The Big Review

The Big Review: Matisse | Invitation to the Voyage at the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel ★★★★½

Sprawling survey of the Modernist master, comprising more than 70 works, is a celebration of a remarkable six-decade career

The Big Review: 14th-century Siena is magnificent at the Met ★★★★★

Reuniting the surviving sections of the city’s altarpiece marvel is just the start of this important, beautifully staged show at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Big Review: Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers at the National Gallery, London ★★★★★

A magnificent show with important and rarely seen loans that highlight the Dutch artist’s astonishing achievements in Provence

The Big Review: Chicago exhibition captures Georgia O’Keeffe's love of cityscapes

From her Manhattan skyscraper studio, the grande dame of American Modernism painted the city below with aplomb

The Big Review: Michelangelo: the Last Decades at the British Museum, London ★★★☆☆

In the absence of large-scale works, the London show focuses instead on the objects that reveal the artist’s deepening spirituality

The Big Review: Mary Cassatt at Work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art ★★★★★

This survey frames Cassatt—once dismissed as a lightweight painter of pretty portraits—as a skilful examiner of private realms

The Big Review: Willem de Kooning and Italy at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice ★★★☆☆

A show studded with masterpieces by the Dutch-American Abstract Expressionist—but the Italian connection is tenuous

The Big Review: Joan Jonas at the Museum of Modern Art, New York ★★★★★

An arresting and endearing retrospective of the trailblazing performance artist that you will want to see again and again

The Big Review: Yoko Ono at Tate Modern, London ★★★★

A retrospective of Ono’s pioneering and provocative work shows that she is not quite the artist you might have imagined

The Big Review: Caspar David Friedrich at the Hamburger Kunsthalle ★★★★★

This curatorial triumph highlights the measured artificiality of the German Romantic artist who made work that still mesmerises

The Big Review: Andy Warhol at the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin ★★★★☆

Andy Warhol the colourist stars in a stand-out exhibition that offers fresh perspectives on curating the world's most familiar artist

The Big Review: Africa & Byzantium at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York ★★★★☆

An array of artefacts show how cultural cross-pollination thrived across centuries and continents under Byzantine rule

The Big Review: Philip Guston at Tate Modern ★★★★★

The long-delayed London survey is a revelatory tour de force that charts the twists and turns of the Canadian-American artist's 50-year career

The Big Review: Ed Ruscha: Now Then at Museum of Modern Art, New York ★★★★★

The past, playfulness and power of words are threaded throughout the Pop artist’s retrospective of more than 200 works

The Big Review: Grayson Perry: Smash Hits at National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh ★★★★☆

The hugely popular English artist has, in this retrospective, set out his case as a chronicler of the British psyche

The Big Review: Gary Simmons: Public Enemy at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago ★★★★★

A powerful retrospective of the New York-born artist that is all too timely in its examination of racism in American culture

The Big Review: Georg Baselitz: Naked Masters at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna ★★★★★

Bold pairings of paintings by the contemporary German artist with those of the Old Masters are both provocative and elegiac

The Big Review: Picasso Celebration at the Musée National Picasso-Paris ★☆☆☆☆

A baffling show in which Pablo Picasso’s works become accessories for the British designer Paul Smith’s decorations

The Big Review: Peter Doig at the Courtauld Gallery in London ★★★☆☆

Oblique views of London, Caribbean memories and poetic etchings highlight the itinerant artist’s flair for reinvention

The Big Review: Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum ★★★★★

A less-is-more approach to the biggest ever exhibition of the Dutch Old Master’s paintings makes this blockbuster a triumph

The Big Review: Max Beckmann at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich ★★★★★

The show takes a "maniacal and majestic" triptych as its departure point, before using a skilful combination of works and personal effects to provide a deep understanding of the German artist

The Big Review: Vittore Carpaccio at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC ★★★★☆

The painter’s masterpieces show that his influences stretched beyond Venice and at times touch on the miraculous.

The Big Review: Just Above Midtown at the Museum of Modern Art ★★★★★

New York's Just Above Midtown gallery launched the careers of numerous artists of colour, and this five-star exhibition about it is a celebration of the power of art

The Big Review: Alice Neel at the Centre Pompidou ★★★★★

While her New York peers were fighting over the future of abstraction, Alice Neel was urgently capturing life

The Big Review: Milton Avery at the Royal Academy of Arts in London ★★★★☆

The American artist was a brilliant colourist who pushed figuration to its limits but never went the way of “the abstract boys”. Plus, what the other critics said about the show

The sitcom as social critique: Martine Syms foregrounds Black banality in major Chicago exhibition

The Los Angeles artist’s exploration of the Black experience in the US can be poignant, humorous and unsettling, as evidenced in her solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

The Big Review: Fugues in Colour at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris

An intoxicating summer exhibition focuses on five abstract artists—Megan Rooney, Sam Gilliam, Steven Parrino, Niele Toroni and Katharina Grosse. But the chromatic emphasis denies broader interpretations of their work

The Big Review: Donatello in Florence

This unrepeatable show, spread across the Palazzo Strozzi and Museo Nazionale del Bargello, reflects the Florentine master’s journey from late Gothic elegance to classical sensuality

The Big Review: Postwar Modern—New Art in Britain 1945-1965 at Barbican Gallery

A show shaped by refugees and immigrants who made new lives on British shores has a war-stained resonance with today