBC One

Alan Yentob’s culture programme, Imagine, returned for its autumn season with a two-part examination of one of the most potently disturbing episodes in the history of art, let alone culture. Even before the programme’s title, masterpieces by such as...

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Anarchy and Beauty: William Morris and His Legacy, National Portrait Gallery

Can you sense a person's life through a sequence of objects? Not to mention influence and legacy? Biographical exhibitions are fascinating, not least because they also tell us something about looking back through the filter of the present. And...

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Gerhard Richter, Marian Goodman Gallery

Another October and another Frieze week just passed. This means the biggest of big hitters have been turning up in London. The economic quantifiers aren’t precise, but there have been plenty of estimates. Hordes of well-heeled visitors mean big...

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Russian Avant-Garde Theatre, Victoria & Albert Museum

Installed in the main exhibition space, this could have been a blockbuster show introducing a large audience to an important moment in Russian Theatre; but tucked away in the Department of Theatre and Performance, where spaces are narrow and...

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Grayson Perry: Who Are You?, Channel 4

The night before he was locked up, Chris Huhne had that Grayson Perry round for tuna steaks. Who knew? Perry was embarking on a series of portraits about identity at a crossroads, and can there be a more public crisis of identity than a Cabinet...

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Pierre Huyghe/ Paul McCarthy, Hauser & Wirth

In a tavern somewhere in Tokyo, two Japanese macaque monkeys work a daily, two-hour shift (under Japanese law, these hours are regulated). Dressed in miniature uniforms, the monkeys’ main task is to deliver hot towels to amused customers before...

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Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World, Globe Theatre

On Saturday at Shakespeare’s Globe, the Alternative Miss World was staged for the 13th time. Having launched this gloriously tacky event in his Hackney studio in 1972, artist Andrew Logan promises to carry on the tradition until the day he dies; but...

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Witches and Wicked Bodies, British Museum

Wicked women have always sold well, but more than that, they have fired the artistic imagination in a quite exceptional way. Exploring the depiction of the witch from the 15th to the 19th century, this exhibition is packed with images that must...

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The spooky and the bold in the art of contemporary China

In China there are more than 100 million fans of Manchester United. At least that’s what I’m told when I get to the the city's National Football Museum. And in a sartorial decision unusual in the art world, we are greeted by artist Chen Wenbo...

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Schama on Rembrandt: Masterpieces of the Late Years, BBC Two

The chatty, loquacious, exuberant Simon Schama, whose seminal 1987 book on Holland in the 17th century, The Embarrassment of Riches, transformed the anglophone’s understanding of the Dutch Republic, describes himself as historian, writer, art critic...

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Richard Serra, Gagosian Gallery

The septuagenarian American sculptor Richard Serra can treat the most massive sheets of steel as though they are handy pieces of paper for his version of origami; or he can decide to stack huge dense metal blocks as though they were children’s play...

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