Exhibition of the week
Royal Academy Summer Show
Grayson Perry leads a long overdue and brilliantly effective reinvention of this 249-year-old annual exhibition. Full of surprises and stimulants.
• Royal Academy, London from 12 June to 19 August.
Also showing
Thomas Cole and Ed Ruscha
The first and last great American artists? Cole brought a Romantic eye to the American landscape in the early 19th century. Ruscha surveys LA with cool irony. They both chart the Course of Empire.
• National Gallery, London, from 11 June to 7 October.
Raqib Shaw
Brilliantly coloured psychedelic remakes of Renaissance art.
• Modern One, Edinburgh, until 28 October.
Astérix in Britain
Celebration of the indomitable Gaulish warrior and his co-creator René Goscinny.
• Jewish Museum, London, until 30 September.
Patrick Heron
Light and colour infuse Heron’s joyous abstract paintings.
• Tate St Ives until 30 September
Masterpiece of the week
This painting was originally a mural in the Jas de Bouffan, the country house that Paul Cézanne’s father purchased from his profits in banking. Louis-Auguste Cézanne was a self-made man who rose from humble origins to a position of wealth and power in Aix-en-Provence. His son’s portrait shows him as a stern, raw character who mystifies and perhaps frightens the young artist. Louis-Auguste has his head down in his paper and is turned side-on so he doesn’t catch our eyes. We can’t look into his face, can’t guess at his inner life. He is a gnarled wooden monument. The artist is awestruck.
• National Gallery, London
Image of the week
My Name is Lettie Eggsyrub, Heather Phillipson’s cartoon installation at Gloucester Road tube station, was described in our five-star review as “daft and deft and witty and over the top. It is the whole egg-nog. A curate’s egg: good in parts, rotten in others, it is provocative, wild, and an overdone delight.” Read it in full here.
What we learned
Heather Phillipson cracked a good joke on London commuters
Grayson Perry has livened up the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition …
The architecture of Southampton tells the story of Brexit …
Charles Rennie Mackintosh is 150
Tomma Abts is a geometric conjuror
As the Serpentine prepares to open its 2018 pavilion, we talked to its Mexican architect
Andy Warhol never turned down private commissions
The bid to save Scotland’s modernist masterpiece looks doomed
A new exhibition urges us to remember black classicists
London may now get an East Bank
Whitstable Biennale has a fish-and-chips flavour
Tate Britain examined the artistic Aftermath of the first world war
There’s a festival for living statues
Howard Hodgkin’s last works are a passionate epitaph
The V&A wants your Mary Quant gear
June exhibitions are bursting with Pride
Joshua Abbott went in search of modernism in the London suburbs …
… while people meet by chance on Chris Dorley-Brown’s photographic Corners
Sanne De Wilde saw things differently on the colour-blind island
One photo booth revealed an Australian family story
A Matisse drawing of a Bloomsbury muse is up for sale
Photographers like swimming pools
We remembered the artist Clyde Hopkins
Don’t forget
To follow us on Twitter: @GdnArtandDesign
Sign up to the Art Weekly newsletter
Data protection laws have changed in the UK, under an initiative called GDPR. Make sure you continue to receive our email roundup of art and design news by confirming your wish here.
