Jenny Uglow

The Imperial Gardener

How Joseph Banks made the royal garden at Kew the most outstanding botanical collection in the world.

They Made London Their Own

A new book traces the multitudinous contributions of migrants to the capital, as well as their persistent exploitation.

Pandemic Journal

Dispatches from around the world documenting the coronavirus outbreak

Pandemic Journal, March 23–29

Brief dispatches by New York Review writers documenting the coronavirus outbreak around the world, including Michael Greenberg in Brooklyn, Raquel Salas Rivera in San Juan, Aida Alami in Paris, Rahmane Idrissa in Niamey, and more.

Garden of Painterly Delights

We are fed up with snow and floods and sad, bad news. In tune with this mood, thank goodness, the Garden Museum in Lambeth is showing an exhibition called “Sanctuary: Artist-Gardeners 1919–1939.”

David Bomberg’s ‘Desire to Emancipate’

Shocking his tutors, Bomberg was a blazing radical, influenced by Italian Futurists and by the Cubist experiments of artists he met in Paris on a trip with Jacob Epstein in 1913, including Picasso and Modigliani.

What the Weather Is

Beauty in Ingenuity: The Art of Science

A sense of excitement defines the exhibition, “The Art of Innovation: From Enlightenment to Dark Matter,” as visitors zig-zag through 250 years of art and science.

William Blake's Visionary Imagination

The Blake exhibition at Tate Britain, the first major exhibition in nearly twenty years, shows 300 of his prints and paintings, with manuscripts and printed books, gathered from galleries and libraries across the world.

Civility and Its Discontents

‘In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England’ by Keith Thomas

Dora Maar’s Piercing Gaze

This haunting show, Dora Maar’s largest exhibition in France, contains over 400 of her works, yet, like the model in the banner advertising the exhibition, she turns away, and hides her face, remaining enigmatic in her work.

Big Talkers

‘The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age’ by Leo Damrosch

Czech Art and a De-Accessioning Row

“Czech Routes”—the fourth in a series, following shows of émigré artists from Germany, Poland, and Austria—contains works by twenty-one painters, printmakers, and sculptors who left Czechoslovakia at different times in the past century.

Airy & Otherworldly Japanese Poetry Prints

“Plum Blossom and Green Willow: Surimono Poetry Prints,” with its array of nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock poetry prints, transports us to another world.

Island Hopping

‘Oceania,’ Art of the Islands

“Oceania” makes it clear that exchange is a two-way process; its focus is not on Western expeditions but on the indigenous art of the diverse island cultures themselves.

How Rembrandt Took Britain

It is a tricky and ambitious plan to show Rembrandt’s works alongside those of his admirers, imitators, and copyists.

Stepping Out of Byron’s Shadow

In Urgent Color: Emil Nolde’s Expressionism

Emile Nolde seems to go even further with Expressionism, to be in love with the “expressiveness” of paint itself, its power to manipulate emotions, to delight, inflame, provoke.

The Serious Charm of Edward Bawden

Some critics sneer at the twee marketing of Edward Bawden’s prints on greetings cards, handbags, kitchen tea-towels, and fridge magnets. But after seeing the Dulwich Picture Gallery show, who can say that Bawden, this serious if unclassifiable artist, is merely a purveyor of charm?