What if Hitchcock directed lockdown? – the week in art
Exhibition of the week
Rear Window
Stuck indoors for lockdown? This witty on-line present suggests it’s a bit like being James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. In this cinema traditional, Stewart performs an ace photographer trapped in his condominium with a damaged leg. Like Stewart’s curious voyeur watching his neighbours, you might be tempted right here to “spy” on seductive artworks by Jeff Wall, Ellen Altfest, Gillian Carnegie and extra. Good enjoyable.
• White Cube online.
Also exhibiting
Becoming Richard Burton
A Welsh icon is well known in this nostalgic exhibition at Cardiff’s National Museum, which is open.
• National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, from tomorrow until 11 April.
Artemisia
With its five-star survey of the sword-wielding baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi quickly closed, the National Gallery gives a brand new on-line curator’s tour with Letizia Treves.
• National Gallery online.
Mary Quant
This celebration of the Sixties icon is open with social distancing.
• V&A Dundee until 17 January.
Paolo Pellegrin
Black-and-white photographs of a world in hazard by the globetrotting Magnum photographer.
• Michael Hoppen Gallery online until 10 January.
Image of the week
From the tomb of Tutankhamun to Raphael’s Sistine masterpieces, Adam Lowe makes excellent copies for governments and galleries the world over. But he’s not a forger – he’s a liberator. Read the interview.
What we discovered
The art world is divided over whether to sell to stay alive …
… while a new Nigerian museum could solve the Benin bronzes row …
… and UK museums and galleries fear Covid poses existential threat
Manchester is knocking down its modernist Tadao Ando wall in Piccadilly Gardens
Angelina Jolie is to direct a biopic of photographer Don McCullin
We probed the mystery of a vanishing Botticelli
A photobook on slaughterhouses punches for the vegan cause
Maggi Hambling responded to her Wollstonecraft statue critics
Steve McQueen celebrated black NHS nurses through the decades
Johny Pitts searched for identity in his home town …
… while we got the inside track on California
Ugly buildings are on the rise
Homeless people drew their own graphic novel
Stefan Brüggemann has words about the US-Mexican border
Kei Nomiyama followed fireflies
Photo Vogue festival looked at the changing face of fashion
We remembered rock photographer Baron Wolman
Masterpiece of the week
Saint John the Evangelist, about 1478, by Hans Memling
There’s a young, pure high quality to this depiction of a handsome saint. The determine remains to be and calm however not stiff or formal. Memling, born in Germany, was the most in-demand painter in Bruges, in Flanders, in the 1470s, attracting commissions from throughout Europe. This work is a side-wing of an altarpiece commissioned by the Welsh-born Sir John Donne, a courtier of Edward IV of England. Bruges grew to become a scorching spot of European art in the early 1400s when Jan van Eyck perfected a revolutionary new means of depicting actuality. Memling’s candy Saint John reveals how he has mastered that intimate realism whereas giving it a extra elegant, nearly Italian grace.
• National Gallery, London.
Don’t overlook
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