Exhibition of the week
Monet & Architecture
This exhibition is a beguiling journey into the mind of Monet that reveals the serious purpose behind his visual brilliance.
National Gallery, London, 9 April-29 July.
Also showing
Tracey Emin
A warm 20-metre-long message for everyone arriving at St Pancras station is Emin’s most ambitious public artwork to date.
St Pancras International station, London, from 10 April.
Bumped Bodies
Sarah Lucas, Rebecca Warren, Enrico David and more in a survey of embodiments in contemporary art.
Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 10 April-12 August.
Linder Sterling
The fruits of a residency by the punk artist at this splendid stately home.
Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, until 21 October.
The Classical Now
Yves Klein’s Blue Venus is the best thing in this interesting but inadequately worked-out and slightly superficial survey of how contemporary artists draw on the heritage of ancient Greece and Rome.
King’s College, London, until 28 April.
Masterpiece of the week
The Enchanted Castle (1664) by Claude Lorrain
Before Claude Monet there was Claude Lorrain, traditionally known simply as Claude. This 17th-century French artist who settled in Rome created, alongside his contemporary Nicolas Poussin, the idea of landscape as a lofty, serious artistic genre full of symbolism as well as natural beauty. In this painting, the looming classical building by the sea adds a sinister note to a landscape of dreamlike luminosity. In the foreground, the ancient Roman story of Cupid and Psyche is being played out. The soft twilit atmosphere is strange and eerie. No wonder it helped inspire John Keats to weave the reverie of his poem Ode to a Nightingale, with its haunting description of this picture’s “Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn”.
National Gallery, London.
Image of the week
“I created this image of a 1955 scene at Vancouver’s Hastings Park racing track in 2008,” says the artist Stan Douglas, whose exhibition DCTs and Scenes from the Blackout is at David Zwirner gallery in New York until 7 April. “We seated the performers on the kind of wooden benches they would have been sitting on and gave them exact facsimiles of the racing cards and magazines they would have bought … This image captured the moment when the group gave way to the individual. Some turn into themselves, others try to reach out and make contact with others. There’s the guy in the bottom left telling off-colour jokes, and the woman is clearly offended.”
What we learned this week
Australian photographer Mike O’Meally has been chasing the great American dream
Artists from Belarus and Russia created a clown festival for April Fools’ Day
Iranian art is on show in London and selling fast
The V&A may return looted Ethiopian treasures on long-term loan
Photographing Istanbul by night can get you locked up
Cristiano Ronaldo’s sculptor has had a second go
Todd Webb was responsible for some pioneering documentary photography in 1950s sub-Saharan Africa
Mexico City has a gay cruising scene on its underground network
The Ashmolean in Oxford is brimful of little-known US modernist painters
We have skateboarding to thank for a sensible South Bank renovation
Junya Ishigami designs buildings that float
Richard Burton’s childhood cinema is to be refurbished as a community hub
Tate Liverpool’s chief art handler has taken over the gallery
… and fine art is taking over Instagram
Don’t forget
To follow us on Twitter: @GdnArtandDesign.
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