The publication in April of Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Index Annual Report has provided the art world with much food for thought. We look at the implications for artists and institutions with Louis Jebb, the managing editor of The Art Newspaper and our technology specialist. As the Centre Pompidou in Paris is taken over on all its floors by what it calls the “ninth art”—graphic novels and comics—we talk to Joel Meadows, the editor-in-chief of Tripwire magazine and a comics aficionado, about the rise of this subculture in museums and the market. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Edgar Degas’ Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando (1879), which depicts a Black circus performer, Anna Albertine Olga Brown, who was briefly known as Miss La La. She and the painting are the subject of a new exhibition at the National Gallery in London opening next week. We talk to Anne Robbins, the curator of paintings at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, and external curator of the exhibition, and Sterre Overmars, the curatorial fellow for post-1800 paintings at the National Gallery, about the painting.Comics on Every Floor, Centre Pompidou, Paris, until 4 November.Discover Degas & Miss La La, National Gallery, London, 6 June-1 September.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Martin Kemp discusses the challenges of displaying the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, Judy Chicago's exhibition at Serpentine North, and Christian Schad's self-portrait. Topics include the allure of the Mona Lisa, potential relocation, and ongoing mysteries, as well as Chicago's innovative retrospective exhibition blending analog and digital elements, and Shad's portrayal of strength in art during the New Objectivity movement.

We take a tour of Tate Britain’s new exhibition, Now You See Us, featuring more than 100 women artists who worked between the 16th and 20th centuries, with Tabitha Barber, its curator. The Dia Art Foundation has reached its half century and its director, Jessica Morgan, tells us how it has changed in that time, and especially how it has radically expanded the range of artists it shows and collects. We also discuss the new commission at Dia Beacon by Steve McQueen. And this episode’s Work of the Week is one of the few record-breaking paintings in a relatively middling auction week in New York: Martin Wong’s Portrait of Mikey Piñero at Ridge Street and Stanton (1985), which sold for more than $1.6m (with fees) on Tuesday evening at Christie’s. Barry Blinderman, who sold the work in 1985 from his Semaphore gallery in New York, tells us more about the painting and the extraordinary circumstances of its making.Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920, Tate Britain, London, until 13 October.Steve McQueen: Bass, Dia Beacon, until 12 May 2025. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We talk to The Art Newspaper’s reporter Sarvy Geranpayeh about her conversations with six Palestinian artists about their daily lives amid Israel’s ongoing military offensive in Gaza. Frank Stella, one of the key artists in the history of American abstraction, has died, aged 87. We speak to Bonnie Clearwater, the director and chief curator of the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who worked with Stella on two landmark shows. And as Spring finally arrives in London, this episode’s Work of the Week is, fittingly, Vanessa Bell’s View into a Garden (1926). It features in an exhibition opening next week at the Garden Museum in London, called Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors. Emma House, the curator at the museum, tells me more.Glory of the World: Color Field Painting (1950s to 1983), NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, US, until 25 August. Frank Stella: Recent Sculpture, Deitch Projects, New York, until 24 May.Gardening Bohemia: Bloomsbury Women Outdoors, Garden Museum, London, 15 May-29 September. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After years of decreasing public funding, the lingering effects of the Covid pandemic and enduring questions around the ethics of corporate sponsorship, UK museums are facing unprecedented financial pressures. Some commentators are suggesting that the time has come to abandon the policy of free admission to museums that is viewed by many as key to the cultural fabric of the UK. Among those arguing for charging is the critic and broadcaster Ben Lewis, who joins Ben Luke to discuss the issue. This week, the British Museum opened the exhibition Michelangelo: the Last Decades. It focuses on the period after 1534, when Michelangelo left his native Florence for Rome, never to return, and embarked on many of his most ambitious projects. We take a tour of the show with its curator, Sarah Vowles. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Maria Blanchard’s Girl at Her First Communion (1914). The painting features in a new exhibition at the Museo Picasso in Málaga. Its curator, José Lebrero Stals, tells us more about this underappreciated Spanish artist, who was at the heart of the Parisian avant garde in the 1910s and 20s.Michelangelo: the Last Decades, British Museum, until 28 July.María Blanchard: A Painter in Spite of Cubism, Museo Picasso Málaga, Spain, until 29 September.LAST CHANCE subscription offer: subscribe for as little as 50p per week for digital and £1 per week for print and digital, or the equivalent in your currency. Visit theartnewspaper.com to find out more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The last painting made by Gustav Klimt, left on his easel when he died in 1918 of illnesses relating to the Spanish flu epidemic of that year, has sold at auction in Vienna for €35m including fees. But much remains unclear about the picture, including its sitter, its commissioner and what happened to it in the Second World War. Ben Luke talks to Catherine Hickley, The Art Newspaper’s museums editor, about whether this murky provenance contributed to its relatively low price for a Klimt in the saleroom. A retrospective of the pioneering German artist Rebecca Horn opens this week at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and we talk to Jana Baumann, its co-curator, about the show. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Mont Sainte Victoire, one of dozens of paintings made by Paul Cézanne of the towering limestone peak near Aix-en-Provence in France. Painted in 1886-87, it is in the collection of the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Elizabeth Steele, the Phillips’s Head of Conservation, describes how she revealed the painting from a century of discoloured varnish and dust as it goes on view in the exhibition Up Close with Paul Cezanne, which is at the Phillips until 14 July.Rebecca Horn, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, 26 April-13 OctoberUp Close with Paul Cezanne, Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., until 14 July.Subscription offer: subscribe to The Art Newspaper for as little as 50p per week for digital and £1 per week for print and digital, or the equivalent in your currency. Visit theartnewspaper.com to find out more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Explore the diversity and migration themes in the Venice Biennale, artistic narratives, celebration and drama at the event, post-colonialism and climate crisis portrayals, symbolic representations in art, indigenous resistance, and the restoration process of a Renaissance masterpiece.

