Exhibition of the week
Edinburgh art festival
Alberta Whittle, Jesse Jones and Grayson Perry lead the exhibitions threaded through Edinburgh, while outside the city at Jupiter Artland is a boozy installation by Lindsey Mendick.
• Various venues, Edinburgh, until 27 August.
Also showing
Oliver Hemsley
Expressive paintings by this artist who survived an unprovoked stabbing while a student.
• TKE Studios, Margate, 12 August to 15 October.
The Artistic Home
Dreamy ceramics from the Victorian aesthetic movement, by the likes of William De Morgan and Margaret E Thompson.
• V&A, London, until 25 September.
Civilization
Photographs revealing the state of today’s world. So don’t expect to be cheered up.
• Saatchi Gallery, London, until 17 September.
The Offbeat Sari
How this traditional garment is being taken in playful contemporary directions.
• The Design Museum, London, until 17 September.
Image of the week
Jamie Reid’s promotional poster for the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen. The artist, who has died at the age of 76, captured the iconoclastic energy of the punk era. Read more.
What we learned
Abstract artist Brice Marden, who has died aged 84, reinvented painting
Miniatures are having a moment
Will Gompertz has a new gig at Sir John Soane’s Museum
A museum wants to identify the war hero without a name
‘Avant garde It girl’ Tina Modotti was a revolutionary photographer
Audiences have had enough of gizmos and pricey tickets
Mick’n’Keith do Dartford: statues of the Rolling Stones were unveiled in their home town
Artists are reclaiming AI – with the help of cats, bees and drag queens
A portrait of beloved actor Noni Hazlehurst won the Archibald prize
A joyful sculpture has won one of Australia’s richest art prizes
Masterpiece of the week
Dedham Vale, John Constable, 1828
This Romantic masterpiece hangs in your mind’s eye like a rain-filled cloud. It snags in memory, in a way only great art can. Yet there is nothing about Constable that can be hyped or made groovily contemporary. He has simply painted a Suffolk scene on a breezy day, nearly 200 years ago. Why is it so compelling? The colours are complex and real, as if a window on to the living world has opened in the gallery wall. The light seems to be moving through the painting, which is so fluid and supple in its mottled textures that you feel the vitality of nature with sudden intensity. Constable achieves in paint what his contemporaries did in poetry and music. Seeing this is like reading Wordsworth, while listening to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. It is as joyous and moving as a landscape can be: a quiet miracle.
• Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh.
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