After years of decreasing public funding, the lingering effects of the Covid pandemic and enduring questions around the ethics of corporate sponsorship, UK museums are facing unprecedented financial pressures. Some commentators are suggesting that the time has come to abandon the policy of free admission to museums that is viewed by many as key to the cultural fabric of the UK. Among those arguing for charging is the critic and broadcaster Ben Lewis, who joins Ben Luke to discuss the issue. This week, the British Museum opened the exhibition Michelangelo: the Last Decades. It focuses on the period after 1534, when Michelangelo left his native Florence for Rome, never to return, and embarked on many of his most ambitious projects. We take a tour of the show with its curator, Sarah Vowles. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Maria Blanchard’s Girl at Her First Communion (1914). The painting features in a new exhibition at the Museo Picasso in Málaga. Its curator, José Lebrero Stals, tells us more about this underappreciated Spanish artist, who was at the heart of the Parisian avant garde in the 1910s and 20s.

Michelangelo: the Last Decades, British Museum, until 28 July.

María Blanchard: A Painter in Spite of Cubism, Museo Picasso Málaga, Spain, until 29 September.

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The last painting made by Gustav Klimt, left on his easel when he died in 1918 of illnesses relating to the Spanish flu epidemic of that year, has sold at auction in Vienna for €35m including fees. But much remains unclear about the picture, including its sitter, its commissioner and what happened to it in the Second World War. Ben Luke talks to Catherine Hickley, The Art Newspaper’s museums editor, about whether this murky provenance contributed to its relatively low price for a Klimt in the saleroom. A retrospective of the pioneering German artist Rebecca Horn opens this week at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and we talk to Jana Baumann, its co-curator, about the show. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Mont Sainte Victoire, one of dozens of paintings made by Paul Cézanne of the towering limestone peak near Aix-en-Provence in France. Painted in 1886-87, it is in the collection of the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Elizabeth Steele, the Phillips’s Head of Conservation, describes how she revealed the painting from a century of discoloured varnish and dust as it goes on view in the exhibition Up Close with Paul Cezanne, which is at the Phillips until 14 July.

Rebecca Horn, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, 26 April-13 October

Up Close with Paul Cezanne, Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., until 14 July.

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We are back in Venice for the latest edition of the biggest biennial in the world of art. The 60th Venice Biennale comprises an international exhibition featuring more than 300 artists, dozens of national pavilions in the Giardini—the gardens at the eastern end of the city—and the Arsenale—the historic shipyards of the Venetian Republic—and host of official collateral exhibitions and other shows and interventions across Venice. The Art Newspaper’s contemporary art correspondent, Louisa Buck, editor-at-large Jane Morris and host Ben Luke review the international exhibition, Foreigners Everywhere/Stranieri Ovunque, curated by the Brazilian artistic director, Adriano Pedrosa. We talk to artists and curators behind five national pavilions—Jeffrey Gibson in the US pavilion, John Akomfrah in the British pavilion, Romuald Hazoumè in the Benin pavilion, Gustavo Caboco Wapichana, the curator of the Hãhãwpuá or Brazilian pavilion, and Valeria Montii Colque in the Chilean pavilion—about their presentations. And we like to end our Venice specials by responding to an example of the historic work that made la Serenissima one of the world’s great centres for art. So for this episode’s Work of the Week, Ben Luke gained exclusive access to one of the most significant paintings in Venetian history: the Assunta or Assumption of the Virgin made between 1516 and 1518 by Titian. Since the last Biennale in 2022, the Assunta has been unveiled after a four-year conservation project, funded by the charity Save Venice. We spoke to the man who restored this incomparable masterpiece, Giulio Bono, right beneath Titian’s painting.

The Venice Biennale, 20 April-24 November. Listen to the interview with Adriano Pedrosa in the episode of this podcast from 2 February.

The website that Giulio Bono mentions, which will present the findings of the conservation of Titian’s Assunta in detail, will go online later this year.

Save Venice, savevenice.org.

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