Exhibition of the week
Anna Ancher: Painting Light
This powerful Danish painter of every day life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries echoes Vermeer in her stilled scenes.
• Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 4 November to 8 March
Also showing
Ben Edge: Children of Albion
Wacky paintings of modern Britain with enthusiastic references to Blake and the Green Man.
• Fitzrovia Chapel, London, from 6-26 November
Wayne McGregor
The renowned choreographer branches out into art installations that centre on the human body.
• Somerset House, London, until 22 February
David Blandy
A film inspired by The Canterbury Tales that explores the lost history of Britain’s common land.
• The Amelia Scott, Tunbridge Wells, until 11 January
Future Tense
Installations by Squidsoup and Liz West immerse you in the techno age with plenty of pulsing lights.
• York Art Gallery until 25 January
Image of the week
Ben Edge explained to us how his dynamic new understanding of Britain today, as seen in grand paintings such as Children of Albion (above), was triggered by seeing a procession of druids march past a KFC. Read the full story
What we learned
Last week’s jewel theft at the Louvre is only the latest in a long history of heists
A Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired dream home has been built jutting out over Loch Long
David Adjaye’s first major project since scandal rocked his firm is a mazey art ambush
Mrinalini Mukherjee’s brilliant sculpture gains little from the group show around it
Don McCullin looked back on seven decades photographing war and tragedy
Donald Trump fired the federal board vetting his controversial White House ballroom
New York’s Met museum is being sued for buying a Van Gogh looted by Nazis
The Artes Mundi 11 international exhibition is smug, stagey, up-itself nonsense
Masterpiece of the week
Saint Zeno Exorcising the Daughter of Gallienus by Filippino Lippi and Workshop, 1455-60
It is the power of Christ that commands you! Here’s a medieval predecessor of The Exorcist for Halloween. This 15th-century painting shows how deeply rooted the belief in possession by demons is in the European past. The victim here looks ill and distraught, her face agonised and eyes vacant, as the little devil that lived in her is cast out. In other words it’s a realistic painting of some kind of psychological or neurological crisis. In the world of medieval Christendom that might well be diagnosed as possession by a demon. Lippi and his team portray the demon as a dark creature with wings and claws, uncannily jumping out of the victim’s mouth. People would carry on being plagued by such visions into the late 1600s. Today we enjoy them as entertainment. Father, could you help an old altar boy?
• National Gallery, London
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