Exhibition of the week
Parmigianino: The Vision of Saint Jerome
The brilliant, audacious artist who inspired John Ashbery’s poem Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror stars in a Christmas exhibition with an alternative slant.
• National Gallery, London, from 5 December until 9 March
Also showing
Jim Dine: Tools and Dreams
Prints of all-American handsaws, hammers and other homely tools by this veteran pop artist.
• Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, until 18 January
Gabrielle Goliath / Personal Accounts
A global perspective on male violence, from Johannesburg to Edinburgh, through video and sound art.
• Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, until 15 February
Romance to Realities: The Northern Landscape and Shifting Identities
John Martin and Joan Eardley are among the artists of the northern landscape in a show sure to be sublime.
• Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, until 26 April
Jakkai Siributr: There’s No Place
Radical textiles that explore subjects from grief and memory to the trauma suffered by refugees.
• Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, until 16 March
Image of the week
Cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun spent $6.2m (£4.88m) on TitledComedian, the conceptual work created by the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, which featured a banana duct-taped to a wall. To celebrate his purchase Sun then ate the edible artwork. Read the full story to find out how it tasted.
What we learned
A Banksy in Bristol can be yours if you buy the building it’s painted on
Steve McQueen has a fresh take on the history of protest in Britain
Barbara Hepworth had “recipes” for making sculptures
The $121m sale of his most famous painting tells us much about Magritte
Surreal exhibitions are celebrating the art of the absurd
Palestinian artists are planning a Gaza Biennale
André-Charles Boulle’s ravishing timepieces are keeping London ticking over
Dorothea Rockburne’s first big UK show is built around a single, mesmerising line
Tate’s show about art and tech before the internet could have told a darker story
An exhibition in Adelaide is celebrating the revolutionary force of textiles
Masterpiece of the week
Fête in a Wood by Nicolas Lancret c1722
People party and feast, eating, drinking and chatting under softly green-blue trees in this bustling festival. But has it got anything to do with reality? Lancret is influenced by Antoine Watteau, who painted exquisitely unreal pastoral scenes – but Watteau’s rustic idylls, which like this canvas can be seen at London’s Wallace Collection, are much more ethereal and poetic than Lancret’s robust carnival. Watteau, who died young in 1721 shortly before Lancret painted this, created a perfumed paradise of lovers and dreamy woodlands. Lancret brings that vision down to earth with a slight thud: from one point of view he’s simply not as good. His lines are harsher, his people more dully solid. And yet, he is also doing something new here as he blends a refined courtly vision with what looks like a glimpse of a country carnival, with people who are not aristocrats but bourgeois and plebeian. It’s like seeing a fairytale dramatised as a slice of contemporary life.
• The Wallace Collection, London
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