Following the death of Pope Francis on Easter Monday, The Art Newspaper’s managing editor, Louis Jebb, who has written an extensive obituary of the late pontiff, joins Ben Luke to talk about the late pope’s engagement with art and with the Vatican art collections. Wednesday 23 April was the 250th anniversary of the birth of JMW Turner, one of the greatest British artists. A host of exhibitions and events are marking this moment, and we speak to Amy Concannon, the senior curator of historic British art at Tate Britain, about Turner’s enduring appeal. And this episode’s Work of the Week is arguably John Singer Sargent’s most famous—and in its time, his most infamous—painting, Madame X (1883-84). A portrait of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, it features in a major show of Sargent’s work that opens this week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, before travelling later in the year to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Our associate digital editor, Alexander Morrison, discusses the picture with Stephanie L. Herdrich, a co-curator of the exhibition.

You can explore the Turner Bequest at tate.org.uk—the full collection will be online later this year. Cataloguing Turner’s Bequest: Sketchbooks, Drawings, Watercolours, Tate Britain, London, ongoing. Full list of the Turner 250 events: tate.org.uk/art/turner-250

Sargent and Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: 21 April-3 August; Sargent: The Paris Years, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 22 September 22-11 – January 2026.

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ollowing on from opening her exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which continues until August, the US-born, Berlin-based artist Christine Sun Kim this week opened a show in London in collaboration with Thomas Mader. The exhibition, 1880 THAT, uses a notorious historic conference in Milan in 1880, which effectively outlawed sign language in Deaf education, as a springboard to explore languages and stigma in Deaf and hearing cultures today. Ben Luke discusses the show with Kim and Mader. In Abu Dhabi, the latest museum devoted to the interactive art of the Japanese collective teamLab opens this week in the Saadiyat Cultural District. The Art Newspaper’s reporter in the Middle East, Melissa Gronlund, has visited the museum and tells us more about teamLab’s newest immersive experience. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Young Woman seated at a Virginal (1670-75), a painting by Jan Vermeer that may be the very last picture he ever made. Our special correspondent, Martin Bailey, tells us how new conservation of the picture has revealed that 17th-century pollution may hold the key to dating the painting.

1880 THAT: Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader, Wellcome Collection, London, until 16 November; Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night is at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, until 6 July.

teamLab: Phenomena, Abu Dhabi, opens 18 April.

From Rembrandt to Vermeer: Masterpieces from The Leiden Collection, H’ART Museum, Amsterdam, until 24 August.

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In two-and-a-half months since the inauguration of President Donald Trump, a series of executive orders and other initiatives have attempted systematically to eliminate and defund some of the federal agencies responsible for the distribution of federal money to museums, libraries and other organisations. The Art Newspaper’s editor-in-chief in the Americas, Ben Sutton, joins Ben Luke to discuss what is being seen as an authoritarian and ideologically driven attempt to control cultural activities in taxpayer-funded institutions, restrict free speech and—to use the administration’s own term—“rewrite history”. We also discuss the effect of the economic chaos caused by President Trump’s seesawing on trade tariffs in the past week. That same topic is discussed by Clare McAndrew of Arts Economics, the writer of the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2025. The report’s key finding is that global art sales declined by 12% in 2024 and McAndrew discusses this stark statistic and other aspects of the survey. And this episode’s Works of the Week are by Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone, the two artists in an exhibition subtitled The Art of Friendship at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. Jellett and Hone were key figures in Irish Modernism, and we talk to one of the curators of the exhibition, Brendan Rooney, about Jellett’s painting, Decoration (1923) and Hone’s stained-glass image of a chalice (1948-52), a study for her most famous piece, the East Window of Eton College Chapel in Berkshire, UK.

The Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2025, theartmarket.artbasel.com.

Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone: The Art of Friendship, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, until 10 August.

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