Exhibition of the week
Stanley Kubrick
Enter the mind of the man who filmed A Clockwork Orange … if you dare. Kubrick’s images are masterpieces of modern art, from Alex and his droogs in the Korova Milkbar to the blood flowing from the Overlook Hotel’s elevator in The Shining. Read our five-star review here.
• Design Museum, London, until 15 September.
Also showing
Massimo Vitali
Sensual and ironic photographs of crowded Italian beaches that are allegories of modern life.
• Mazzoleni, London, until 24 May.
Gerhard Richter
Tourist haunts including Tate Modern are smeared with colour in Richter’s painted-over snapshots.
• Gagosian Davies Street, London, until 8 June.
Cy Twombly
The great conceptual painter explores natural categories in works inspired by the ancient Roman scientist Pliny the Elder.
• Bastian, London, until 15 June.
The Naked Form in Modern Chinese Art
This show reveals how Chinese artists discovered the nude in the 20th century.
• Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, until 15 September.
Masterpiece of the week
Young Man Holding a Skull (Vanitas), 1626-28, by Frans Hals
He is not Prince Hamlet … but he looks like he could be. Just as Shakespeare’s tragic hero ponders over the skull of Yorick, this young man theatrically holds a skull that is a symbol of life’s brevity. But he doesn’t seem to have absorbed the message. He is full of youthful energy, joy and vitality that make his holding forth on death seem fake. This contrast between hopeful youth and death’s despair is heightened by Hals’s revolutionary style. He paints fast in broad, impulsive bursts of colour to communicate the flow and flux of a living moment. Even the skull is freely daubed. Like the youth, the art of Frans Hals is full of life. And yet the skull weighs the picture down. A misunderstood warning is still a warning.
• National Gallery, London.
Image of the week
Pauline Bunny, 1997, by Sarah Lucas
Lucas’s sculpture, made from stuffed pairs of tights, went on show at Tate Britain as the gallery rehung the last 60 years of its displays with work by only female artists – also including Bridget Riley, Rachel Whiteread and Monster Chetwynd. Male artists have been jettisoned from the free galleries for at least a year. The gallery said the display offered “a significant moment to recognise and celebrate a selection of Britain’s most important artists”. Our critic hoped it was a preamble to ‘“something more substantial”.
• Sixty Years, Tate Britain, London.
What we learned
A Wakefield wasteland is now a £1.8m sculpture garden
New York is celebrating the work of punk’s designers
Artists have challenged Tate’s call to resume contact with Anthony d’Offay
Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff created some of the weirdest British surrealist images
Edmund de Waal studied the language of exile in Venice’s Jewish ghetto
Mae West’s lips will for ever remain British
Michael Stipe’s photography is more than a hobby
Helvetica Now takes the font into the internet age
An art revolution was started by a flea
A new biography draws out Bauhaus’s modernist master, Walter Gropius
Ukrainian Easter eggs are wonders of design
As the 500th anniversary of his death approaches, we asked: who was Leonardo da Vinci?
Cartoon beasts are invading the New York subway
Plans for a Bansky museum in Port Talbot are running aground
Ioana Cîrlig has found colour in black corners of Romania
Chris Ingram has documented trauma in ex-soldiers
Kyotographie is taking a fresh look at Japan and more
Cuba’s old cinemas have been forgotten or transformed
Architects had plenty to say about Notre Dame’s spire
Don’t forget
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