The end of the ‘heritage-industrial’ complex?

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William Carruthers on what USAID did for world heritage

Does USAID (the US Agency for International Development) still exist? For the heritage world, this – and the fate of heritage projects connected to shrinking amounts of development funding more generally – is a pressing one. Building on previous American efforts in technical assistance during the early years of the cold war, the Kennedy administration founded USAID in 1961 at the start of the UN's first 'Development Decade'. Under the second Trump administration, however, the organisation has found itself cut to ribbons. In common with many other federal agencies, at the time of writing – and despite multiple lawsuits – Elon Musk's DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) is working on firing most of USAID's staff and folding the rump of the organisation into the State Department. For global health, the consequences of these events is nothing short of disastrous. For anyone used to seeing the USAID logo on billboards erected at heritage sites around the world, the effects, while less calamitous, are also plain to see.

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Lauren Kane on the faceless figures of Caspar David Friedrich

Landscape painting of the Romantic period is full of minuscule humans, placed in the scene to scale the grandeur of the nature around them. The desired effect is a sense of awe in the viewer at the sheer might of nature, that by perceiving such a contrast they might experience a simulacrum of the awe they might feel in the presence of a mountain. Another way of pulling the viewer into the work was by making the figure in a painting face away, towards a landscape or expansive ocean view, the true subject of the painting. The German term for this is Rückenfigur (literally 'back figure') and when it came to painting people, it was reliably Friedrich's mode. Whether beholding the moon or trudging through the snow into a forest, his figures have turned their backs. The facelessness of the back-figure creates the same effect as the tiny adventurers; if the subjects are no one, they can be us.

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Susan Moore visits an ambitious new centre for ceramics in Portugal

Renato de Albuquerque bought his first piece of Chinese export porcelain in the Portobello Road in London in the early 1980s. Four decades and some 2,600 acquisitions later, the Brazilian collector's world-class holdings of primarily Ming- and Qing-dynasty export wares are at the heart of a new foundation that places the art of ceramics – past, present and future – centre stage. For the Albuquerque Foundation, which opened in Sintra in Portugal last month, aims to do more than to preserve and interpret a core collection. Through exhibitions focusing on established and emerging artists, as well as educational and residency programmes, it intends to transform that collection into a living – and life-affirming – resource for members of the public, scholars and artists alike.

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Robert Rubsam on the night-time scenes of Keita Morimoto

Keita Morimoto is a nocturnal artist. He paints urban life between dusk and dawn, a lonely crepuscular cityscape of dark buildings and fluorescent lights. The brand-new works collected in 'To Nowhere and Back' (the majority date from 2025) at Almine Rech's Tribeca gallery, construct a dreamlike picture of Tokyo after dark, where isolated figures gather at lonely intersections without ever meeting.

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Catherine Slessor on a brief history of swimming and style

If sexual intercourse, as Philip Larkin posited, began in 1963, then swimming, as the Design Museum would have it, began around 1923. That date is the starting point of its exhibition 'Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style', a dissection of swimming culture in the modern era, from the sportif to the sybaritic, spanning fashion, architecture and public taste.

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Rowland Bagnall on how Peter Mitchell captured Britain in colour

The emergence of colour photography as an artistic medium is often framed as an American story. Arriving on the heels of Pop art, the colour images of everyday Americana taken in the 1960s – gas stations and roadside diners, vibrant vehicles and street scenes – shaped the iconography of post-war consumerism. The hero of this version of the story is William Eggleston, whose divisive solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1976 was a watershed moment in the history of the medium. At the same time in the UK, however, the British photographer Peter Mitchell was documenting the decline and redevelopment of Leeds, producing a record of its buildings, shopfronts and working-class communities in striking colour. Now in his early eighties, Mitchell is the subject of a retrospective at the Photographers' Gallery in London – an opportunity to celebrate his lasting contribution to the rise of colour photography in Britain.

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Hettie Judah on the notorious 'degenerate' art exhibition of 1938

Hettie Judah on the notorious 'degenerate' art exhibition of 1937

The process of removing tens of thousands of artworks from German museums commenced in June 1937. The following month, over 700 were displayed for public scorn in Munich. The exhibition, titled Entartete 'Kunst' ('Degenerate "Art"') toured Germany and Austria for four years. Documentation shows Klee's Swamp Legend in a display mocking Dada, alongside works by Kurt Schwitters. Ridiculing Dada is, on reflection, quite the self-own, but just because an act is dumb does not mean it is not dangerous. The Schwitters works in the photograph did not survive.

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