Spooky shores, folkloric visions and Ireland’s mysterious landscapes reveal a secret – the week in art
Georges Seurat takes an eerie trip to the seaside, Yinka Shonibare puts empire in its place and Sean Scully reveals his source
Exhibition of the week
Seurat and the Sea
If you thought French 19th-century paintings of the seaside were all happy impressionism, you will be disconcerted, then absorbed by Seurat’s eerie modernist shores. Read the review.
• Courtauld Gallery, London, until 17 May
Also showing
Delaine Le Bas: Un-Fair-Ground
A mural made for Glastonbury is at the heart of this artist’s folkloric vision of Britain today.
• Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, until 31 May
Yinka Shonibare
With irony and wit, Shonibare spans global history and puts empire in its place.
• The Arc, Winchester, from 14 February to 3 June
Sean Scully
Photographs of Ireland’s mysterious landscapes reveal a secret source of Scully’s abstract art.
• Lisson Gallery, London, from 18 February to 9 May
Jamie Mills: A Firework for Vincent
Sculptures that evoke both Robert Rauschenberg and the Cornish landscape.
• Anima Mundi, St Ives, until 22 March
Image of the week
The French architect Renée Gailhoustet, who once had her nose broken by Jean-Marie Le Pen, created eco-brutalist apartment blocks with cascading terraces that seemed to have surrendered to nature. They are still loved by their residents and when she died in 2023, the residents of Le Liégat, a social housing block she completed in 1982, put up a large handmade sign saying: “Merci Renée.” There is an exhibition dedicated to her on now in London. Read more here.
What we learned
Ai Weiwei had no fear in going back to China on a momentous trip to see his mother
Cherie Blair didn’t model for long for exhausting artist Euan Uglow
“Only women can paint great female nudes”
AI has cast doubt on who painted two works attributed to Jan van Eyck
Plans for a grandiose “Arc de Trump” in Washington were said to “go full Roman”
The Grade II-listing of London’s Southbank Centre vindicates a brutalist glory
Lucian Freud’s paintings are as brilliant as his drawings are terrible
A Rembrandt lion drawing raised $18m for big cat conservation
The “Lowry effect” is rejuvenating Salford and Manchester
Masterpiece of the week
A Caprice With a Ruined Arch by Francesco Guardi, c.1775
Why are ruins fascinating? Everything and everyone becomes a ruin eventually. Entropy, the tendency of order to decay into chaos, is a fact of physics as well as everyday experience. But in the past, as now, the shiny and new was often valued above the timeworn: old churches were destroyed in the Renaissance, for instance, to make way for bigger, “better” ones. This painting shows how in the 18th century that attitude was turned upside down. For the first time, broken old buildings were cherished as atmospheric, picturesque wonders. Guardi is so in love with ruins that he invents one, imagining a crumbled, partly collapsed medieval abbey or palace against a blue Italian sky. When was it built, who lived here? He invites you to imagine this architecture’s glorious past while savouring the melancholy beauty of its present.
• National Gallery, London
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