Michael Prodger

Agnes Martin’s abstract grid paintings are presented as a response to the chaos and pressures of modern life, offering viewers a sense of beauty, freedom and concentrated stillness. The article traces Martin’s movement from Saskatchewan to New York and later New Mexico, her withdrawal from the art world, mental-health struggles and long hiatus from painting. It places her between abstract expressionism and minimalism while emphasizing her distinctive belief in an ideal, non-representational art rooted in landscape and memory. An exhibition at Dia Beacon, running until April 2027, brings together work from her New York period and the paintings she made after returning to art in 1974.

Tate Modern’s exhibition “Frida: The Making of an Icon” examines how Frida Kahlo became a global cultural symbol, but its limited selection of 33 Kahlo paintings is supplemented by work from around 80 other artists and a large display of merchandise. The exhibition is criticized for emphasizing Kahlo’s brand, political and identity-based associations, and commercial afterlife over her art. Although much derivative work is judged shallow, Kahlo’s strongest self-portraits and The Suicide of Dorothy Hale demonstrate the depth, symbolism and emotional force of her original paintings. The show ultimately suggests that the constant reuse of Kahlo’s face and biography risks turning her into a commodity and distancing audiences from her achievements as an artist.

David Hockney is portrayed as both a hugely popular public figure and a deeply serious, intellectually engaged artist. His career challenged the dominance of abstract and conceptual art through renewed figurative painting, while incorporating art-historical references, emerging technologies and diverse media including photography, printmaking, digital drawing and stage design. Major works such as A Bigger Splash and his portraits demonstrate his attention to composition, perception, colour and personal relationships. A large retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton emphasized the many distinct phases of his career, from Californian swimming pools and Yorkshire landscapes to Normandy scenes and iPad works. His accessibility, tireless productivity and pleasure in the everyday explain his enduring appeal, even as he remained committed to keeping modernism alive.

Francisco de Zurbarán’s religious paintings combined intense Catholic spirituality with sculptural realism, dramatic tenebrism and meticulous attention to physical textures. Based largely in Seville, he benefited from the city’s wealth, its trade with Spanish South America and the commissions of religious orders responding to the Counter-Reformation. The article examines major works including Crucifixion, The Apparition of Saint Peter to Saint Peter Nolasco, Agnus Dei and his paintings of Saint Francis, while also discussing his secular and royal commissions. Zurbarán’s work circulated widely through colonial trade and private collecting, and a major exhibition at London’s National Gallery highlights his ability to give tangible form to faith.

Konrad Mägi’s international travels exposed him to major European modernist movements, which he adapted into an emotionally charged and highly experimental style. His landscapes and portraits reflected Estonia’s effort to establish a distinct national identity and eventually achieve independence from Russian and German influence. As founder and director of the Pallas Art School, Mägi also sought to build a new generation of Estonian artists. A major exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery presents 60 of his works and positions him as an important, if not first-rank, figure in the spread of modernism.

John Vanbrugh transformed British architecture through a theatrical and highly personal version of the Baroque, despite having no formal architectural training. Alongside Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor, he helped reshape England’s churches, civic buildings and country houses, creating landmarks including Castle Howard, Blenheim Palace and Seaton Delaval Hall. His earlier careers in commerce, the army, political intrigue and playwriting informed his dramatic architectural language, while his collaborations with Hawksmoor combined inventive design with technical expertise. Vanbrugh’s monumental approach, particularly at Blenheim, provoked conflict with patrons and criticism from contemporaries, but later architects recognised his originality and lasting influence on European architectural imagination.

A critical review of Tate Modern’s retrospective Tracey Emin: A Second Life argues that nearly all of Emin’s work is inseparable from her traumatic personal history, including abuse, illness, sex, abortion and bodily pain. The exhibition demonstrates her ability to turn intense experience into expressive, often powerful painting, but also exposes limitations in her draftsmanship, reliance on literal self-disclosure and repetitive focus on herself. The review credits Emin with exploiting the contemporary collapse of boundaries between private and public life and praises her creation of affordable artist studios in Margate, while concluding that her artistic strengths have also become constraints and that she might benefit from looking beyond herself.

