The major museum openings of 2025

Plus: Florence's first female painter

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Michael Delgado on the museum openings not to miss this year

The Frick Collection will finally be reopening in April 2025, showing off its restored exhibition spaces, a suite of new galleries on the second floor and a full refurbishment of the Art Research Library and Reading Room by Selldorf Architects. It is just one of a number of openings in what promises to be a busy year for US cultural institutions. These include the Yale Center for British Art – which holds the most extensive collection of British art outside the UK – whose Louis Kahn-designed glass and steel home will reopen in March after conservation work that has involved replacing the roof, skylights and lighting systems, and the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Met, dedicated to art from Oceania, sub-Saharan Africa and the ancient Americas, which has been closed for renovation and a major rehang since 2021 and will reopen to the public in May. On the other side of Manhattan, the Studio Museum in Harlem, set up in 1968 primarily to show works by Black artists, will unveil in the autumn its brand new building.

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Arjun Sajip casts his eye over upcoming films with an artistic angle

You wait years for a movie about an architect's ambitions, then two come along at once. On the heels of Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis – in which Adam Driver's master builder designs a utopian city made from a material he has invented himself – comes Brady Corbet's The Brutalist. Adrien Brody plays László Tóth, a Holocaust survivor who settles in Pennsylvania and finds himself balancing the demands of art and commerce as he tries to give concrete form to his dreams. It is interesting that the style of both films seems at temporal odds with their subjects: Megalopolis is set in an apparently futuristic United States that draws heavily on ancient Rome for its imagery and social structure, while The Brutalist – with its overture, intermission, 35mm cinematography and 212-minute runtime – is a formally classical drama about an avant-garde thinker.

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Samuel Reilly surveys the year ahead in notable anniversaries

If you live in Edinburgh or Dublin, the coming of each new year is likely to be accompanied by thoughts of the 'father of modern art' (as Turner was dubbed by Ruskin). This is thanks to the collector Henry Vaughan, who divided his outstanding collection of Turner's watercolours between the national galleries of Scotland and Ireland in bequests that stipulated that they be shown only in the month of January 'when the light is at its weakest' – a tradition still upheld. To mark the 250th anniversary of his birth, the galleries this year have arranged a swap – one which means that Turner's stormy panorama of Edinburgh from below Arthur's Seat (1801) is shown for the first time in the city it depicts. Later in the year, major Turner surveys are taking place in New Haven, where the Yale Center for British Art – home of the finest holding of Turner's works in the United States – is presenting 'J.M.W. Turner: Romance and Reality' (29 March–27 July), while in London, Tate Britain pits him against his greatest rival: 'Turner and Constable' runs from 27 November–12 April 2026, and since Constable was a year younger it ticks off two 250s in one. A smaller show at Harewood House in Yorkshire pairs Turner with an exact contemporary: 'Austen and Turner: A Country House Encounter' considers how the novelist and the painter helped to shape, in their own ways, our understanding of the role of the country house in Regency England (2 May–19 October).

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Donal Cooper and Suri Li on the rising reputation of Plautilla Nelli

On the morning of Saturday 14 December aficionados of Renaissance art gathered alongside local dignitaries inside the modest church of Santi Giuseppe e Lucia in the sleepy Tuscan hamlet of Montaione, some 50 miles south-west of Florence. The occasion was the return and public presentation of one of the church's altarpieces – a Madonna of the Rosary depicting the Virgin and Child distributing rosary beads to Saints Dominic and Catherine of Siena – after its recent conservation. The picture had been displayed there at least since 1875 (and possibly much longer) over a side altar, untroubled by connoisseurs or scholars, until 2016 when the Uffizi curator Fausta Navarro identified it as a hitherto unrecognised and undocumented work by Suor Plautilla Nelli (d. 1588), often called the first female painter of Florence. Vasari called her 'la prima' and she is certainly the earliest woman artist in the city for whom a coherent body of work survives. The unveiling of the Montaione picture completes a programme of events over the past 12 months celebrating 500 years since Nelli's birth, dated by most experts to the early weeks of 1524 (she was baptised on 29 January). The marking of her quincentenary consolidates the growth in interest in Suor Plautilla over the past quarter century, which has catapulted her from obscurity to a leading role (alongside Sofonisba Anguissola, Lavinia Fontana and Artemisia Gentileschi) in a still emerging narrative of female artists in Renaissance Italy.

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David Weir on how Visconti's The Leopard translates paintings into film

David Weir on how Visconti's The Leopard translates painting into film

'When I'm directing an opera, I dream about a film, when I'm working on a film, I dream about an opera, and when I'm doing a play, I'm dreaming about music.' So said the film-maker Luchino Visconti, a man of many disciplines. Few of his works capture the range of his artistry better than The Leopard (1963), his historical epic about the unification of Italy and the decline of the Sicilian aristocracy in the 1860s. Certainly it's operatic; it also has literary heft (based as it is on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel of the same name). But less widely recognised is the way in which Visconti drew on 19th-century painting for his meticulous mise en scène – not only to express the film's ideas, but also to achieve a particular kind of authenticity.

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In the current issue…

Jane Morris looks at where the art market is headed in 2025

Donald Trump has no discernible interest in art – but that doesn't mean he won't affect the market. The 1031 tax break – which allows capital gains tax to be deferred almost indefinitely, so long as the proceeds of the sale of one asset are used to buy another of the same kind – was seen as a major driver of the US market. During his last presidency, Trump got rid of it for art but left its equivalent for property intact. How his plans on tariffs, migration, tax and deregulation will affect the art world this time around is unclear. The first big risk factor is his stance on tariffs, variously threatening 10 per cent to 20 per cent taxes on all imported goods according to UBS Global Wealth Management's chief economist, Paul Donovan. He says that tariffs could be as high as 30 per cent on Chinese goods and warns that 'the European automotive sector has a target on its back'. However, Donovan says, 'We don't believe that the president-elect will do everything he says he will, so we suspect there will be no universal import tariff.' The art market will be hoping he is right: in 2023, art imports into the United States for sale totalled $10.4bn.

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