Exhibition of the week
Medicine Galleries
The Science Museum has now reopened and if you want a wider view of the pandemic that closed it, you won’t find a more spectacular history of human responses to illness than its curious and fascinating gallery of medicine past and present.
• Science Museum, London, free permanent display.
Also showing
Mary Quant
David Hockney, Mick Jagger, John Lennon – male heroes of pop in 1960s Britain are numerous, but Mary Quant did more than anyone to define that liberating decade. Her designs shaped the look of the age and still flow through fashion today. The futuristic V&A, recently seen in TV drama Succession, brings swinging London to Scotland.
• V&A Dundee, 27 August-17 January.
Phyllida Barlow
The queen of sculptural sprawl shows a selection of her messy masterworks. Echoes of a blitzed childhood haunt these colourful constellations of broken images and shattered materials. The gallery offers up her work, which makes beauty from the ruined, as therapy for our damaged age. It’s worth trying this exuberant medicine.
• Firstsite, Colchester, until 11 October.
Scene Through Wood
Woodcut prints are one of the oldest forms of reproduced art, originating in China and evolving in 15th-century Germany, yet this medieval art has prospered in modern times. Curated by Anne Desmet RA, selecting from private collections and the museum’s own works, this exhibition surveys wood engraving – a type of woodcut that creates layered and complex images – in the century since the Society of Wood Engravers was founded.
• Ashmolean, Oxford, end date tbc.
Eastern Encounters
India’s dominant empire when the British began to insert themselves was that of the Mughals. This glittering collection of superb miniatures reveals the richness and zest of their artistic traditions, which brilliantly mixed Islamic and European styles. Captivating portraits and sensual scenes reveal the sophistication of a civilisation that thrived into Victorian times.
• The Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh, until 31 January.
Arthur Lanyon
Arcade Laundry, the title of painter Arthur Lanyon’s solo show, is irresistible and it captures the chaotic urban energy of his art. Paradoxically, this painter of modern life is not only showing in the pastoral south-west, he lives and works there, in Penzance. In fact, he is the grandson of Cornish modernist Peter Lanyon, whose abstract talent he appears to have inherited.
• Anima Mundi, St Ives, until 26 September.
Image of the week
Joining the ranks of England’s listed gardens alongside the rolling landscapes of Capability Brown are a range of unlikely sites from a 1980s car park near Heathrow airport to these ponds outside the old Jammie Dodgers factory in Moreton on the Wirral. They’re among 20 postwar living landscapes and buildings that have been awarded protected status in a bold move by Historic England and the Gardens Trust to highlight the everyday marvels around us.
The watercourse was designed by Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, one of the leading landscape architects of the 20th century, in the early 1950s, and recalls a theatrical water feature from an Italian Renaissance garden. Each of its 10 pools is tapered to create a false perspective, giving the illusion of distance. Jellicoe imbued it with an element of fantasy, writing of mounds in the landscape as the “extended shape of two serpents”, his landforms suggesting the “vast prehistoric monsters” that would have inhabited the submerged forest that once existed on site.
What we learned
Four queer women defying the snow: Mikael Owunna’s best photograph
Overwhelming yet hopeful: photographs of depression win Wellcome prize
Who really owns this Nazi-looted Rousseau painting?
Government ‘indifference and even disdain’ make its current culture policy a shambles
It’s an alien invasion! EC comics – in pictures
Access to art could drift away as lockdown takes its toll
Times are harder than ever for Australia’s rural arts communities
Mass cultural gatherings are too important to be killed off by Covid
A Tokyo architect brought new meaning to the public toilet
London artists turned studio destruction into an artistic celebration
Enlightened sharks move into Regent’s Canal for a lesson in urbanism
A digital exhibition celebrates a century of women’s suffrage in the US …
… and 100 British artists fly the flag for female empowerment
Classical art inspires the mansplaining satire we didn’t know we needed
Photographer Justin Hamel searches for Great Depression-era murals in US post offices
Picasso’s daughter paints a picture of her doting father
The Royal Academy’s spectacular impressionist display surprised and intrigued
Rembrandt enthusiasts might love the Dutch master a bit too much
Buckingham Palace’s art collection will go on display for the very first time
Student artists exhibit their final shows online
Designs for a waterside Hampshire new town are … watered down
Brilliant bird photographers soar to the top of the pecking order …
… And we pay tribute to Matt Herron, chronicler of the US civil rights movement
A dark shadow lurked behind the smiles of interwar Germany
The art quiz puzzled in Westminster, Manchester and finally, after 100 quizzes, Art UK sets the questions, with a prize on offer
Judit Reigl: Hungarian artist who subverted gender in powerful abstract paintings
Masterpiece of the week
John Plampin, c.1752, by Thomas Gainsborough
The Suffolk sky is heavy and dark, laden with wet brooding clouds, with only a small glimpse of blue beyond. The Victorian art critic John Ruskin mocked Italian and French painters for only showing bright blue or golden skies and praised Gainsborough as one of the first artists to capture complex English weather. In fact this painting has echoes of 17th century Dutch artists who painted a similarly damp northern landscape. Yet Gainsborough is painting his own part of the world and you can definitely feel the presence of East Anglia in this muggy masterpiece. Plampin poses nonchalantly, a precocious Romantic at his happiest on a country walk.
• National Gallery, London.
Don’t forget
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