Claude Monet. Photograph: The Courtauld Gallery, London
Exhibition of the Week
Monet and London
One of the most hyped exhibitions of the year – and the hype is justified by this intense encounter with Monet in the smog.
• Courtauld Gallery, London, until 19 January
Also showing
Lygia Clark: The I and the You
Modern art that interacts with its beholder by this influential Brazilian artist.
• Whitechapel Art Gallery from 2 October until 12 January
Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit
Remember slackers? Kelley is the artist of that generation and his work featuring playful textiles and plush toys is loved by today’s hipsters, too.
• Tate Modern from 3 October until 9 March
Rego and Goya
Goya’s prints bring madness to Enlightenment Bath but Rego is tamer on this showing.
• Holburne Museum, Bath, until 5 January
Anya Gallaccio
The land artist brings nature into this light-kissed seaside gallery.
• Turner Contemporary, Margate, from 28 September until 26 January
Image of the week
Installation artist Olafur Eliasson, best known for his giant artificial sun at Tate Modern, is taking over another London landmark: Piccadilly Circus. His project Lifeworld will be displayed on the screens that dominate the central London hub, replacing their searing HD advertisements with softer, blurred imagery. “It’s not about banning the screens,” he says, “but the blur is an attempt to reach out and say, ‘Here’s something beautiful. It’s about slowing down. It’s about tenderness. It’s about abstraction.” Read more here.
What we learned
Police were called to a gallery in Hay-on-Wye over a nude painting in its window
Oscar Wilde’s grandson condemned an ‘absolutely hideous’ sculpture of the writer
A blurry new work by Olafur Eliasson will grace Piccadilly Circus’s electronic displays
The London Standard’s AI-written review ‘by’ dead art critic Brian Sewell missed the mark
2024 Turner prize nominees include Irn-Bru bottles and a Ford Escort in a doily
‘No everyday object is safe’ from rote treatment by Michael Craig-Martin
South African painter Marlene Dumas thinks art ‘may be a pact with the devil’
Installation artist Angelica Mesiti’s The Rites of When gets close to the sublime
The British Museum’s Silk Roads exhibition turns world history upside down
The ‘Czech Nan Goldin’ captured Prague’s underground and the fall of the Berlin Wall
Masterpiece of the week
St Paul’s from the Surrey Side by Charles-François Daubigny, circa 1870-3
Monet was not the only French painter to be struck by the smog and smoke of 19th-century London. This painting captures the Thames with a grimly clouded melancholy three decades before Monet started using the Savoy Hotel as a studio. Daubigny had reasons to be cheerless. This Romantic landscape painter of the generation before the impressionists – he was born just two years after the Battle of Waterloo – fled to London at the start of the 1870s to escape the Franco-Prussian war. Monet and other budding impressionists were also in London at the same time, for the same reason. Evidently there was something truly compelling about the capital of the world’s first industrial nation that haunted and transfixed French eyes.
• National Gallery, London
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