Exhibition of the week
Picasso Ingres: Face to Face
A head-on encounter between the greatest artist of the 20th century and his unlikely neoclassicist hero Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.
• National Gallery, London, until 9 October.
Also showing
Penny Goring: Penny World
Radical art of lived experience with a punk-feminist, socialist edge.
• ICA, London, 8 June to 18 September.
Eva Rothschild: ‘Our Life, Our Sweetness and Our Hope’
Magical abstract art conjured from the stuff of the everyday.
• Modern Art, London, until 25 June.
Haunted Realism
Images of modern life from an impressive mix of artists including Rachel Whiteread, Ed Ruscha and Chris Burden.
• Gagosian, London, 9 June to 26 August.
Henry Moore
The primordial forms of the British modernist including his interpretation of Stonehenge.
• Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, until 4 September.
Image of the week
A 36-year-old man was arrested and submitted to psychiatric evaluation this week, after smearing cake across the Mona Lisa – or at least, across the glass which protects it – in the Louvre museum in Paris. The action appears to have been an act of protest about the climate crisis. Read the full story here.
What we learned
A New York DA’s office is fighting to stop the trade in looted antiquities
Justo Gallego Martínez’s self-built cathedral is either a folly or a masterpiece
Edvard Munch is the master of melancholy
Thomas Heatherwick’s Tree of Trees could be the new Marble Arch Mound
Jamel Shabazz’s intimate photographs of New York seek to capture love
Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven may have inspired Duchamp’s famous urinal
Monet saw through London’s poisonous wealth
Billy Gannon joined the list of people who deny they are Banksy
Punk artist Christopher Wool likes making mistakes
Australian artist Daniel Boyd is inspired by an Aboriginal warrior who fought the British
Masterpiece of the week
Heneage Lloyd and his Sister, c 1750, by Thomas Gainsborough
The kids in this painting, thought to be the daughter and son of Sir Richard Lloyd of Hintlesham Hall, near Ipswich, are outshone by the sky. Not that it is bright, exactly. A silky riot of black rainclouds and silver sunlit tones hangs over the Lloyd estate on a day of ripe East Anglian gloom. Gainsborough doesn’t just paint clouds but the air between us and them, capturing an uneasy, almost electrical glow in the atmosphere. The fluffy leaves of the trees are set off sharply against this bronze light. The clouds are reflected in the lake, adding to all the greys and ivories. This wet British day gives the classical balustrade against which the children pose a poetic gravity that ennobles their pale faces and casual clothes. They seem suitably brooding for this place. Perhaps they will grow up to be Romantic poets.
• Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
Don’t forget
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