The V&A’s new quilts show is already causing a stir, with international enthusiasts block-booking hotels in west London. Viv Groskop finds out what all the fuss is about
As you step through the heavy wooden doors into the V&A’s new quilts exhibition, the first thing you see is a four-poster bed, draped with …

Landscape and portrait artist often described as the father of Jamaican painting

Albert Huie, who has died aged 89, was often described as the father of Jamaican painting. Although he produced folkloric genre pieces, his main concern was with his island’s rich landscape and the physical beauty of its people.
His appreciation …

Theatre composer to sell Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto, which is predicted to fetch between £30m-£40m at auction

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s charitable foundation is to make a second attempt to sell one of its most valuable possessions: a Picasso blue period portrait which Christie’s today said would have the largest …

A new exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, explores the unique partnership of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert through their passion for arts

The artist says: Thanks for reading my contemporary art blog! If you are involved in the art and culture industry in any way, and would like …

Steven Morris on National Portrait Gallery giving unknown portraits to writers to make up stories
Steven Morris

The artist says: Thanks for reading my contemporary art blog! If you are involved in the art and culture industry in any way, and would like to syndicate content from or to this blog, …

The Institute of contemporary arts does what it says on the box better than any other public gallery I can think of at the moment. Its closure would be a terrible loss to creativity
This Thursday at the ICA in London’s Mall, artist and musician Billy Childish will be talking to …

Celebrated in London, New York and now in a major show in Paris, Lucian Freud is one of our greatest living painters. But will his work stand the test of time
In Lucian Freud’s painting Two Irishmen in W11, the bare floorboards of his studio support a white armchair in which he …

Storytellers invent life histories for unknown subjects in National Portrait Gallery vaults

For more than half a century they have lain in a storeroom, unidentified and unseen by the hundreds of thousands of visitors to the National Portrait Gallery every year. But new life is being breathed into a …

Dealer and collector with a passion for art nouveau and art deco
Victor Arwas, who has died of a heart attack aged 72, was a larger-than-life personality, even for the London art world. As a dealer and collector, his interests centred on the graphic and applied arts of the late …

Japanese film-maker and artist Takeshi Kitano has turned Paris’s prestigious Fondation Cartier into a brightly coloured children’s funfair

The artist says: Thanks for reading my contemporary art blog! If you are involved in the art and culture industry in any way, and would like to syndicate content from or to …