Art can be, and often is, a species of combat, a fight to the death.

While painting on canvas often slows life right down, paper works were frequently the stuff of sketchbooks, not necessarily labored over in some studio.

From Louise Bourgeois in 2000 to El Anatsui in 2023, countless artists have wrestled with the London exhibition space’s (im)possibilities.

Is the Royal Academy’s Marina Abramović retrospective spirituality or its monetization? You toss the coin.

In Kitaj’s work, the whole is an extravagant layering of several images into one.

Tate Britain did wisely to rehang the British poet and painter closer to modernity.

With the Gilbert & George Centre, those two-forever-in-one (or one-forever-in-two) living sculptors have made a bid to claim immortality.

Can we ever get enough of the Pre-Raphaelites, their lives, loves, and art? It seems not.

Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris shows the nature of her dogged opposition: how she fought back, and won, in her own way.

The Guggenheim Bilbao’s retrospective of the rebellious 20th-century Viennese artist features over 120 works, but leaves us wanting more.

Near the end of his life, Dr. Gachet urged van Gogh to resume painting because through his art he would find ways of unburdening himself.

What of Saint Francis, that selfless feeder of the birds and the animals? Does he not deserve to be remembered benignly?

Welcome to Alchemy, in which artists with famous names mix strange substances together with outcomes of variable interest.

Two London shows highlight the influences of music and architecture on sculptor Anthony Caro’s work. The latter is more successful than the former.

Here they are at the National Gallery, almost all at once, all those modern artists we came here to see, those we have come here to report having seen later.

The tales in the Thamesmead Codex are melded, mashed up, meshed together fragments of the many human stories told to artist Bob and Roberta Smith.

We go to Raphael for idealized beauty. But what if a painting were the opposite of beautiful, and utterly arresting for that very reason?

Goya neatly clothes himself in his own world of fantasy: He will have her in the end. In life, where the climate is much chillier, it was, alas, to be otherwise.

The doomster title of Extinction Beckons at London’s Hayward Gallery had really got me going. Then, almost immediately, things started to go wrong.

These rowdy, carnivalesque capers, and all this wild costuming, are about defiant displays of unreason, at odds with the dreary drone of the “voices of authority.”

The French painter felt he had to rise to the challenge of one question above all things else: What exactly is it to be a modern artist?

Would it be ridiculous to suggest that Freud lacks nobility or generosity, or even that his pessimism reduces him?

Ghenie's paintings of Marilyn Monroe are a relentless representation of a howling, turbulent tragedy, a face broken into crude sideways slewings and gougings and gorgings of paint.

Parker's stories bring so many of her works alive, give them meaning, and make us warm to her and to them. Is that a problem?

Can two paintings an entire exhibition make? Yes. Especially when it is a Spaniard called Pablo Picasso squaring up to a Frenchman called Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.

The Renaissance master was boundlessly ambitious and intimidatingly energetic, charming, good-looking, diplomatic, and utterly opportunistic.

The studio is a place of self-mirroring, self-haunting, a space where the artist plays out the day-to-day reality of the fantasy of being an artist.

Bad Manners is thoroughly and unmistakably an endeavor of one-time art world provocateur Jake Chapman.

Perhaps Ai is untouchable. If that is the case, where were we left when judging his new art?

Bacon was obsessed by animals lifelong. Rawness. Beastliness. Fearsomeness. The way they lived. The way they died. The way they preyed upon each other.

Testament at Goldsmiths College asks: Can any monument be removed of its tarnish?

Albrecht Dürer always wanted to move on, to be somewhere else.

Braque's paintings speak of self-containment, of a quietly impassioned, ongoing dedication to the task at hand.

Hogarth and his contemporaries agreed that human life was a stinking and dirty business once you had skimmed the froth off the top.

Sentimentality would creep into the artist's late evocations of remembered childhood scenes, as would idealization.

Quite a bit of wildness hides beneath the artist’s cloak of scholarship and respectability.

I soon discovered that this gentle, wary, vulnerable man of 75 possessed a will of steel.

So many of us have seen this painting too often in reproduction, without perhaps ever having really seen it at all.

Rego’s women are always independent spirits, and they are often raging.

For Eduardo Chillida, a work was a finished thing. Gustav Metzger, on the other hand, would make works that sometimes existed in a state of perpetual evolution.

This is a public, political art that invites us to see the world differently, and even encourage the spirit of community.

The exhibition Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life is both an examination of some of the best of her artworks and a spasmodic account of her life.

An exhibition takes on the notorious Roman emperor, from gleaming marble to roaring flames.

There is so much information handed to us in the exhibition, Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy that we risk forgetting what we might think if we came fresh to a painting.

You could say that Nina Hamnett fell victim to her own reckless self-mythologizing.

How much of the effect is the object reflected, or the reflection of the object?

Whiteread has made two full-size structures over the course of the lockdown that suggest a candid act of emotional unburdening.

Eight shows over the course of a year loosely explore the eight chapters of Arendt’s 1968 book, Between Past and Future."

How should we take all this buffoonery? In part, it looks like satire. But what exactly are they poking fun at?

Margaret Gainsborough was a woman who knew her own worth.