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 [...]

Detail from Self-Portrait 1889, by Vincent Van Gogh
The title of the Royal Academy’s groundbreaking new show, The Real Van Gogh: the Artist and his Letters, signals the intention of the curators to dispense with the myth of the madman touched with genius, to present instead the art of a consummate professional.
From the first gallery, we [...]

What is the most important work of British art of recent decades? One contender is the stunning installation 20:50, created by the sculptor Richard Wilson in 1987, when Damien Hirst was still just a pugnaciously precocious student at art school, and now reprised in the Saatchi Gallery off the King’s Road in London.
Over the years, [...]

Artist Damien Hirst stands in The Wallace Collection at his ‘No Love Lost, Blue Paintings by Damien Hirst’ exhibition.
The art critics ripped into Damien Hirst’s new show at the Wallace Collection as if his notorious sharks in formaldehyde had escaped their elegant glass prisons and were determined to wreak bloody revenge on their creator.
It was [...]

Bill Thompson, Toro, 2009, 24″ x 20″ x 7″ Urethane on polyurethane block.
Thatcher Projects presents Shift an exhibition of new work by Bill Thompson. From curvilinear and cloud-like to pointedly flexed and bowing, Thompson’s colorful wall structures combine painting and sculpture into a unique minimalist art form.

British artist Damien Hirst poses for photographers in front of his painting “White Roses and Butterflies,” 2008, in London. Photo: Reuters/Kieran Doherty (Britain Entertainment Society)
British artist Damien Hirst has made a reputation, and sizeable fortune, from suspending animals in formaldehyde and filling medicine cabinets with pills.
Now one of the world’s most successful living artists has [...]

Joaquín Sorolla, Female Nude. Oil on canvas, 106 x 186 cm. 1902.
The Museo del Prado has broken a ten year old attendance record with its Sorolla exhibition. More than 450,000 persons visited the exhibition which closed last Sunday.
The director of the Museo del Prado, Miguel Zugaza, made the informaion public today saying that this exhibition [...]