Nature by the uncool YBA, armoured ceramics and dizzying Aussie abstraction – the week in art

Cecily Brown blooms into life, Ashanti folklore is remade and three Indigenous Australians spill their ancient knowledge – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Cecily Brown: Picture Making
New nature-tastic works of kaleidoscopic, richly textured, painterly experimentation by the YBA who never felt cool enough to really be a YBA. Springing to life just as the blossoms around the Serpentine really start to bloom.
• Serpentine Gallery, London, until 6 September

Also showing

Phoebe Collings-James: A Rose, A Bridge, A House
Politically inclined ceramics – formed into armour and clay paintings – riffing on cuneiform writing and Ashanti folklore.
• Pitzhanger Manor, London, 1 April-14 June

Veronica Ryan: Multiple Conversations
A big celebration of the Turner prize-winning artist’s career, filled with over 100 works of ultra-conceptual sculpture.
• Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1 April-14 June

Frank Bowling: Seeking the Sublime
This mini-retrospective of the pioneering British-Guyanese painter takes you from his earliest figurative exploits all the way to his super-influential approach to abstraction.
• The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until 17 January

Portals to Place: Three Papunya Tula Artists
Dizzying abstraction is a vehicle for ancient knowledge in this show by three indigenous Australian artists, Lorna Ward Napanangka, Yukultji Napangati and John West Tjupurrula.
• Edel Assanti, London, until 16 May

Image of the week

War is once again tearing the Middle East apart, just as it did 20 years ago when Peter van Agtmael took this photograph of an American soldier having a break in a daffodil yellow living room on a night raid in Rawa, Iraq. All that weaponry and hi-tech tactical gear contrasts so awkwardly with the kitsch interior of this everyday Iraqi home. But the real incongruity is the soldier’s face. Whether he’s bored to tears or frozen in emotionless inability to process his situation, his blank expression tells you that war isn’t just dull most of the time, it’s totally pointless too. Read the full story here.

What we learned

An epic retrospective of Henri Matisse explodes with stunning colour

After an $82m expansion, New York’s New Museum is on the ‘threshold of a new age’

Donald Trump installed a new statue of ‘American hero’ Columbus in Washington DC

Hurvin Anderson’s paintings explore his black heritage with startling intensity

Works by Michaelina Wautier misattributed for 300 years make an astounding show

Ministers are considering charging tourists to access UK national museum collections

Monet has taken to greasepaint and burst into song in a new musical about his life

Masterpiece of the week

Paul Cézanne, Montagne Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine, c 1887

Cézanne ditched the glitz, glamour and opportunities of Paris for good in the early 1880s, leaving behind his circle of impressionists and all of their ideas in the process. With a hefty inheritance from his Provençal father, Cézanne could dedicate himself fully to his one great muse: a big lump of a mountain on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence called Mont Sainte-Victoire. He painted it over and over and over. It was an obsession, a compulsion. People talk about it as if he were just exploring all the ways light bounced off its grey surface, turning it pink and yellow, or trying to paint new moods and atmospheres, or use it as a symbol of the area and its people. But I see it as almost total abstraction, a conceptual devotion to a single subject, painted so many times that its form and meaning totally dissolve, leaving behind only shape and colour. I can barely see the mountain and pine tree in this stunning landscape painting, I see only triangles and curves, greens and greys and yellows, painting in its purest, simplest form.
• Courtauld Gallery, London

• Jonathan Jones is away

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