Ai Weiwei discusses his international career, move from Berlin to Cambridge and Portugal, and continued work through studios in Beijing and Berlin. He reflects on his detention, surveillance and censorship by Chinese authorities, his family’s history of exile, and his return to China after a decade away. He argues that his politically engaged art records human suffering rather than simply attacking the state, while expressing doubts about art’s ability to change wider society. The conversation also covers his book On Censorship, a forthcoming Manchester exhibition using salvaged buttons, Britain’s historical relationship with China, Taiwan’s status and the risks of military conflict. Weiwei says he has produced more than enough work and would be content to stop creating if no one asked him to make another exhibition.

A Courtauld Gallery exhibition, “A View of One’s Own: Landscapes by British Women Artists 1760-1860”, recovers the largely forgotten contributions of female British landscape painters. Although watercolour was considered an acceptable feminine medium, women faced restricted artistic training, limited recognition and overt gender bias. Artists including Mary Lowther, Amelia Long, Elizabeth Frances Batty, Harriet Gouldsmith and Fanny Blake exhibited widely and produced ambitious landscapes comparable in subject and style to those of male contemporaries. The exhibition argues that there was no distinctively feminine landscape sensibility, while acknowledging uneven artistic quality and concluding that Lowther and Blake were particularly gifted.

The article surveys notable 2026 art exhibitions, placing particular emphasis on women artists, including Frida Kahlo, Tracey Emin, Chiharu Shiota, Rose Wylie, Catharina van Hemessen and Hilma af Klint. Other highlights include major presentations of Jan van Eyck, Francisco de Zurbarán, George Stubbs, Winston Churchill, William Blake, the Pre-Raphaelites, William Morris and artists responding to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Exhibitions across Britain, Ireland, Italy and the Netherlands span historical painting, modernism, landscapes, portraiture, anti-fascist art and Renaissance patronage, with the writer combining practical dates and venues with strongly subjective critical judgments.

Francisco Goya’s tapestry cartoons, produced between 1775 and 1792 for Spain’s royal palaces, reveal darker and more psychologically unsettling themes beneath their apparently lighthearted scenes of popular life. The Snowstorm, painted in 1786 for the Pardo Palace, is presented as the most ambiguous and chilling of these works: a group of men and a dog struggle through a violent winter landscape while an unclear encounter unfolds. The painting coincided with Goya’s rising court status and appointment as painter to the king, even as he grew bored with tapestry commissions. His later deafness and isolation intensified his scrutiny of human behavior, helping lead toward the bleak vision seen in his mature paintings and prints.

Martin Parr, who died of cancer aged 73, is remembered for vivid, often humorous photographs of British social life, class divisions, rituals and eccentricity. His depiction of working-class holidaymakers in The Last Resort prompted accusations of exploitation, while later work examined affluent southern society and national institutions. The essay portrays Parr as politically empathetic but artistically satirical, using colour, flash and deliberately ordinary or awkward subjects to expose collective behavior and the contradictions of British identity.

William Nicholson remains under-recognised despite the breadth and quality of his work across painting, printmaking, portraiture, landscape, illustration and stage design. A Pallant House Gallery exhibition demonstrates how his deliberate avoidance of avant-garde labels was accompanied by exceptional economy, technique and stylistic control. His collaborations with Mabel Pryde as the Beggarstaffs anticipated aspects of modernism, while his still lifes, portraits and landscapes reveal a distinctive ability to transform humble subjects through restrained colour, light and composition. The article concludes that the pleasure Nicholson found in painting is directly communicated to viewers.

The exhibition “A World of Private Mystery” at the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden presents 34 works by British neo-romantic artists active mainly between 1935 and 1955. The movement, influenced especially by Samuel Palmer, drew on pastoral landscapes, lyrical intensity and a sense of mystery, while also reflecting wartime anxiety, melancholy and social dislocation. Works by Graham Sutherland, John Craxton, Keith Vaughan, Michael Ayrton and others demonstrate that neo-romanticism was more varied and modern than its critics suggested. As tastes changed, the artists moved toward abstraction, mythology, architectural painting or personal decline, but the exhibition argues that their work was an authentic British response to its era.