20th Century

In this major retrospective and first exhibition of Churchill’s creative oeuvre in the UK since his death, the Wallace Collection will bring together more than 50 paintings that represent the very best of the former Prime Minister’s output.  

Half of the loans are coming from private collections and have rarely, if ever, been seen before in public. The exhibition will also showcase a large group of works from Chartwell, a major lender to the exhibition, which was Churchill’s family home for over 40 years of his life and is now managed by the National Trust. 

Following a chronological approach, Winston Churchill: The Painter will span his activity as an artist from his first attempts during the First World War (1914-18) through to the 1960s, shortly before his death. Churchill’s own paintings will be complemented by a small group of loans of works by his artistic mentors and friends, such as Sir John Lavery (1856-1941) and Sir William Nicholson (1872-1949), which will help visitors to explore his artistic development. 

From simple beginnings, Amalia Kussner rose to fame as a talented and bold artist and ultimately became one of the most sought-after miniature portrait painters of the Gilded Age. At a time when the use of photography was on the rise, many still loved miniatures, which had a feeling and soul to them that photos could not duplicate. Miniatures could be worn as jewelry or carried between winter and summer homes and easily set out on display. Amalia's portraits provided a grandeur that matched how the Gilded Age elite perceived themselves: as royalty.

Yet no female portrait artists had the notoriety or esteemed clientèle that Amalia did. Her subjects included members of the Astor family, Consuelo Vanderbilt, "dollar heiress" Minnie Paget, England's Edward VII, Russia's Czar Nicholas II and Alexandra, and diamond mine magnate Cecil Rhodes. At the height of her career, from the mid-1890s to early 1910, having a Kussner miniature was just as important an accessory as owning fine jewelry or a mansion in Newport. "Famous sitters, drawn to her by the accuracy and skill of her brush, never failed to become life-long friends," read her obituary.

The Research Assistant in Prints and Drawings will work with Curator of Prints and Drawings on a project related to 20th-century American art and the watercolors of Andrew Wyeth. The fellowship is a part-time position, working 2 days per week for 60 weeks. This role will involve researching artworks through primary and secondary research, managing details on the exhibition checklist, assisting with didactic materials, and participating in public programming. The fellow will have the opportunity to learn about various aspects of exhibition and publication development by working closely with the curator on related tasks and may also assist with other projects related to modern and contemporary works on paper. 

Marking the centenary of his famous painting The Three Dancers, this exhibition, staged by celebrated contemporary artist Wu Tsang and author and curator Enrique Fuenteblanca, sheds new light on Picasso’s work. They will transform the exhibition space into a theatre for displaying over 45 works by Picasso from Tate's collection, alongside key European loans. This includes paintings, sculpture, textile and works on paper, some never seen in the UK before.

It is not the only expensive Klimt from Lauder’s holdings headed to Sotheby’s, either. Two landscapes from Klimt—one depicting a meadow and dated 1906, the other showing a forest and dated 1917—will come to auction, too, with estimates of $80 million–$100 million and $70 million–$90 million, respectively.

Beyond the Klimts, the Lauder sale will also include six bronzes by Henri Matisse collectively worth $30 million, a $20 million Edvard Munch painting, and an Agnes Martin painting valued at more than $10 million.

The title of this newly acquired work references ‘The Dark Rosaleen (Róisín Dubh)’, a 19th-century adaptation by James Clarence Mangan of an Elizabethan poem, later set to music. In 1921, the same year Yeats painted this picture, Thomas P. Whelan described The Dark Rosaleen as “a passionate address in verse to Ireland, written for a nation that still drank from the cup of sorrow.”

Though Singing ‘The Dark Rosaleen’, Croke Park does not explicitly reference the violent events at Croke Park on 21 November 1920, known as Bloody Sunday, its title, setting, and sombre tone evoke the tragedy and its consequences. On that day, during a Gaelic football match between Dublin and Tipperary, Auxiliaries Crown Forces opened fire on spectators, killing 14 civilians, and injuring 60 others.

As one of Yeats’s few overtly political works, this painting stands as a deeply personal response from a keenly sensitive individual to a seismic moment in Irish history. While it is unclear whether the scene represents a specific moment Yeats observed, an amalgamation of separate sketches, or a product of his imagination is unclear. However, sketchbooks in the Gallery’s Yeats archive containing multiple depictions of hurling matches at Croke Park indicate Yeats’s familiarity with the setting.

