Exhibition of the week
Ali Cherri: How I Am Monument
This Beirut-born artist creates contemporary monuments that echo the archaeology of the Middle East.
• Baltic, Gateshead, from 12 April to 12 October
Also showing
Richard Wright
Complex, beguiling yet ephemeral site-specific paintings by the 2009 Turner prize winner.
• Camden Art Centre, London, from 16 April to 22 June
The Edwardians: Age of Elegance
John Singer Sargent, Edward Burne-Jones and more capture the bling and complacency of the golden summers before the first world war.
• King’s Gallery, London, until 23 November
Astronomy Photographer of the Year Exhibition
Ravishing images of the cosmos, mostly taken by amateur astronomers with easily available equipment.
• National Maritime Museum, London, until 11 August
Inventing Post-Impressionism
How the critic Roger Fry championed the art of Cézanne, Van Gogh and more in early 20th-century Britain.
• Charleston, Sussex, until 2 November
Image of the week
As you let David Hockney’s intense blues cascade over you to the strains of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at his new exhibition in Paris, you realise how deep and sustaining a love for life this man feels and can communicate. Read the full review.
What we learned
A retrospective of British artist Ed Atkins follows his quest to ‘reimagine life’s chaos’
Almost 130 years after his death, the work of William Morris has gone viral
A giant memorial quilt for people who died of Aids is to show at Tate Modern
A LS Lowry painting sold to a Guardian literary editor for £10 could fetch £1m
Eco research studio Material Cultures believes nature has the best building materials
A new exhibition is showcasing artworks from Californians hit by the recent wildfires
Called ‘freak pictures’, Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone’s works transformed Irish art
The BBC reinstalled a sculpture by paedophile Eric Gill with a new protective screen
Masterpiece of the week
A Landscape With Tobias and the Angel by Jan Lievens, 1640-4
As a young painter, Jan Lievens worked in friendship and rivalry with Rembrandt – no less. They were both based in Leiden, possibly sharing a studio. Art lovers who visited them raved about the two youthful geniuses. But Rembrandt went on to sublime highs and lows, his personal disasters only deepening his art. Lievens had a much more ordinary career. It was hard to be exceptional in the market-led art world of 17th-century Holland with its appetite for craftsmanlike depictions of reality.
This painting shows how much Lievens has in common with Rembrandt, nonetheless: an appetite for biblical tales and melancholic inner poetry. Lievens depicts the little figures of Tobias, who was sent on a journey by his blind father Tobit, and the angel who helped him catch a fish: making an ointment from its gall, Tobias was able to heal Tobit’s eyes. The supernatural encounter is almost banal in its everyday quality. It is the shadowy, cloud-muffled northern landscape that engrosses the artist. Lievens loses himself in dark trees and the shimmering surface of a river. Sombre and strange, his landscape is a romantic poem of rural sadness.
• National Gallery, London
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