Exhibition of the week
Carolee Schneemann
Orgiastic meditations on enfleshment by this outrageous pioneer of performance and body art.
• Barbican, London, from 8 September until 8 January
Also showing
Visions of Ancient Egypt
Chris Ofili, David Hockney and more get inspired by the Pharaohs.
• Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, from 3 September until 1 January
The Lost King: Imagining Richard III
Art and armour help to bring 15th-century England to life, including Paul Delaroche’s painting of the doomed nephews of Richard III.
• Wallace Collection, London, from 7 September until 8 January
Marcus Coates
For this Artangel project Coates has collaborated with five people who have experienced psychosis.
Churchill Gardens Estate, London, from 4 September until 30 October
Sturtevant
This subversive 1960s artist who remade other artists’ work is now regarded as a pioneer of postmodernism.
• Thaddaeus Ropac, London from 8 September until 3 October
Image of the week
Treefrog pool party by Brandon Güell
For this photograh, highly commended in the wildlife photographer of the year contest, Güell waded chest-deep into murky water in the Osa peninsula where a gathering of male gliding treefrogs were calling. At dawn thousands of females arrived at the pool to mate and lay their eggs on overhanging palm fronds. Here, unmated males search for females to mate with.
• See more of the best work in this year’s contest here
What we learned
Canadian city pulls huge bronze bison sculpture amid concerns over image of colonialism
The brutal sale of Keith Haring’s Radiant Baby reflects a genius cut short
An Instagram meme of ‘four lads in jeans’ has become a statue in Birmingham
Antiquities shattered in the Beirut port explosion have been painstakingly reconstructed
Lim Heng Swee has been creating digital artworks of cats camouflaged as landscapes
Guardian photographer Linda Nylind has found a subersive side to Southwold on the Suffolk coast
Photographers have chosen their favourite shots of Britain’s departing prime minister
Yinka Ilori’s patterns and architectural designs to get their own show at London Design Museum
The Natural History Museum revealed some of this year’s best wildlife photography
Masterpiece of the week
Melancholy III by Edvard Munch, 1902
This is one of Munch’s gentler works. It savours gloom like like a fine wine. We don’t know why the young man sits in sad introspection by the shore, contemplating those dark Nordic waters. But there’s a philosophical acceptance to his pose and perhaps a hint of creativity. For this is a portrait of “melancholy”, not madness. The way the youth rests his head on his hand repeats the conventional pose of melancholy in medieval and Renaissance art - most famously Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I. Dürer’s image of Melancholia as a winged “genius” surrounded by tools of sculpture and architecture identifies this mood with the visionary darkness of the artist. This is Munch’s own acknowledgment that his art is born of inner suffering.
• British Museum, London
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