Arts news

• Laura Cumming’s best art of 2021

  26-12-2021 12:00
  
  The blockbuster battled on, British Caribbean art came home, and from Iran to Nero’s Rome, art transported us far and wideMark Kermode’s best films of 2021Read the Observer critics’ review of 2021 in full hereThis was the year of the great exhibition – in spite of the plague. Galleries offered online shows when they couldn’t open and riches when they could, no matter the havoc of cancelled loans, insurance hikes and unreliable transport. Schedules were dextrously sh
  
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• Gallery aims to reclaim narrative with its racist ‘casta’ paintings

  26-12-2021 08:30
  
  Curator of new show tackles racial stereotyping using depictions of scenes of colonial life in the Caribbean and South AmericaExploring Leicester Museum & Art Gallery 12 years ago, trainee curator Tara Munroe came across a stack of discarded oil paintings. The troubling scenes they portrayed would go on to change the direction of her career and may soon alter wider attitudes to art history.The paintings depicted wealthy colonial life in South America and the Caribbean, and had been marked fo
  
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