Exhibition of the week
Rear Window
Stuck indoors for lockdown? This witty online show suggests it’s a bit like being James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. In this cinema classic, Stewart plays an ace photographer trapped in his apartment with a broken leg. Like Stewart’s curious voyeur watching his neighbours, you are tempted here to “spy” on seductive artworks by Jeff Wall, Ellen Altfest, Gillian Carnegie and more. Good fun.
• White Cube online.
Also showing
Becoming Richard Burton
A Welsh icon is celebrated in this nostalgic exhibition at Cardiff’s National Museum, which is open.
• National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, from tomorrow until 11 April.
Artemisia
With its five-star survey of the sword-wielding baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi temporarily closed, the National Gallery offers a new online curator’s tour with Letizia Treves.
• National Gallery online.
Mary Quant
This celebration of the 1960s icon is open with social distancing.
• V&A Dundee until 17 January.
Paolo Pellegrin
Black-and-white images of a world in danger by the globetrotting Magnum photographer.
• Michael Hoppen Gallery online until 10 January.
Image of the week
From the tomb of Tutankhamun to Raphael’s Sistine masterpieces, Adam Lowe makes perfect copies for governments and galleries the world over. But he’s not a forger – he’s a liberator. Read the interview.
What we learned
The art world is divided over whether to sell to stay alive …
… while a new Nigerian museum could solve the Benin bronzes row …
… and UK museums and galleries fear Covid poses existential threat
Manchester is knocking down its modernist Tadao Ando wall in Piccadilly Gardens
Angelina Jolie is to direct a biopic of photographer Don McCullin
We probed the mystery of a vanishing Botticelli
A photobook on slaughterhouses punches for the vegan cause
Maggi Hambling responded to her Wollstonecraft statue critics
Steve McQueen celebrated black NHS nurses through the decades
Johny Pitts searched for identity in his home town …
… while we got the inside track on California
Ugly buildings are on the rise
Homeless people drew their own graphic novel
Stefan Brüggemann has words about the US-Mexican border
Kei Nomiyama followed fireflies
Photo Vogue festival looked at the changing face of fashion
We remembered rock photographer Baron Wolman
Masterpiece of the week
Saint John the Evangelist, about 1478, by Hans Memling
There’s a tender, natural quality to this depiction of a good-looking saint. The figure is still and calm but not stiff or formal. Memling, born in Germany, was the most in-demand painter in Bruges, in Flanders, in the 1470s, attracting commissions from all over Europe. This work is a side-wing of an altarpiece commissioned by the Welsh-born Sir John Donne, a courtier of Edward IV of England. Bruges became a hot spot of European art in the early 1400s when Jan van Eyck perfected a revolutionary new way of depicting reality. Memling’s sweet Saint John shows how he has mastered that intimate realism while giving it a more elegant, almost Italian grace.
• National Gallery, London.
Don’t forget
To follow us on Twitter: @GdnArtandDesign.
Sign up to the Art Weekly newsletter
If you don’t already receive our regular roundup of art and design news via email, please sign up here.
