The latest news and comment on the Royal Academy of Arts
July 2024
Who’s on the 2024 RA Dorfman prize shortlist? A lingerie factory turned weekend home, Ukrainian volunteer roofers – and more
The four disparate projects shortlisted for the annual prize add up to a heartening display of style, beauty, collaboration and force-for-good ambition
Brief letters
What is art for, if not for political discourse
Brief letters: Young artists at Royal Academy | Holly berries | Whale strandings | Elastic band use | Wrap it up | Dearth of film canisters
Royal Academy removes Gaza-inspired works after Jewish group flags concerns
In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s review – a small yet blazing act of solidarity
‘I took it personally’: Rejects, the show for artists rebuffed by the Royal Academy
June 2024
‘A show you want to pick up and fondle’: Assemble electrify the RA’s Summer Exhibition
The architecture room of the Royal Academy’s annual event has been turned into a mesmerising ‘museum of making’ by the Turner-prize winners, full of intriguing insights and mind-boggling exhibits
Royal Academy Summer Exhibition review – a gasping death-rattle of conservative mediocrity
Pampered pets, polite portraits and enough wan landscapes to fill a field – this show mirrors the numbed, aimless condition of Britain after 14 years of Tory misrule
‘I don’t know if I like it’: artist finally shown at Royal Academy after 31 attempts
Alison Aye’s work will be seen alongside 481 other new exhibitors at the Summer Exhibition
April 2024
The Guardian view on the Royal Academy: reframing a bloody past
Editorial: The Royal Academy is examining the part it has played in Britain’s history of slavery and empire – and the usual carping suspects will not be pleased
March 2024
The great women's art bulletin
Why does Cleopatra always have to die nude? Male titillaters – and the artist who stood against them
From Medusa to Circe, novelists have scored hits with feminist reimaginings of Greek myths and historical figures. But Swiss-born painter Angelica Kauffman beat them to it – by 250 years
Notebook
TalkTV’s natural home was never going to be on television
Tomiwa Owolade
The station’s move online will cater for die-hard viewers who want to watch its content wherever they can
Angelica Kauffman; Sargent and Fashion review – appearance is all
More defiant in life than in her smooth, theatrical art, one of the co-founders of the RA finally gets a show of her own. And gents and ladies dress to thrill for flashy, riveting John Singer Sargent
February 2024
A colossal artistic joke – Flaming June at the Royal Academy review
Entangled Pasts: Art, Colonialism and Change review – the most radical show in the RA’s history
January 2024
Entangled Pasts 1768-Now review – RA all at sea with its risk-light colonial revisionism
From a pregnant woman tossed from a slave ship to reworkings of Titian and Da Vinci featuring black faces, this show aims to redress the RA’s biased version of art history – but it could all have been more daring
‘We’re artists, not boxes to be ticked’: Lubaina Himid on her call to arms – and exposing Bath’s past
The Turner prize-winner has filled a museum with billowing reams of fabric – to reveal the shameful pasts of the gentry immortalised in its paintings. As the rebellious artist nears 70, she lets rip at what held her back
Other lives
Stuart Walker obituary
Other lives: Film and TV production designer whose work included The Camomile Lawn and Portrait of a Marriage
December 2023
2024 culture preview
The Last Supper recast: artist Tavares Strachan on reimagining Da Vinci’s dinner guests
He replaced Christ with Haile Selassie and took Judas’s place himself. The Bahamian’s epic artistic revisions, from space to the Arctic, hit Britain in 2024 – and the Royals are in his sights
November 2023
Impressionists on Paper: Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec review – a show full of surprises
From Monet’s pastel sunsets to a beautifully bleak Van Gogh landscape and Pissarro’s summer orchard, the RA gathers fragile, rarely seen works, many made at speed, out and about and up close
October 2023
Why is no one else worried about being sandwiched between naked people?
Anita Chaudhuri
Germ warfare season is upon us. I, for one, don’t plan to get ill by squeezing past a pair of models at the Marina Abramović exhibition
The great women's art bulletinWhy does Cleopatra always have to die nude? Male titillaters – and the artist who stood against themFrom Medusa to Circe, novelists have scored hits with feminist reimaginings of Greek myths and historical figures. But Swiss-born painter Angelica Kauffman beat them to it – by 250 years
