It is a once-in-a-lifetime experience: the chance to see one of the greatest -- and most fragile -- works of European art before your very eyes. The illustrated manuscript known as the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry contains images that have shaped our view of the late Middle Ages, but it's normally kept under lock and key at the Château de Chantilly, north of Paris. It's only been exhibited twice in the past century. Now newly restored, the glowing pages of Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry are on show to the public for just a few months. "Approche, approche," the Duke of Berry's usher tells the visitors to the great man's table for the feast that will mark the start of the New Year. It's also your invitation to examine closely the illustration for January, one of the 12 months from the calendar in this Book of Hours -- a collection of prayers and other religious texts -- that form the centrepiece of this exhibition in Chantilly. It's su...
It's a bestseller: Katy Hessel's The Story of Art without Men . And if you've read her 2022 book rewriting art history, or even if you haven't, you can go beyond the printed page and see the real thing close up for yourself, in Europe's only art museum without men. It's in the south of France, in a hilltop village just outside Cannes: Femmes Artistes Musée Mougins . Now in an ideal world, you shouldn't really need a museum in 2025 devoted solely to women artists. But this is clearly not an ideal world. As Hessel and many others have pointed out, women have historically been woefully underrepresented both in traditional museums and galleries and on the commercial art market. This women-only space (on the walls, we hasten to add; male visitors very welcome) aims to go some way to restore the balance. Did we like what we saw? Most definitely. The museum, which opened last year, displays a rotating selection from the hundreds of works by women artists collected...