Christian Kobke “View of Dosseringen near the Sortedam Lake Looking towards Norrebro”
When Queen Margrethe II of Denmark opens the National Gallery’s luminous survey of the art of Christen Købke today, she will take her photo call in front of View of Dosseringen near the Sortedam Lake Looking towards Norrebro. This was inevitable: Købke is to [...]

Ai Weiwei, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995). Photograph: Ai Weiwei
The cavernous space of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall has been dwarfed by a massive spider, cleaved by a 167-metre crack and baked by an artificial sun. Now, the gallery has announced, the space is to be filled by its most politically adventurous commission yet.

The “five-to-10 good years” phenomenon, first articulated by former Tate director Alan Bowness, suggests that virtually all artists do their best work in a relatively short period, whether it was the 10 years Delacroix had between 1824 and 1834, Courbet’s six (1849 -1855) or Munch’s three (1892-95).
After a major artist makes his breakthrough, he will [...]

Some of the most magnificent drawings ever executed – physical manifestations of Michelangelo’s love and infatuation for a handsome and intelligent teenage boy – will on Thursday go on display as a group for the first time.
The groundbreaking show at the Courtauld gallery in London, with loans from the Vatican and the Queen, is essentially [...]

The Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí presented the loan of the work Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pommegranate One Minute Before Awakening (1944), from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum (Madrid). The oil painting will be exhibited at the Drawings Room (number 6) of the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres from 9 February until 2 May [...]

Agnolo Bronzino’s was the hand to hire for a power portrait in mid-16th-century Florence. He could turn toddlers into potentates and make new-money Medicis look like decent people. His painting shaped late Mannerism, the profane, twisty, prosthetic style that erupted, like a repressed libido, between the humanist sanctities of the Renaissance and the smells and [...]

A Christie’s employee looks at a 1963 painting entitled “Tete de femme (Jacqueline)” by Pablo Picasso on display at the auction house in London, Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2010. The painting is to be auction at ‘Impressionist and Modern Art’ sale on Feb. 2 with an estimated price of 3 to 4 million pounds (US$4.9 to [...]