German Punks, Scotland’s Impressionist Love Story, and a Pickle on the Roof: The Week in Art | Art and Design

exhibition of the week

A Taste for Impressionism: Modern French Art from Millet to Matisse
A newly discovered Van Gogh is among the highlights of this survey of Scotland’s love affair with Impressionism and its legacy, along with Monets and Matisses galore.
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburghfrom July 30 to November 13

also showing

Ishiuchi Miyako
This haunting photographer focuses her lens on the things we leave behind.
Stills Centre, Edinburghuntil October 8

Young and wild?Art in Germany in the 1980s: punk, painting and prints
The German neo-expressionist scene of the 1980s in all its unbridled intensity, including Elvira Bach, Ina Barfuss and Georg Baselitz.
Ashmolean Museum, Oxfordfrom July 30 to November 20

Houses fit for people: Tessa Lynch
Prints that explore alternative models of housing and collaborative play.
Edinburgh Engraversuntil September 18

George Shaw: The Local
This painter immerses you in his melancholic vision of modern Britain.
The Box, Plymouthuntil september 4

picture of the Week

Magnum’s Italian photographer Ferdinando Scianna has come to the end of a glorious six-decade career, but in an entertaining and insightful interview he says he thinks only a small percentage of the pictures he’s taken, including this one of shadows. play in their Sicilian hometown – they were good. Read the full interview here

what we learned

Italian Magnum photographer Ferdinando Scianna has reached the end of a glorious career

Damien Hirst plans to burn more than 5,000 of his paintings

An Australian artist is asking NZ$10,000 (£5,200) for a McDonald’s pickle hanging from a gallery ceiling.

Avant-garde feminist photography is exhibited in France

A secret art society in Kherson is producing harrowing visions of life under Russian occupation.

Artemisia Gentileschi’s Rome now exists in exciting virtual reality

Nina Katchadourian has recreated the incredible ordeal of a Scottish family adrift in a boat in the Pacific for 38 days

King Kong returns to Birmingham ahead of the Commonwealth Games

Nyaparu ‘William’ Gardiner’s stunning work captures the ranchers and landscape of his native Pilbara in Western Australia

Climate activists latched onto Botticelli’s Primavera

Arthur Lanyon’s new work shows the painter taking stock of major life events: the death of his father and the birth of his son.

The site of a Roman fort on Hadrian’s Wall has been rebuilt in wild colors to mark its 1,900 year anniversary.

The V&A awarded the best work of the year in illustration

masterpiece of the week

Christ crowned with thorns, workshop of Dirk Combats c. 1470-75
Crystalline spheres of salt water hang from the face of Christ. The shocking reality of his tears is just one of the ways this painting sets out to torment you with the most painful, pitiful, direct encounter it can create with the suffering of the incarnate son of God. His eyes are bloodshot from grief and suffering, his redness reflecting the dark blood that spills down his forehead as the crown of thorns cuts him. Flemish painters discovered a raw eye for reality in the late Middle Ages that enabled them to create work such as this, where practical physical details are built up to nightmarish intensity. Bouts, whose apprentices or assistants probably painted this in his style, takes this cocktail of the fantastic and the real to a haunting extreme in his masterpiece. The fall of the damned. This small painting (43.8 x 37.1 cm) almost makes Christ himself look like hell.
National Gallery, London

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