Exhibition of the week
The 80s: Photographing Britain
Reel around the fountain with this trip down memory lane to a decade of social division, war and riots.
• Tate Britain, London, 21 November to 5 May
Also showing
On Kawara: Date Paintings
This pioneer of conceptual art painted the dates of his life in a disturbing record of time’s inevitable passing.
• David Zwirner, London, from 21 November to 11 January
Stitched!
Celebration of embroidered art from Scotland’s stately homes.
• Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, until 18 January
Dora Carrington
The Bloomsbury artist who preferred to be known as plain Carrington gets an exhibition of her own.
• Pallant House, Chichester, until 27 April
Alexander Calder
Cantilevered sculptures by this American surrealist who gave us the mobile.
• Ben Brown Fine Arts, London, until 22 November
Image of the week
Frank Auerbach died this week aged 93. He is pictured here in the 1970s working on one of his many searing paintings of his adoptive home, London. He was sent there from Berlin, aged eight, by his parents who were subsequently murdered by the Nazis. “The only thing worth using for one’s art is one’s deepest experiences”, Auerbach told the Guardian last year, as he worked on what he predicted would be his last paintings, in the same studio, in his Camden Town home.
What we learned
Frank Auerbach could make a spring day feel like pure agony
Dora Carrington’s work is as fascinating as her polyamorous love life
We held a Renaissance great-off: Leonardo v Raphael v Michelangelo
Ceramic artist Magdalene Odundo is on a quest to make the perfect pot
Art police uncovered a huge network forging Banksy, Warhol and Picasso in Italy
Vincent Valdez has drawn fire for paintings tackling racism, violence and America
Manet left Berthe Morisot traumatised after taking over the painting of one of her canvases
A £1bn collection of Chinese ceramics has been donated to the British Museum
The mighty Mughal empire left behind a staggering trove of opulent art treasures
Masterpiece of the week
Faun Uncovering a Woman by Pablo Picasso, 1936
Ignore, for a moment, the content. Consider the skill. Picasso used a scraper and sugar aquatint to enrich this engraving, and if the techniques sound complex, the results are simply beautiful. The visual magic lies in his creation of light and shadow: a joyful shaft of morning sun comes through the window and is held within a dark box of a bedchamber. Black and white make the subtlest of spaces – a room as real as any in art.
Then there’s the story Picasso tells. The first rays of the sun are illuminating a sleeping woman, leaving her face in somnolent darkness. Any moment now she will awake to find the faun, a half-man, half-animal monster, watching her with his arms outstretched. How will she react?
It’s like the fairytale of Beauty and the Beast – and Picasso’s admirer Jean Cocteau, who had previously collaborated with him on the ballet Parade, very obviously draws on this and other scenes in Picasso’s Vollard Suite in his 1946 film La Belle et la Bête. Picture this faun played by Cocteau’s star Jean Marais, his hand holding a cigarette as in the film, and perhaps it’s easier to get away from biographical interpretations of Picasso to enjoy the dreamlike intensity of this modern masterpiece.
Picasso and Cocteau were both inspired by, although not card-carrying members of, the surrealist movement. Surrealism preached the liberation of desire and dreams, based on a poetic misreading of Sigmund Freud. Of all the wild and shocking art this unleashed in the 1920s and 30s, Picasso’s Vollard Suite, which is an ever-transforming sequence of images just as haunting as this, is the grandest, most imaginative and haunting: one of the most eye-popping and ultimately moving artworks of modern times.
• Showing at Picasso: Printmaker at the British Museum, London, until 30 March
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