Arts news

• Samurai review: Japan’s lethal warrior class are shown in all their sexy, demonic glory

  29-01-2026 18:05
  British Museum, LondonExtraordinary battle armour, complete with moustachioed masks, enlivens this scintillating show, which brilliantly captures the theatrical side of a chivalrous epochJapan’s pre-modern warrior elite can’t still be alive inside the suits of armour that hold you awed and scared in this scintillating journey through their world of gore, power and artistic beauty. But they surely seem to be: samurai armour is so vital, so electric, with its grimacing, moustached, bla
  
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• Robert Crumb review – sexual deviancy elevated to an art form

  29-01-2026 16:00
  David Zwirner, London
  Though they were created for comic books, the artist’s horny and hilarious drawings of his own neuroses, and of glamazons in thigh-high boots, are unnervingly powerful on gallery wallsIt is unnerving to walk into a gallery and see all your deepest fears and anxieties splayed out across the wall, but that is the power of Robert Crumb. For more than half a century, the wiry, weird, difficult and awkwardly horny artist (now in his 80s) has been churning out underground c
  
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• ‘I was so, so stupid’: how Animalia and The Eleventh Hour made Graeme Base an unlikely bestseller

  29-01-2026 15:00
  Base had no idea what he was doing when he published his wonderfully weird and fiendishly difficult picture books. They became global hits anywayVote for the best Australian children’s picture bookIt is so often the case that the best children’s books are the ones adults think children won’t like – too difficult, too weird, too wordy. Graeme Base seems to specialise in these. Like his alphabet book Animalia, which has sold five million copies around the world, packed with
  
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