The Latest Breaking News from the Royal Academy

Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo review – masterpieces from a man with a heart as big as the Notre Dame

From hanged men and inky cephalopods to shadowy gothic castles, these cosmic, horror-tinged works let the Les Misérables writer and liberal political campaigner speak directly to us

The Guardian - UK · Mar 18, 2025

Brasil! Brasil! The Birth of Modernism review – spot the standouts in lavish display of bafflingly weak art

Harking back to a wartime RA show, this mishmash of 20th-century Brazilian art, much of it in thrall to European modernism, ends exactly where it should begin…

The Guardian - UK · Feb 2, 2025

‘Abnormal art is the only good art’: how Flávio de Carvalho sparked a Brazilian revolution

He donned a skirt to shock his conservative countrymen – and got bundled into a police station for his own protection. As his work appears in the RA’s Brasil! Brasil! show, we celebrate a luminary of modernism

The Guardian - UK · Jan 28, 2025

Michael Craig-Martin review – sorry, but these lamps and filing cabinets just aren’t that interesting

His early conceptual work inspired the likes of Damien Hirst, but the RA has inexplicably focused on his cool and clinical representations of the ordinary stuff of modern life

The Guardian - UK · Sep 17, 2024

Michael Craig-Martin at the Royal Academy review: inescapably joyful

This career-spanning retrospective of the much-loved tutor to the YBAs combines playfulness with serious conceptual ideas

Evening Standard · Sep 17, 2024

‘I have taken risks, but Damien is a staggering risk-taker’: Michael Craig-Martin on style, the YBAs and being the great late bloomer of British art

Ahead of a major retrospective at the Royal Academy, the veteran artist and mentor to Hirst, Lucas et al talks about his nomadic early years, halcyon days at Goldsmiths – and the moment he stopped being ‘frightened’ of colour

The Guardian - UK · Sep 8, 2024

Frederic Leighton’s only known painting of moon over water to go on show after being lost for a century

Painter’s Bay of Cadiz, Moonlight, bought by Leighton House Museum in June, will star in November exhibition

The Guardian - UK · Sep 7, 2024

In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s review – a small yet blazing act of solidarity

Rescued from bombarded Kyiv in 2022, wildly dynamic works born out of war, revolution and Stalin’s purges, by artists including Kazymyr Malevych and Sonia Delaunay, attest to Ukraine’s moving spirit of freedom then and now

The Guardian - UK · Jul 7, 2024

Love through the lens, a dynasty of Japanese printmaking and Leeds’s finest – the week in art

The Yoshida family’s remarkable legacy, Alison Wilding’s subtle and surprising sculptures and this year’s rather tired effort from the Royal Academy

The Guardian - UK · Jun 14, 2024

Inside the RA's Summer Exhibition opening party with Jennifer Saunders, Zadie Smith and Kristin Scott-Thomas

The Royal Academy had celebrities splashing their cash as the Summer Exhibition opened in style

Evening Standard · Jun 13, 2024