Sign up to the Art Weekly newsletter
Data protection laws are changing in the UK, under an initiative called GDPR. Make sure you continue to receive our email roundup of art and design news by confirming your wish here.
Exhibition of the week
Egon Schiele
The incendiary genius of the Austro-Hungarian empire’s most dangerous artist hits Merseyside a century after his death in the influenza epidemic of 1918.
• Tate Liverpool, 24 May-23 September.
Also showing
Tacita Dean: Landscape
Moving explorations of history, place and time by an artist who straddles the photographic and the handmade.
• Royal Academy, London, 19 May-12 August.
Francesca Woodman
The gothic vision of this short-lived artist fills her black-and-white photographs with spooky power.
• Tate Liverpool, 24 May-23 September.
Phyllida Barlow
A new permanent installation by the veteran sculptor celebrates 10 years of this outstanding sculpture park.
• Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh.
Julian Schnabel
The latest splashy daubs by the master of neo-expressionist painterly swagger.
• Pace Galleries, London, until 22 June.
Masterpiece of the week
St Jerome (1525-30) by Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo
There is an introspective evening quiet to the paintings of Savoldo that makes them arresting and absorbing. He worked in Venice in the age of Titian, and everything about this picture is exquisitely Venetian. It is painted in oil on canvas, which may not sound unusual but was still a new combination, pioneered in Venice – and a magical one. Oil paint with its capacity for many subtle layers has a particular affinity for the complex texture of canvas, as this painting beautifully demonstrates. That ethereal sky, those blue mountains, the warm flesh of St Jerome – Savoldo creates a quietly intoxicating array of poetic hues. What makes this painting especially ingenious is the cool shadowy foreground that contrasts with distant brightness. This negative light at the front of a scene goes against expectations and draws us into Jerome’s meditations, to share his long dark night of the soul.
• National Gallery, London
Image of the week
Drinkers on the Bund in Shanghai
Liu Tao traipsed through two different districts of the world’s most populous city for his 2014 series, Shanghai Tian Wa, on either side of the Suzhou river: Tian Tong Lu, a street running through an area under construction, and Wai Tan, on the waterfront. Capturing fragments of street life in this still-exploding metropolis, his camera often hones in on the dispossessed, marginalised and incongruous bystanders of China’s breakneck modernisation.
What we learned
Goa is best viewed from a dog’s eye perspective
Shipwrecks don’t just happen on the Mediterranean’s European coast
Ian Hislop’s getting Banksy into the British Museum
Maggi Hambling will make a statue commemorating Mary Wollstonecraft
The US government censored photo-documentation of the Great Depression
Modigliani probably isn’t worth $157m
Victorian ceramicist William de Morgan is more home decor than high art
It’s all bear suits and bow ties at this year’s LensCulture Portrait awards
A salvaged chunk of an east London housing estate is going on show at the Venice Biennale
Sydney-based artist Nasim Nasr defies the laws of naturism
London’s Design Museum is Europe’s best museum
Tacita Dean is at the top of her game
Historic England have forgotten about brutalism
Will Alsop was still thinking big before his death
Before he hit outer space, Stanley Kubrick shot the mean streets
A new Canberra exhibition is helping rewrite Tasmanian history
A giant jade Buddha is settling down in Victoria, Australia
David Chipperfield’s Royal Academy extension is going underground
Rockefeller art collection breaks 22 world records
Don’t forget
To follow us on Twitter: @GdnArtandDesign