Because “best” is such a subjective term, I’ve tried to spread my picks of gallery going across the calendar year. I’ve left out returns to museums in Amsterdam and Oslo (the Munchmuseet’s postwar American exhibition was great), and the long walks through MoMA, the Met, the Frink and the Whitney (although curiously one of two bijoux exhibitions at the Morgan Library was unexpectedly useful). A few themed shows – the surrealism at the Design Museum, the RAA’s southern America – might have made it in, but didn’t.

The 2023 Turner Prize (Tate Liverpool) was more than the sum of its parts, thanks to a sense that it was all science fiction. Like a lot of its predecessors, I didn’t feel the need to loiter especially long … and yet there were definite moments of estrangement and joy. Heather Phillipson’s postapocalyptic installation was familiar from the Duveen Hall of Tate Britain and I’d seen Ingrid Pollard’s photos, ephemera and automata at Milton Keynes (but not at Turner Contemporarararararararary). I didn’t know Sin Wai Kin’s trans fantasies – an imagined boyband and merch, among others, and I was glad to catch them in conversation at the Barbican. The winner Veronica Ryan’s seeds offered nova aplenty and I must track down her Windrush piece. My voted would probably have been for … Pollard. (There was a further visit to Liverpool, during which I caught some underwhelming biennial stuff. The gallery goes dark for a couple of years, but they have a satellite space across the docks.)

Dulwich Picture Gallery has a habit of holding exhibitions of people you wish you’d heard of before – and M.K. Čiurlionis: Between Worlds is an example. The Lithuanian artist both explored and created mythology. He seemed to pack an awful lot into six years, before dying at the age of 35 from pneumonia. He was also a composer – reflected in his musical titles for many of his paintings.

Thorvald Hellesen: Pioneering Cubism (Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo) disinters an experimental artist who seems to be left out of the histories of Cubism. Grandson of a Norwegian prime minister, he ended up in Paris in time for the Cubist exhibitions and the periodical furore and was friends with Fernand Léger; one of his wives was Hélène Perdriat, a former dancer and artist and set designer in her own right. Hellesen embraced at least two styles of Cubism – the stringed instrument via geometry and the multi-viewpoint action. An opportunity to write something about him came up, so it’s just as well I bought the catalogue and what appears to the only monograph (and can find the Léger book I bought five or six years ago – and useful to have seen the Blaise Cendrars stuff at Morgan Library).

Of course, everyone (well, some art critics) has Vermeer (Rijksmuseum) in their top ten, presumably showing off that they got to see it. Having learnt from nearly not seeing Bosch and Bruegel, I booked early and was rewarded with seeing the thirty-odd of the surviving canvases (Girl with a Pearl Earring was back in Den Haag, but I’d had that moreorless to myself in the Mauritshuis). Somewhere, I seem to have developed a thing for Low Countries artists and I guess he suffers a little from not having the width of, say, Rembrandt, in which to locate his individual works. There’s a thing for light and for including Meaningful Paintings, and they have a different sense of enigma from the works Nicolaes Maes, even when (seeing women reading letters, women drinking in presence of a man) caught mid-act. There’s less sense of complicity. Anyway, maybe I’ll write up my thoughts properly – and I note I read one of the books on how he cheated with a camera obscura.

Alice Neel: Hot Off the Griddle (Barbican) was one of those big survey shows that the Barbican can specialise in – and I wished I’d paid more attention at the Talbot Rice Gallery a decade or so ago. It’s pretty well all portraits, of family, friends, art dealers, authors, artists, with a focus on the sitter rather than the location. And speaking of locations, I found the apartment where she lived in New York (and of course I’d seen Pull My Daisy years ago, but I think my attention had been drawn to the Beats rather than the women).

I am still in two minds about Hilma af Klint & Mondrian: Forms of Life (Tate Modern) – Mondrian is always glorious, even if the never-before-seen-in-public works mentioned in reviews have long been hidden on the walls of the Kuntsmuseum Den Haag. And I’ve pondered a bit before about his theosophical influences, but these are dialled up to eleven in af Klint. She had taken the philosophy/science/religion seriously and painted transformational works to please Rudolf Steiner. He seems underwhelmed and so she had the works locked away, having offered them to the main gallery in Stockholm. The best part of a century further on and there were queues around the block at Stockholm and New York. But is it any good? I suspect less is more.

And less is enough describes It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby (Brooklyn Museum), a pairing of the Picassos in the Brooklyn Museum and many of their other works by women. Gadsby has a definite thesis: no matter how brilliant and groundbreaking these works are, you have to confront his misogyny. There’s an uncomfortable age gap between him and his muses/girlfriends – although I wonder what the ages of consent were – and etchings such as the minotaur ones show a distinct lack of any consent from the sleeping women. I don’t remember laughing quite so much in an exhibition, whilst learning so much. (I’m not sure Gadsby is right to slate Picasso for his lack of political engagement aside from Guernica, but I suspect he was overly cautious.)

I was lucky to see Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life (Towner Eastbourne) – it was on my to do list at Wakefield, but I couldn’t make the dates work and tours to St Ives, Edinburgh and, I think, Norwich, were swallowed up in Covidgeddon. I think I hit the last day – quite a small selection, but more interesting than the one Tate Britain had a couple of years back. I don’t recall seeing the glass works before and her friendship with J.S. Bernal needs some digging into. I hadn’t got down in the UN Plaza in Manhattan, but I assume her sculpture there is off limits behind fences.

Gwen John (Pallant House, Chichester) is one of those cliché how to supress women artist figures – she only did portraits and she was clearly shy and her brother (Augustus) was louder… Except she’s there in Paris before and between the wars after her brother went home and his wife (her friend) joined her household). And she tried to walk to Italy, even if she only got to Toulouse. She demanded that Rodin used her as a model. I think there’s a whiff of bi-erasure about the exhibition (and a couple of friends feel that the sheer number of cats in her painting is proof if proof there need be). I need to spend more time with her work.

And finally, Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance (Fitzwilliam Museum), a return to Cambridge for the first time this decade I suspect and an exhibition about curation. The Fitzwilliam Museum was created by Richard Fitzwilliam, channelling his own inheritance from Sir Matthew Decker, a co-founder of the South Sea Company. This wealth is intimately tied up with the transatlantic slave trade, paying for the conspicuous display of the eighteenth and nineteenth century high society. Enslaved or indentured people (or their descendants) appear as appendages to family portraits, subverted by Barbara Walker’s reimagining of these by means of erasing the white people. And the museum includes many objects taken from African cultures or painting on wood harvested from the so-called New World. Curiously, depictions of Diasporic people from the seventeenth century look less racist than those from the end of the slave trade. This is not erasing history, but is a long overdue recalibration – which the Rijksmuseum, Mauritshuis and other galleries have been doing for years.