Exhibition of the week
Edvard Munch: Love and Angst
The bleak beauty of this darkly ravishing artist’s images infects your soul and ensnares you in his terrifyingly intense reality. And that’s before you even get to The Scream.
• British Museum, London, from 11 April to 21 July.
Also showing
Charles Rennie Mackintosh: Making the Glasgow Style
Sensual and mystical designs by the Scottish genius of art nouveau whose masterpiece the Glasgow School of Art has been so tragically struck by fire.
• Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, until 26 August.
Hito Steyerl: Power Plants
The nature of power and the social inequalities of the Serpentine Gallery’s surroundings are analysed with video, AI and “power walks”.
• Serpentine Galleries, London, from 11 April to 6 May.
George Shaw: The Corner of a Foreign Field
Try not to miss this moving and timely mini-retrospective. His paintings of Tile Hill Estate are sad songs of modern Britain and its madness.
• Holburne Museum, Bath, until 6 May.
Imaginary Cities
The British Library’s resident artist Michael Takeo Magruder turns old city maps into digital dreams of an infinite metropolis.
• British Library, London, from 5 April until 14 July.
Masterpiece of the week
The Ambassadors, 1533, by Hans Holbein
Munch’s obsession with death – his exhibition at the British Museum begins with a self-portrait in which he has a skeleton arm – was not new in north European art. It streaks through Holbein’s portrait of two French friends in Tudor London in a shocking revelation of death’s inevitability. Jean de Dinteville, France’s ambassador to Henry VIII, and Georges de Selve, Bishop of Lavaur and international diplomat, stand in their fine clothes in front of an array of Renaissance symbols of exploration, beauty and knowledge, including terrestrial and astronomical globes, a lute, and mathematical instruments. Yet all this aspiration is as dust. Holbein has painted a giant, distorted skull slicing through the scene. At first it looks like a black and white stain. When it resolves into the face of death it undermines all the appetite for life on show. Holbein laughs grimly. All our hopes are vain. We are worm food. The joke would rebound – or his pessimism be proven right – when he died of the plague in London in 1543, still in his 40s.
• National Gallery, London.
Image of the week
Anish Kapoor’s A Brexit, A Broxit, We All Fall Down
Kapoor’s new work, created for Guardian readers, is a response to Brexit. “This is a surrealist work, one that seeks to let the unconscious out,” wrote Jonathan Jones. “But instead of his own demons, Kapoor lets out the shadows in the nation’s psyche: yours, mine and Jacob Rees-Mogg’s. For, like a black hole of melancholy, something about this bottomless pit is alluring. Part of you wants to fall in.” Read more here.
What we learned
New York’s new cultural citadel is a handbag on wheels
Jeremy Deller created an artwork for Brexit day …
… while two Brexit vases by Grayson Perry were acquired by the V&A
Charles Dickens and George Eliot influenced Van Gogh
The man behind paint-by-numbers, Dan Robbins, has died
How art detective Arthur Brand found a stolen Picasso
William Blake’s wife was a lifelong creative influence on the artist
A Banksy artwork on a garage wall will be moved to a new museum of street art
The Spurs’ new stadium is a home win
The great American photographer Annie Leibovitz is reliving her Rolling Stone years
Europe’s tallest building is being planned for a tiny Danish town
Indian-born artist Raqib Shaw has wild visions
… while Alys Tomlinson’s images of Order of Malta volunteers offer a kind of trip back in time
How an artist’s dying wish turned her neighbours into gallery curators
A new generation of artists are fighting to save LGBT nightlife
Early 20th-century photographer Hugh Mangum brought segregated America together
Aboriginal handprint art has been discovered outside Sydney
Radical artists Ericka Beckman and Marianna Simnett are not into fairytale endings
Don’t forget
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