Exhibition of the week
Edinburgh Art festival
Vincent van Gogh, Tracey Emin and Burke and Hare can all be found in this sprawling visual answer to the fringe, along with canalside commissions and community projects.
• Edinburgh venues, from 28 July until 28 August
Also showing
Artemisia Gentileschi
A virtual-reality encounter with this baroque avenger is given weight by her actual painting Susanna and the Elders, which lives here.
• Burghley House, Lincolnshire, from 23 July until 31 August
Traces
Flemish Renaissance drawings including sketches by the wondrous Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
• Courtauld Gallery, London,, until 25 September
Frank Auerbach
Last few weeks to catch this outstanding encounter with a modern great.
• Newlands House Gallery, Petworth, until 14 August
Ilana Savdie
Paintings that rejoice in the subversive spirit of the carnivalesque.
• White Cube Bermondsey, London, until 11 September
Image of the week
The acclaimed pop artist Claes Oldenburg has died at age 93. He specialised in monumental sculptures where mundane objects suddenly became much larger than life. See a gallery of his work here.
What we learned
Painter Frank Bowling is an abstract sculptor on the side
Boris Johnson’s fantasy city-within-a-city is now a Ballardian ghost town
Europe’s tallest piece of street art was finished in Leicester
Spanish customs seized a €450,000 Picasso sketch that hadn’t been declared by a passenger
A new exhibition in London will examine surrealism’s influence on design
Magnum photographer Colby Deal captures black life in his native Houston, Texas
Masterpiece of the week
Portrait of Margaret Lindsay of Evelick: The Artist’s Wife by Allan Ramsay (1758-60)
The noble born Margaret Lindsay eloped with the highly successful but far from aristocratic Scottish painter Allan Ramsay, marrying him in Edinburgh to her father’s fury. She seems a sensitive and serious soul in his portrait of her, engaging your eye with frankness and self-awareness as she is surrounded by a delicate mixture of pale pinks and blues, the flowers beside her playing off her ribbons and lace. Ramsay is an artist of huge emotional insight. He worked in the Scottish Enlightenment when Edinburgh thinkers were questioning nature and society. As we gaze on his wife’s characterful presence we see how he interrogates the very nature of individuality.
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• This article was amended on 24 July 2022. Europe’s tallest piece of street art is in Leicester, not Leeds as stated in an earlier version.
