Exhibition of the week
Mark Rothko: The Seagram Murals
The greatest abstract paintings in Britain, commissioned for a New York restaurant but given by Rothko to the Tate, cast their dark spell all over again.
• Tate St Ives, Cornwall, until 5 January
Also showing
Hockney and Piero: A Longer Look
Intimate encounter between the renowned British painter and Renaissance genius Piero della Francesca, whose masterpiece The Baptism of Christ is owned by the National Gallery.
• National Gallery, London from 8 August until 27 October
El Anatsui
Survey of this magic realist whose redemptive art creates beauty from the discarded and unloved.
• Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, until 29 September
Royal Portraits
Photographs of the Windsors, from Cecil Beaton to Andy Warhol whose portrait of Elizabeth II is based on a photo by Peter Grugeon, and sprinkled with diamond dust.
• King’s Gallery, London, until 6 October
Jenny Holzer
Pioneering art of the information age in one of the excellent shows from the Artist Rooms collection that spread top-class modern art around Britain.
• Attenborough Arts Centre, Leicester, until 29 September
Image of the week
A vibrant portrait of the LGBTQ+ and human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell, by Sarah Jane Moon, has been hung in the National Portrait Gallery’s History Makers gallery as part of a drive to better reflect the diversity of the UK. The 72-year-old activist’s rainbow tie celebrates almost six decades of fighting for LGBTQ+ rights. Tatchell, who has experienced more than 300 violent assaults and has been arrested or detained by police more than 100 times, said he was “delighted and honoured” to see it “alongside so many esteemed public figures … I love the bold, expressive, joyful style, which reflects the spirit of my campaigns,” he said. Read the full story
What we learned
Retrospective of Peter Kennard’s furious protest art is also a work in progress
Artist David Medalla took photos in defiance of a stroke that left him paralysed
Bernini’s violence to a sculpture of his lover Costanza reveals a lot about patriarchy
Paris marks the centenary of Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism with a major show
Wrexham, the city where our art critic grew up, has become a culture hub since he left
The Olympics’ controversial Last Supper was actually depicting Greek gods
A London school is reviving the world’s endangered sacred arts
Tony Shiels, painter and creator of the ‘Loch Ness muppet’, has died aged 86
Masterpiece of the week
Anna and the Blind Tobit by Rembrandt, circa 1630
Why would a painter try to depict the experience of blindness? For Rembrandt, the sightless Tobit, whose story is told in the Book of Tobit in the Old Testament Apocrypha, may have access to a mystery beyond the visible. This painting lures us towards that enigma. The white, harshly bright daylight framed by the window seems empty and dead. By contrast, the shadowy interior of Tobit’s room in its deepening darkness is an image of the inner sanctum of consciousness. Rembrandt searches in these shadows for what cannot be pictured – and anticipates the abstract expressionism of Rothko.
• National Gallery, London
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