Arts news

• Goya to Impressionism review – three salmon steaks blow the soppy jugs and flowers away

  12-02-2025 18:51
  
  Courtauld Gallery, London
  Is there an ulterior motive to this drearily grand exhibition of paintings borrowed from a Swiss collection? Could it be to show how vastly superior the Courtauld’s own works are?The bland title of this show reads a bit like a confession, in terms of how little it has to say. Goya to Impressionism – so? Why do we need to see the troubled Spanish painter of war and witchcraft juxtaposed with soft scenes by Renoir and Sisley? No reason, except they all belong
  
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• American Photography: unforgettable images of the beauty and brutality of a nation

  12-02-2025 14:19
  
  Astounding shots of a wounded civil war major and a flogged Black man sit amid amateur snaps and propaganda in Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum – showcasing the nation’s unrivalled mastery of the cameraAs the land of the free and the home of the brave reverberates to cries of Make America Great Again, what is often overlooked is the complicated notion of the word “again”. As highlighted in American Photography, an expansive, sometimes beautiful but often shocking survey at t
  
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• Stewart Dakers obituary

  12-02-2025 09:51
  
  My friend Stewart Dakers, who has died of cancer aged 86, was best known to Guardian readers as the writer of its Grey Matters column, which ran from 1999 to 2020. Stewart mined his experience of community work with senior citizens to record their reflections on today’s world and shared his belief that older people should continue to engage with politics.As an active volunteer, Stewart made a real difference in his home town of Farnham, in Surrey. It was more than 40 years ago that he foun
  
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• Henri Michaux review – the delirious artist who took mescaline so you don’t have to

  12-02-2025 01:01
  
  Courtauld Gallery, London
  He lived an avant-garde life in Paris, recording his intense drug-induced visions on paper. Our critic sees a spine, a hand, an owl, a sea monster – or does he?Psychedelic art has an image problem. Picture it and you may see tie-dyed fabrics, muzzy portraits of Jimi Hendrix, endless vistas of magenta. By the end of the 1960s, the wave of drug experimentation that started with Aldous Huxley and the beat generation had inspired a lot of great music – but very
  
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