Tracey Emin’s lust for life, gaudy Egyptian treasure and Don McCullin hits 90 – the week in art
Emin reminds us of the deep power of art, Ramses II parades his megalomaniac gold and Rose Wylie’s witty paintings finally get their due
Exhibition of the week
Tracey Emin: A Second Life
The most serious and intelligent, as well as passionate, artist of her generation proves art can still touch us all and express what it is to be alive.
• Tate Modern, London, until 31 August
Also showing
Ramses and the Pharaoh’s Gold
Egypt’s most ambitious pharaoh, Ramses II, brings his positively Trumpian vision to London in a show of megalomaniac wonders.
• Battersea power station, London, from 28 February until 31 May
Rose Wylie: The Picture Comes First
This splashy, frenetic, sometimes compelling painter struts her stuff. But it does get a bit silly at times.
• Royal Academy, London, from 28 February until 19 April
Making Waves
The art of Japanese woodblock printing gets a much-deserved survey, from the Edo pleasure quarter all the way to Mount Fuji.
• York Art Gallery, until 30 August
Don McCullin
A survey of the celebrated war photographer’s work for his 90th birthday.
• Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, until 12 April
Image of the week
The PhotoVogue festival coinciding with fashion week in Milan covers a wide range of strands, but the central theme is Women by Women, which celebrates how women express and imagine themselves while confronting the growing fragility of their rights and visibility. Here a bodybuilder from south India challenges ideas about femininity, and the notion that strength and muscularity are masculine. See a gallery of highlights from the show here.
What we learned
Bodmin’s new festival will attract art lovers to this less visited corner of Cornwall
David Hockney’s first English landscape is on show for the first time in 30 years
Rose Wylie is still making her wild, witty, sometimes football-inspired art at 91
Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia church has been completed after 144 years
Two artists showing in parallel use secondhand clothes to make monumental art
Free entry to UK national museums and galleries might be ending
Artemisia Gentileschi brought real truth to the much misrepresented Mary Magdalene
Julia Kochetova’s astonishing war photographs reflect her experience as a Ukrainian
Masterpiece of the week
The Birth of the Virgin by Master of the Osservanza, c.1440
The lives of women in medieval Italy are depicted around a huge bed with a gold-coloured bedspread in this painting from 15th-century Siena. In the big bed, a new mother rests, while female friends, relatives and helpers go about their work: one holds the newborn baby, another fills a washing bowl, while a servant brings a jug on her head to a woman who is heating food for the exhausted mother. In a world without any medicine to speak of, restorative snacks were considered crucial after childbirth. In this religious painting, such familiar details of everyday life make the story of the Virgin emotional and richly human, especially for a female audience.
• National Gallery, London
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