Exhibition of the week
David Hockney: Drawing from Life
This exhibition, returning after its original run was cut short by Covid, is a moving chronicle of Hockney’s life in his art.
• National Portrait Gallery, London, 2 November-21 January
Also showing
Burma to Myanmar
A blockbuster that seeks to understand the crises of modern Myanmar through its history.
• British Museum, London, 2 November-11 February
Fantasy: Realms of Imagination
Art, literature, film and comics in a grand celebration of making stuff up.
• British Library, London, until 25 February
Yinka Shonibare: Free the Wind, the Spirit, and the Sun
New works by Shonibare himself as well as artists who have had residencies in his Guest Artists Space Foundation in Lagos, Nigeria.
• Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, until 11 November
Zarina Bhimji: Flagging It Up
Photography, film and installations exploring power and selfhood, from the 1980s to now, feature in this mid-career retrospective.
• Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 28 October-28 January
Image of the week
Over this Halloween weekend, Historic England is asking people to help record the “ghost signs” still to be found on buildings across England and send them in for an online map. Duncan Wilson, the chief executive of Historic England, said he found ghost signs very evocative. “These mysterious pieces of secret history are a reminder of the people who came before us, and the urban spaces and high streets they made their own.” Read the full story
What we learned
Florence Houston’s paintings turn wobbly jelly into wondrous still life
Sunspot, a no-frills development in Jaywick, Essex, brings a ray of hope
Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs take the Hayward Gallery into new realms
Rachel Maclean’s candy-coloured shop of art put fun back on the high street street
RB Kitaj’s kaleidoscopic collage-paintings were haunted by the Holocaust
At 94, Ghanaian photographer James Barnor looked back on his pioneering career
The Wellcome Collection’s new show puts the £660bn beauty industry on display
Hans Holbein’s sketches showed the secret life of the Tudors
David Shrigley turned 6,000 Dan Brown books into Nineteen Eighty-Four
A biologist solved a century-old art riddle
Masterpiece of the week
Four Figures at a Table, by the Le Nain Brothers, c 1643
It often seems the art of pre-modern Europe is a cavalcade of kings and queens and aristocrats. Yet in the age when Van Dyck was painting silk-clad cavaliers, Antoine, Louis and Mathieu Le Nain painted the French peasantry. This is a typically blunt and bleak example of their unvarnished records of real life. An older woman looks right at us, despairing, while a younger woman also casts us a melancholy glance. She is holding a plain ceramic water jug, to go with the dry bread the young boy in the picture is eating. Life’s no picnic for these country folk – it is an all but bare table. Dull brown light adds to the atmosphere of plainness and poverty. About 150 years before the French Revolution, the Le Nain Brothers reveal the injustice that sustained the brilliance of upper-class life.
• National Gallery, London
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