My toddler threw a toy pig at an artwork – and inspired this guide for small kids in galleries

For the first instalment of Young at art – a new series on the delights and dangers of introducing small children to art – Chloë Ashby weighs up whether it’s worth the effort

theguardian.com

Cecily Brown: ‘I was too shy to talk to all these super cool kids like Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst’

She left London because her paintings felt hopelessly unfashionable compared with the work of the YBAs. Now she’s back with a blockbuster show – and the world has come round to her point of view

theguardian.com

Euan Uglow review – No wonder Cherie Blair didn’t model for long, these pictures are exhausting just to look at

His work was so painstaking and slow to produce that the models – including a certain trainee barrister – often didn’t make it to the end of a portrait. It makes for paintings that seem drained of lif...

theguardian.com

Gwen John: Strange Beauties compiles subtly intense studies of ordinary life – review

Opening 150 years after her birth, this exhibition honours a diligent and rigorous artist who found beauty in ‘drabness’

independent.co.uk

Louise Bourgeois — the long, mischievous life of the spider woman

The great French artist,who lived to 98, is celebrated in Knife-Woman, Marie-Laure Bernadac’s deeply personal biography

thetimes.com

Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas: ‘It’s much better to be a bad girl’

The two artists talk about their 25-year friendship, a severed finger and why they’re the opposite of ‘two little Bo Peeps’

thetimes.com

A Story of South Asian Art review — the Indian artist who defined a movement

The Royal Academy’s exhibition devoted to Mrinalini Mukherjee and her contemporaries is beautiful but unfocused

thetimes.com

‘All roads lead to Grace Jones’: visual artists on the music that fires them up in the studio

Chris Ofili loves steel pans. Lindsey Mendick adores Self Esteem. And Ragnar Kjartansson enjoys everything from Bach to the Cure. Artists reveal the bangers that get their creative juices fizzing

theguardian.com

Anna Ancher — Denmark’s brilliant painter of light

She learnt from the artists who flocked to her parents’ hotel in Skagen, was denied the training her male peers received and forged her own path as a painter of radiant interiors

thetimes.com

Betty Parsons review – scintillating seaside adventures from the woman behind giants like Rothko

As a gallerist, she represented painters like Jackson Pollock – but her own work, which she did at weekends, is deliciously bold and breezy

theguardian.com

Cameras, creativity and kids: Sally Mann’s ‘kind of how-to book’ mixes memoir with advice for artists

The US photographer, whose images of her naked children sparked controversy, reflects on her life and practice

theartnewspaper.com

The great art master who vanished …

He taught Leonora Carrington and founded an art movement with Le Corbusier, so why is Amédée Ozenfant forgotten? In this history, Charles Darwent sets out to rescue him from obscurity

thetimes.com

Confessions of obsessive collectors — the history of a mania

Marie Antoinette, Darwin, Freud … and Norman ‘Psycho’ Bates all did it. In A Noble Madness, James Delbourgo charts the changing image of the collector from antiquity to the present

thetimes.com

Double rum and hundreds of affairs: life with Gwen and Augustus John

The sibling portrait artists have been re-evaluated since their deaths, says Judith Mackrell in her double biography Artists, Siblings, Visionaries. So who was the greater talent?

thetimes.com

Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely review – joyous show from art’s golden kinetic couple

The married sculptors made very different art – hers curvy and colourful, his rickety and angular – but it all hums with life when brought together

theguardian.com

Breast pumps, babygrows and unfinished drinks: the stunning parenting paintings every mother should see

From intimate panels to breathtakingly cinematic canvases, Caroline Walker explains how she set out to capture the many sides of motherhood, right down to the first nappy change

theguardian.com

The mother of a mystery: Audition, by Katie Kitamura, reviewed

It is remarkable the web Katie Kitamura can spin around a scene as simple as a woman joining a man for lunch. His name is Xavier. We don’t know her name, but we do know she’s a successful actress. He’...

spectator.co.uk

Do Ho Suh review — an exquisite meditation on the perfect home

The Korean artist brings model houses, domestic fixtures and fittings and brightly coloured passageways to Tate Modern in a playful and haunting show

thetimes.com

The road trip from hell: Elegy, Southwest, by Madeleine Watts, reviewed

Throughout her quietly compelling second novel, Elegy, Southwest, Madeleine Watts conjures a sense of trundling steadily towards disaster. The narrator, a young Australian woman called Eloise, is reco...

spectator.co.uk

‘I did it for the experience’: Amoako Boafo, the artist who painted Jeff Bezos’s rocket ship

The Ghanaian’s dazzling work has been blasted into space and inspired a Dior collection. But, ahead of a new show, the ‘future of portraiture’ reveals how he originally wanted to be a tennis player

theguardian.com

Deep mysteries: Twist, by Colum McCann, reviewed

On the first page of Colum McCann’s compelling novel Twist we meet the two leads: John A. Conway, who has disappeared, and Anthony Fennell, who’s trying to tell his story. They first met when Fennell,...

spectator.co.uk

The dangers of dating Pablo Picasso

Sue Roe’s Hidden Portraits tells the remarkable stories of the six leading women in the artist’s life — and his poor treatment of them

thetimes.com

Chloë Ashby's 'excruciatingly suspenseful' new novel goes to Fig Tree

Ella Harold, editor at Fig Tree, has acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to Family Friends, the third novel by writer and journalist Chloë Ashby, from Emma Finn at C&W. Fig Tree will publish the novel...

thebookseller.com