Exhibition of the week
Art and Artifice: Fakes from the Collection
The strange and disconcerting history of art forgery is laid bare by the Courtauld’s detectives.
• Courtauld Gallery, London, until 8 October
Also showing
Anselm Kiefer
Last few weeks to see the most startling and powerful contemporary art exhibition of the year so far.
• White Cube, London, until 20 August
The Surrealist Hand
The peculiar ways the surrealists obsessed about hands, in a free display featuring Salvador Dalí and Méret Oppenheim.
• Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern 2), Edinburgh until 7 January
Bouke de Vries
Porcelain responses to this magical museum’s treasure, The Rake’s Progress by Hogarth.
• Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, until 10 September
Louise Bourgeois
Scary spiders to make you spill your ice-cream in a seaside outing for the French dream artist.
• Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool, until 9 September
Image of the week
Designed by Gerard Goalen and opened in 1960, Our Lady of Fatima church in Harlow, Essex, may these days be most famous as the cover star of the Chemical Brothers’ 1998 album, Brothers Gonna Work It Out. But connoisseurs of its modernist design have long admired its innovative, “in-the-round” design, with a freestanding altar and vibrantly coloured glass windows bathing the church in glorious light. Now it has been given Grade II* listing by the UK government on the advice of Historic England to protect its historic and architectural significance. Read the full story
What we learned
Magritte painted two bowler-hatted men over a portrait of his wife
A tea shop in Khartoum before the bombs: Ala Kheir’s best photograph
William Morris has traded wallpaper for football kits
Artists with brain injuries raised vital questions about who gets to make art
Digitalised works by 30,000 artists are being sent to the moon
Babies appreciate Van Gogh just as much as adults do
A tiny street in downtown New York birthed a generation of artists – before it was demolished
Masterpiece of the week
Misia Sert by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1904
It may look like a gentle, soft-focus portrait from a lost age but this is a painting of one of the great movers and shakers of the modernist avant garde. Misia Sert, a gifted pianist who married a wealthy banker, had a hand in some of the early 20th century’s definitive artistic moments. She suggested to some of her friends they collaborate on a ballet, which resulted in the modernist extravaganza Parade, with music by Erik Satie and cubist costumes and sets by Picasso. Another friend, Marcel Proust, based two characters in In Search of Lost Time on her. Painted in the year she divorced her first husband, this portrait shows her enraptured by a thought, maybe hearing music in her head, as Renoir engages passionately with the power of her personality.
• National Gallery, London
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