Christie’s is delighted to announce the third year of the Christie’s Grant for Nazi-era Provenance Research, supporting the next generation of provenance researchers in this field. The grant will be offered to four recipients (£5,000 each), to fund forward-thinking academic, post-graduate research into subjects related to Nazi-era provenance research and restitution.

In addition, Christie’s will offer two grants of £2,000 each to undergraduates who are studying the Nazi era and restitution-related topics, and who may be considering a future career or study in this area, with a view to deepening their interest in the subject.

Romania has now secured a "long-term hold", ensuring Saint Sebastian (around 1610-14) will remain at Christie's New York "until Romania’s recovery efforts are heard and resolved by the proper legal authorities", according to a letter shared with The Art Newspaper by Nixon Peabody, the law firm representing the state of Romania in New York in this case.

The son of Joseph and Estée Lauder (born Josephine Esther Mentzer), he helped grow her namesake business, founded in 1946, into a company with global reach for women’s makeup and face creams, while also donating millions to museums and medical research.

That included a gift valued at over $1 billion, featuring 78 works from his Cubist art collection to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, including work by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger and Juan Gris. Lauder acquired many of these pieces from leading Cubist collectors such as Gertrude Stein, Raoul La Roche, and Douglas Cooper.

In 2026, The Courtauld will present the first ever exhibition dedicated to the seascapes of the French artist Georges Seurat (1859–1891). This major, focused display will be the first devoted to Seurat in the UK in almost 30 years. It will chart the evolution of his radical and distinctive style through the recurring motif of the sea. [...]

The Griffin Catalyst Exhibition: Seurat and the Sea will bring together around 23 paintings, oil sketches and drawings made by Seurat during the five summers he spent on the northern coast of France, between 1885 and 1890. Working in port towns along the English Channel, including Honfleur, Port-en-Bessin and Gravelines, Seurat captured their seascapes, regattas and port activity in his distinctive Neo-Impressionist technique. He sought, in his words, ‘to wash his eyes of the days spent in the studio [in Paris] and to translate in the most faithful manner the bright clarity, in all its nuances’.

The Collections Researcher will support the Senior Curator of Collections & Research with the delivery of the Foundation’s research activities. Your duties will include researching artworks for the catalogue raisonné, in tandem with handling our research and review enquiry services; supporting the Foundation’s programme of scholarly events; contributing content to our digital platforms and other outlets; preparing information for publications; coordinating archive research visits and offering research support.

This online catalogue is the first attempt to bring together all known oil paintings by Gilbert Spencer, as well as a large selection of his works on paper. It has been created in conjunction with the acquisition of the Gilbert Spencer archive by Arts University Bournemouth, and the subsequent publication of the first monograph on Gilbert Spencer by Professor Paul Gough (with contributions by Sacha Llewellyn and Amanda Bradley Petitgas), Gilbert Spencer: The Life and Work of a Very English Artist (Yale University Press, 2024). The project has been directed by Professor Paul Gough, with content by Dr Amy Lim and website design and build by Rich Tarr. It has been generously funded by a grant from the Research and Knowledge Exchange Committee at Arts University Bournemouth.

A new exhibition in Villa Bardini allows visitors to admire major masterpieces and previously unpublished material associated with the figures of art historian Roberto Longhi and writer and translator Anna Banti, who “revolutionised” art history with the rediscovery of Caravaggio and Italian art of the 17th century. [...]

The exhibition showcases such masterpieces as Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard, Jusepe de Ribera’s Apostles and a moving sequence of ten small Morandis created by the Bologna-born artist and gifted to Roberto Longhi and Anna Banti on various different occasions in the course of their friendship.

At the turn of the 20th century, an unprecedented wave of women artists prevailed against social constraints and left Australia to pursue international professional careers.

This is the first major exhibition to focus on the vital role of these Australian women in the emergence of international modernism, including the now-famous, such as Nora Heysen, Margaret Preston and Grace Cossington Smith, as well as the still under-recognised, such as CL Allport, Justine Kong Sing and Stella Marks.

Featuring celebrated and rediscovered paintings, prints, drawings, sculpture and ceramics, Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940 reclaims the place of these pivotal Australian women artists, recognising their contribution to the development of European art. They brought new ideas back to Australia and played an integral, often unrecognised role in modernising our nation.