Exhibition of the week
Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes
Landscape was always a great source of surreal visions, from Max Ernst’s dream forests to Dalí’s Catalan shore draped with molten watches. Those original surrealists are mixed here with more recent images of uncanny space.
• The Hepworth, Wakefield, from 23 November to 21 Apri
Also showing
Electric Dreams
Brion Gysin and Gustav Metzger are among the psychedelic pioneers of techno art in what should be a delirious exhibition.
• Tate Modern, London, from 28 November to 1 June
Heroin Falls
Magnum photographer Lindokuhle Sobekwa documents drug use in South Africa while Graham MacIndoe records his own addiction.
• Sainsbury Centre, UEA, Norwich, from 23 November to 27 April
Adam Dant
The artful cartoonist explores the quirky mythological bedrock of British identity in images and maps of a fabled Albion.
• Newlands House, Petworth, from 22 November to 16 February
Jeff Wall
New works by this influential pioneer whose composed worlds reframe photography as conceptual art.
• White Cube Bermondsey, London, from 22 November to 12 January
Image of the week
In 1987, the Swiss artist André Heller created Luna Luna, a theme park in Hamburg that featured a carousel decorated by Keith Haring, a ferris wheel painted by Jean-Michel Basquiat, a funhouse by Salvador Dalí and a glass maze by Roy Lichtenstein. Designed to “build a big bridge between the so-called avant garde – the artists who were a little snobbish sometimes and didn’t connect with the masses – and the so-called normal people”, it remained in storage for more than 35 years but has now been rebuilt and is open to the public in New York. Read our photo-essay all about it here.
What we learned
The world’s most expensive banana fetched $5.2m
Belgian artist René Magritte shattered an auction record
The king of ‘floor art’ invited viewers to take a walk on the wild side
After decades, a tiny 500-year-old royal portrait was identified
Robert Frank’s iconic photo book The Americans changed the course of 20th century art
The Prado in Madrid is reintroducing a pop of colour to the usually monochromatic world of sculpture
Masterpiece of the week
Three Studies for a Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne by Francis Bacon, 1965
Although Bacon was gay, some of his most intimate, warm portraits are of women. Isabel Rawsthorne was part of his Soho circle and herself a painter steeped in avant garde ideas and friendships, including with Paris-based intellectuals and artists such as Bataille, Leiris and Giacometti. Bacon portrayed her as a powerful, heroic bohemian, most unforgettably in his great painting Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne Standing in a Street in Soho, in which she commands the street and the pictorial space.
Here he concentrates on her angular, thrusting head which he sees from multiple points of view in a faceted, fleshy version of Picasso’s cubist style. Picasso’s 1909 sculpture Head of Fernande peels back his lover’s external appearance to reveal an inner landscape of rocks and rivulets. Here Bacon takes a comparable approach to make Rawsthorne not just visibly, but tangibly present to us. He admitted that people tended to feel injured by his surgical portrait style – first world war portraits of facially wounded soldiers were among his inspirations – but this admiring triptych shows how emotional his search for human truth is.
• Showing in Francis Bacon: Human Presence at the National Portrait Gallery, London, until 19 January
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