Life’s Hidden Dramas in the Art of Walter Sickert 

Oct 7, 2025

Walter Sickert, “Ennui” (c. 1913–14, inscribed lower left “To Asselin/Sickert/1916”), oil on canvas (all images courtesy Piano Nobile, London) LONDON — As W.H. Auden reminds us, at the end of his great 1938 poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” of...

London’s National Gallery to Open New Wing

Sep 26, 2025

London’s National Gallery, home of Western masterpieces from the 13th to early 20th centuries, will build a new wing to accommodate an “expanded collection” with an infusion of £375 million (~$500 million) in private donations. The project marks the most...

A Neo-Impressionism Show for the One Percent

Sep 19, 2025

LONDON — What does socialism look like when earnestly perpetuated by extraordinarily wealthy benefactors sorely lacking in self-awareness? One answer might be found in Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists at the National Gallery. This can...

Haunting Shadow of Scrubbed Banksy Mural Goes Viral

Sep 12, 2025

It took courthouse administrators less than two days to remove Banksy’s latest stencil mural of a judge attacking a protester, which appeared in central London early this week. But what remains of the artwork is a shadowy stain, eerily reminiscent of a hooded...

A No Kings Movement for 19th-Century Art 

Sep 10, 2025

LONDON — How best to paint the scorned, the marginalized, the lost to view?  This was the challenge that faced the French artist Jean-François Millet in the middle years of the 19th century. His subject was the peasantry who worked on the land, owners of small...

Emily Kam Kngwarray’s Language of Country 

Sep 9, 2025

LONDON — An exquisite rhythm rolls across the sheer mass of Emily Kam Kngwarray’s paintings, produced in prolific bursts of creativity between 1980 and 1996, the last decade and a half of her life. As she worked at the forefront of a movement that sought to translate...

An Insider Artist’s Outsider Alter-Ego

Sep 3, 2025

Grayson Perry, “I Know Who I Am” (2024), cotton fabric and embroidery appliqué (© Grayson Perry; courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, all other images Anna Souter/Hyperallergic) LONDON — The Wallace Collection is famous for its trove of Rococo art, such...

The Shocking Allure of Erotic Abstraction

Sep 1, 2025

LONDON — Some of the Courtauld’s previous exhibitions have suffered from insufficient curation. Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Alice Adams, Eva Hesse, on the other hand, strikes the exact right balance. Drawing on scholar Jo Applin’s research, curator...

Edward Burra’s Satirical Surrealism

Aug 29, 2025

LONDON — Edwards Burra was a chronically ill English painter, suffering from debilitating arthritis and asthma throughout much of his life. Hailing from the upper classes of southern England, with regularized, side-parted, tamped-down hair, he spent much of his life...