Exhibition of the week
Whistler’s Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan
A hugely enjoyable story of art, passion and the birth of modernism that is full of beauty and boldness.
• Royal Academy, London, 26 February to 22 May.
Also showing
Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945-1965
Bacon, Auerbach, Hamilton, Hockney … this survey of Britain’s unlikely art boom should be full of brilliance.
• Barbican, London, from 3 March to 26 June.
Britta Marakatt-Labba: Under the Vast Sky
Contemporary art from the Arctic Circle that captures the world of the Sami people and the climate crisis engulfing the region.
• Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, until 29 May.
Pissarro: Father of Impressionism
One of the quiet greats of modern art gets an intimate survey with friends such as Gauguin and Signac.
• Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, until 12 June.
Julien Ceccaldi: Gourmandises
Gross, perverse and wittily surreal paintings by this New York-based Canadian artist.
• Modern Art, London, from 24 February to 19 March.
Image of the week
In 19th-century Iran, beauty ideals were unconstrained by gender norms so facial hair was considered fashionable for women, while men wore feminine clothes and makeup. Shirin Fathi, artist in residence at the Sarabande Foundation in London, transformed herself into three Persian archetypes for her project Heart Throbs. “A non-binary perspective on gender and androgyny has been around for centuries,” says Fathi. See the full gallery here.
What we learned
A Manchester art gallery director was forced quit over a Palestinian solidarity statement
The National Portrait Gallery in London and BP are to cut ties after 30 years
Tate Modern’s Surrealism Beyond Borders is a raging sea of strangeness
David Hockney’s latest self-portrait will go on show in Cambridge
The children’s book illustrator Jan Pieńkowski has died
Carlo Crivelli was the rogue of the Renaissance
A mellow yellow brick may revive a decaying housing estate
Artist Shirin Fathi found less rigidly gendered ideas of beauty in 19th-century Iran.
Masterpiece of the week
Photograph: The National Gallery, London
Portrait of a Man by Hans Baldung Grien, 1514
You can see age and decay starting to eat at this portrait. It’s not just the sharply observed face of the unknown man with his time-hewn skin and the grey in his beard and hair. In spite of the gold insignia that he wears, his fur collar looks a little the worse for wear. Perhaps this is not much. But the strange sheen of that hair is vividly reminiscent of Hans Baldung Grien’s similarly silvery images in other works including pictures of witches at the sabbath, or his painting The Ages of Woman and Death, in the Prado. There too, aged hair is emphasised – including the horrible matted hair of a skeleton that holds an hourglass. Here, with terrible irony, the man’s name is lost but the year is known, 1514, as his time ticks away. This is a subtle and self-controlled, yet haunting image by an artist just about holding his macabre imagination in check.
• National Gallery, London
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