
PLEASURES OF THE TEXT
Erika Balsom on Ruth Beckermann’s MUTZENBACHER
GROUP THINK
MAKE HISTORY
Tim Griffin on the art of Virginia Overton
This exhibition celebrates the addition of nine masterpieces to the French national collections – six paintings, two sculptures and a sketchbook – via the country’s gifts-in-lieu scheme, which was introduced on 31 December 1968, allowing inheritance tax to be paid in kind. This unique acquisition mode is key to the very identity of Musée Picasso, which was founded in 1979 specifically to house the donation made by Pablo Picasso under this system.
Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France.
This week, now that the pro-European centrist Emmanuel Macron has defeated the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election, we speak to Anaël Pigeat, editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper France, about the Macron government’s cultural record so far and what we can expect from his second term.
Tate Britain has opened an exhibition of work by the late 19th- and early 20th-century British painter Walter Sickert; we take a tour of the show with one of its curators, Thomas Kennedy. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, The Art Newspaper’s associate editor, Tom Seymour, talks to Dan Leers of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, US, about A workman lifts a drum from a boiling lye solution, March 1944, a photograph in the museum’s new exhibition, Gordon Parks in Pittsburgh, 1944/1946.
Walter Sickert, Tate Britain, London, until 18 September; Petit Palais, Paris, 14 October-29 January 2023.
Gordon Parks in Pittsburgh, 1944/1946, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, 30 April-7 August.

• The method in Jackson Pollock’s madness
• The problem with Russian money in the art world
• What war photography looks like today
• Philip Guston’s uneasy quest for freedom
Plus: The women artists gazing at men, the portraits of Glyn Philpot, and Elizabeth David’s taste in Old Masters; and reviews of Donatello in Florence, Boilly in Paris, Kafka’s drawings and Stephen Shore’s memoir.
As Russia continues to attack Ukraine, Pavlo Makov’s work for the Venice Biennale carries with it a powerful message of determination and resilience.
Virtual Tour of the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in the Giardini. Venice Art Biennale 2022: The Milk of Dreams. Venice (Italy), April 20, 2022.
The 59th Venice Biennale is an upcoming international contemporary art exhibition to be held between April and November 2022. The Venice Biennale takes place biennially in Venice, Italy. Artistic director Cecilia Alemani will curate its central exhibition.
A Venice Biennale special: we give you a flavour of the 59th edition of the Biennale which, as ever, brings a deluge of contemporary art to the historic Italian city.
We talk to four artists in the national pavilions – Francis Alÿs in the Belgian Pavilion, Sonia Boyce in the British pavilion, Shubigi Rao in the Singapore pavilion and Na Chainkua Reindorf in the Ghana pavilion – about their presentations and how, if at all, they relate to the idea of nationhood. Louisa Buck and Jane Morris join host Ben Luke to review the main exhibition, The Milk of Dreams, curated by Cecilia Alemani, and pick their highlights of the Biennale so far. And while most visitors to Venice this week are immersed in contemporary art, for this episode’s Work of the Week, we take a look at a masterpiece that remains exactly where it was intended to hang. The art historian Ben Street joins Ben Luke in San Giovanni Crisostomo, a church near Venice’s Rialto bridge, to look at Saints Christopher, Jerome and Louis of Toulouse, a late painting by the Venetian Renaissance artist Giovanni Bellini.
Venice Biennale, 23 April-27 November.
Join Stephanie Herdrich, Associate Curator of American Painting and Sculpture, and Sylvia Yount, Lawrence A. Fleischman Curator in Charge—both of the American Wing—for a virtual tour of “Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents.” This ambitious survey reconsiders Homer’s work through the lens of conflict, a theme that crosses his prolific career.
A persistent fascination with struggle permeates his art—from emblematic images of the Civil War and Reconstruction that examine the effects of the conflict on the landscape, soldiers, and formerly enslaved to dramatic scenes of rescue and hunting as well as monumental seascapes and dazzling tropical works painted throughout the Atlantic world.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is Homer’s iconic “The Gulf Stream” (The Met), a painting that reveals his lifelong engagement with charged subjects of race and the environment. Featuring 88 oils and watercolors, “Crosscurrents” represents the largest critical overview of Homer’s art and life in more than a quarter of a century.
This week: Tom Seymour talks to the photographer Edward Burtynsky as he is recognised for his Outstanding Contribution to his medium in the Sony World Photography Awards. He discusses the Russian invasion and his Ukrainian heritage.
In this episode’s Work of the Week, we look at Winslow Homer’s most famous work, The Gulf Stream (1899, reworked by 1906), which is at the heart of a new show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Sylvia Yount and Stephanie Herdrich, the curators of the exhibition, discuss the making, reception and legacy of the painting. And we talk to Lisa Movius about the decision by the Nord regional government in France to suspend plans for the exhibition Matisse by Matisse—a collaboration between Musée Matisse le Cateau-Cambrésis and the private Beijing museum UCCA—over China’s supposedly neutral position on Russia’s invasion. Will other Western authorities or arts organisations follow suit?
Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition 2022, Somerset House, London, until 2 May. Edward Burtynsky’s multimedia project In the Wake of Progress is at the Luminato Festival, Toronto, 11-12 June.
Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, until 31 July. Winslow Homer: Force of Nature, National Gallery, London, 10 September-8 January 2023.