This week: after 80 years in business, Marlborough Gallery, one of the most historic commercial galleries in London, New York and beyond, has announced that it is closing. Host Ben Luke talks to Anny Shaw, a contributing editor at The Art Newspaper, about what happened and what, if anything, it tells us about the market. The New Mexico-based sculptor Rose B. Simpson revealed newly commissioned public art works in Madison Square Park and Inwood Hill Park in New York on Wednesday, called Seed. The Art Newspaper’s editor, Americas, Ben Sutton went to meet her. And this episode’s Work of the Week is the final painting ever made by Caravaggio: The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula, made in 1610. The painting is travelling to London for an exhibition opening at the National Gallery next week, called The Last Caravaggio. Francesca Whitlum-Cooper, the gallery’s acting curator of later Italian, Spanish and 17th-century French Paintings and the curator of the exhibition, tells us more.marlborougharchive.com.Rose B. Simpson: Seed, Madison Square Park and Inwood Hill Park, New York, until 22 September. The Whitney Biennial: Even Better than the Real Thing, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, until 11 August. Rose B. Simpson: Strata, Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, US, 14 July-13 April 2025; Rose B. Simpson: LEXICON, De Young, San Francisco, US, 16 November-29 June 2025.The Last Caravaggio, National Gallery, London, 18 April-21 JulySubscription offer: subscribe to The Art Newspaper for as little as 50p per week for digital and £1 per week for print (or the equivalent in your currency). Visit theartnewspaper.com to find out more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The convicted art fraudster Inigo Philbrick is out of prison and possibly seeking a return to art dealing. How is that possible? Tim Schneider, The Art Newspaper’s acting art market editor, tells us about Philbrick’s story, why the art trade is a natural habitat for fraud, and why a criminal past need not lead to art-world banishment. In the wake of the first Art Basel Hong Kong art fair to take place after the newly instated Article 23 security law, our associate digital editor Alexander Morrison talks to our correspondent in China, Lisa Movius, about the law’s impact on artists, museums and others in the art world now and in the future. And this episode’s Work of the Week is a sword associated with Ranjit Singh, the Maharaja who is the subject of a major exhibition opening next week at the Wallace Collection in London. Davinder Toor, the co-curator of the show, tells us more.Ranjit Singh: Sikh, Warrior, King, Wallace Collection, London, 10 April-20 October Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard Serra, one of the greatest artists of the past 50 years, a linchpin of the post-minimalist scene in late 1960s and early 1970s New York and later the creator of vast steel ellipses and spirals, died on Tuesday 26 March. We mark the passing of this titan of sculpture with Donna De Salvo, the senior adjunct curator of special projects at the Dia Foundation, whose Dia Beacon space has several major works by Serra on permanent view. There are a host of exhibitions focusing on expressionist art in the US and Europe in 2024 and in this episode we focus on two of them. The first ever Käthe Kollwitz retrospective in New York is taking place at the Museum of Modern Art or MoMA, while other shows dedicated to her are taking place in Frankfurt and Stockholm. We speak to Starr Figura, the curator of MoMA’s show, which opens this weekend, about Kollwitz’s extraordinary work and life. Then, we talk to Natalia Sidlina, the curator of Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider, a major survey opening at Tate Modern next month of the German Expressionist group, which looks anew at the deep friendships that formed the basis of the group, their international outlook and their multidisciplinary output.Richard Serra’s work is on long-term view across five galleries at Dia Beacon, New York, US.Käthe Kollwitz, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 31 March-20 July; Städel Museum, Frankfurt, until 9 June; SMK – National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, 7 November-25 February 2025.Expressionists: Kandinsky, Münter and the Blue Rider, Tate Modern, London, 25 April-20 October 2024; Gabriele Münter: the Great Expressionist Woman Painter, Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid, 12 November-9 February 2025.Further expressionist exhibitions in 2024: The Anxious Eye: German Expressionism and Its Legacy, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, until 27 May; Munch to Kirchner: The Heins Collection of Modern and Expressionist Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, US, until 5 January 2025; Munch and Kirchner: Anxiety and Expression, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, US, until 23 June; Erich Heckel, Museum of Fine Arts Ghent, Belgium, 12 October-25 January 2025. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.