The best art exhibitions to see in 2025
From 14th-century Siena to female modernists, the year’s most exciting exhibitions chart an evolving Western tradition.
ByPainting
The Renaissance in drawing
Two exhibitions reveal how, for the great Renaissance artists, drawing was both a tool for making paintings and a form…
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Why painting (still) matters
Reports of the art form’s death have been exaggerated – it retains the power to make new worlds.
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The inventor of the Renaissance
Four and a half centuries after his death, we still owe our understanding of art’s greatest period to Giorgio Vasari.
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The 1924 Paris Olympics: when athletes inspired art
The Fitzwilliam Museum’s latest show highlights an era that saw the sporting and artistic worlds converge.
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Love, loathing and Lucian Freud
Rose Boyt’s memoir of her controlling father reveals a relationship defined by cruelty and shame.
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In defence of the King Charles portrait
Jonathan Yeo’s modernist painting captures the weirdness of the monarch.
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Goya’s lessons for a world at war
Why the great Spanish painter’s work still resonates so urgently.
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The last crimes of Caravaggio
Within weeks of finishing his final painting, a murder scene, the artist was himself dead.
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Caspar David Friedrich and the art of kitsch
The German artist, born 250 years ago, and his most famous painting The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog reveal…
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Winter wonderlands: writers on their favourite artworks
Ali Smith, Julian Barnes, Ai Weiwei and others choose seasonal scenes.
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The madness of Claude Monet
Jackie Wullschläger’s exemplary biography reveals the impressionist painter’s obsessive commitment to his art.
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Max Pechstein and the politics of paint
Amid Germany’s 20th-century upheavals, the expressionist’s art brought him both renown and peril.
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Frans Hals and the will to life
Where Rembrandt painted introspection, the Haarlem portraitist showed people as social creatures.
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Mugshots of a nation
After a three-year facelift, the bandages are now off the National Portrait Gallery.
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The RA Summer Exhibition 2023: from the bland to the bravura
Visitors should come prepared: wear comfortable shoes, stay hydrated, put an energy bar in the pocket, and keep hope in…
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Frieda Hughes’s Q&A: “The Bible taught me everything”
The poet and painter on motorbikes, frog migration, and why all politicians are children.
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The women of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
How the Rossettis and their circle turned the gendered conflicts of Victorian society into art.
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