Exhibition of the week
National Treasures
As part of celebrations for its bicentenary, masterpieces from the National Gallery hang in museums across the UK including Vermeer in Edinburgh, Caravaggio in Belfast and Botticelli in Cambridge.
• At 12 museums across the UK, closing dates vary
Also showing
Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920
A search for lost female artists of the Tudor, Stuart, Georgian and Victorian eras opens new vistas on British history.
• Tate Britain, London, 16 May until 13 October
Marc Quinn: Light Into Life
Outsized sculptures of orchids, palms and other plants by the artist who cast his own head in blood.
• Kew Gardens, London, until 29 September
Isa Genzken: Wasserspeier and Angels
Dada’s not dead in the subversive scattershot assemblages of this powerful artist.
• Hauser and Wirth, London, until 27 July
Andrew Sim
This New York painter represents queer experience in ironically twee images of trees, unicorns and santa.
• Jupiter Artland, near Edinburgh, 11 May until 29 September
Image of the week
Beryl Cook was once dismissed by the art establishment as bawdy kitsch, but a new exhibition is celebrating her liberating sexual expression alongside another outsider artist, Tom of Finland.
What we learned
Influential US abstract artist Frank Stella has died aged 87
Miniature works by Henry Moore went on display in Bath
Jack Lueders-Booth’s 70s Polaroids are a moving record of life in a US women’s prison
Paul Trevillion is hoping to sell his pen-and-ink portrait of Churchill for £1m
The history of breasts in art is a ‘wild cocktail of emotion, politics and desire’
Marian Zazeela, who co-created the Dream House in New York, has died aged 83
A lost Caravaggio that almost sold for €1,500 will go on show at Prado this month
A Guernica-style battle of Orgreave painting stars in a miners’ strikes exhibition
AI has been used to identify counterfeit Renoirs, Monets and others for sale on eBay
MoMA is to host a major survey of artist and activist LaToya Ruby Frazier’s work
Curator Gemma Rolls-Bentley has published a ‘sexy coffee table’ history of queer art
Masterpiece of the week
Saint John the Evangelist on the Island of Patmos by Diego Velázquez, 1618-19
The visionary and the real collide in a jarring, unforgettable way in this early painting by one of art’s most subtle intellects. John, a follower of Christ and author of one of the four gospels, is on a Greek island seeing the future. His prophetic insights, which he is seen here writing down as they unfold, are packed with startling, extreme imagery. Artists from Albrecht Dürer to JMW Turner have been inspired by John’s visions as described in the Book of Revelations. But Velázquez prefers hardheaded reality to fantastical allegories. He gives a glimpse of John’s Revelations in a golden void where the Woman of the Apocalypse confronts the satanic dragon. But the real meat of the painting is the lifelike presence of John himself, a young man clearly modelled on an actual person, maybe a Seville street seller or servant, who keeps his feet literally on the ground even as he witnesses the end of the world.
• National Gallery
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