Portraiture

Booksreview

New book explores work of underrepresented abstract artist who married portrait with place

Miyoko Ito’s intriguing merger of internal and external space gets proper recognition and a fresh look in this visual feast

Courtauld Gallery takes a closer look at Frank Auerbach’s unique reworked charcoal drawings of friends and lovers

The London-based artist, who escaped Nazi Germany as a boy, developed a technique of repeatedly erasing and redoing his drawings, often over a period of months

John Singer Sargent’s eye for fashion unveiled in Boston show

The artist’s portraits will be shown at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston alongside the clothes worn by his glamorous subjects

Book Clubfeature

Opera singer Peter Brathwaite tells us why he reinterpreted Black portraiture using household items

In his book inspired by the Getty Museum Challenge, Brathwaite recreated portraits by artists such as Georges Trubert and Sonia Boyce

Philip Pearlstein, whose nude portraits helped revive figurative painting, has died, aged 98

Pearlstein, a classmate of Andy Warhol’s who similarly worked against the grain of the dominant Abstract Expressionist style of the time, remained committed to representation from the late 1950s onward

National Gallery takes a closer look at Lucian Freud with sweeping survey to mark centenary

Among a slew of shows celebrating 100 years since the artist’s birth, the National Gallery exhibition explores his enduring appeal as a new generation embrace figuration

Glyn Philpot's sensitive portraits of Black models bring renewed interest in the artist who fell out of fashion

An exhibition at Pallant House Gallery explores the artist's life and the change of style that contributed to him being out of favour

Two exhibitions spotlight Muriel Gardiner Buttinger, Alice Neel’s benefactor of 20 years

Buttinger, a psychoanalyst who also helped hundreds of Jews and anti-fascists flee Nazi Austria in the 1930s, sat for one of Neel’s inimitable portrait paintings in 1966

The forgotten faces of American art: Lacma surveys 200 years of Black portraiture

An exhibition 'showcasing Black subjects as powerful, beautiful and complex' includes works by and of the greatest Black talents of the last two centuries

Rossetti paints us a (sometimes not so) pretty picture in exhibition devoted to artist's portraits

Alongside famous Pre-Raphaelite depictions of swoony, pillow-haired beauties are paintings of friends, family and fellow artists on show at the Holburne Museum

Art campaign shows the many sides of mental illness

The Florida-based artist Ian Woods has created layered portraits of mental health advocates

Prizesnews

Artist Gary Hume says National Portrait Gallery should 'bite the bullet' and cut ties with oil giant BP

Fuel company's decision to withdraw from the BP Portrait Award judging panel was a missed opportunity to end sponsorship relationship, artist believes

National Portrait Gallery acquires 20 works from collecting couple

Ian and Annette Cumming set out to commission likenesses of people who would remain renowned

Booksnews

Landscapes, friends, family and photographs

Four books examine John Singer Sargent’s work outside the public eye

Why Churchill missed the cut in Thatcher’s No. 10 rehang

Archives reveal the Iron Lady’s decisive views on the portraits of Great Britons that she wanted for Downing Street