Diane Arbus hits her stride and tomorrow happens in 1956 – the week in art

Someone Else’s House, 2018, by George Shaw. Photograph: courtesy of the artist and Wilkinson Gallery

Exhibition of the week

George Shaw
An astonishing body of work in which Shaw tells the story of modern Britain through his paintings of Coventry’s Tile Hill estate.
• Holburne Museum, Bath, until 6 May.

Also showing

Jack Dracula at a Bar, New London, Connecticut, 1961, part of a forthcoming exhibition. Photograph: Estate of Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus
The early work of the powerful photographer shows how she hit on her uneasy style.
• Hayward Gallery, London, 13 February until 6 May.

Jeff Koons
Love him or loathe him, the American artist brings his bulbous balloon sculptures and giant polychrome ballerinas to Oxford.
• At the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, until 9 June.

Harald Sohlberg
Poetic paintings of Nordic landscapes by this contemporary of Munch.
• Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 13 February until 2 June.

Is This Tomorrow?
The Whitechapel revisits and updates its classic 1956 exhibition This Is Tomorrow.
• Whitechapel Gallery, London, 14 February until 12 May.

Julie Mehretu
Don’t miss an exhibition of work by a tremendous artist who is making abstract expressionist paintings for our troubled times.
• Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, until 24 March.

Masterpiece of the week

An Old Woman (‘The Ugly Duchess’), circa 1513, by Quinten Massys
Famously imitated by John Tenniel in his illustration of Lewis Carroll’s Ugly Duchess, this painting also has a close connection with Leonardo da Vinci’s caricature drawings. Da Vinci made no attempt to be funny with his caricatures. They range from cruel depictions of the worst old age can do to amazed studies of what he called “fantastic” faces – portraits of the disfigured. This painting by Massys closely resembles his homages to the unusual. Who inspired who? It’s now thought Da Vinci must have seen and been inspired by Massys’s work. Maybe. The Carrollesque title The Ugly Duchess is much better than the National Gallery’s bland choice, An Old Woman, for this is an exercise in the surreal, not a straight portrait. Fantasy flourished in north European Renaissance art. Massys’s imagination matches the monstrous ones of Bosch and Bruegel.
• National Gallery, London.

Image of the week

Suspected Lumumbist freedom fighters being tormented before execution in Stanleyville, Democratic Republic of the Congo, in 1964. Photograph: copyright Don McCullin/courtesy The Tate

A Tate Britain retrospective of the veteran photographer’s images of war, poverty and atrocity shines light on the unconscionable. It’s almost overwhelming, writes Adrian Searle.

What we learned

Velvet Buzzsaw with Jake Gyllenhaal is a fiendish portrait of art-world avarice

High Line architects Liz Diller and Ricardo Scofidio win RA prize

Bansky’s fake Princess Di-faced tenner joins the British Museum collection

Architect David Adjaye’s Making Memory exhibition is monumental – but flawed

House of Palestine is an architectural wonder – built by a West Bank oil tycoon

Leonardo da Vinci has been dragged into Salvini’s spat with Macron

Dorothea Tanning striking surrealist vision is celebrated in a major Tate retrospective

Jeff Koons talks about blowup dogs, record prices and his row with Paris

Tracey Emin regrets backing ‘terrible’ Blair and Cameron …

… while her new show is a midlife riposte to British stoicism

Mary, Queen of Scots’ mourning portrait is to be displayed in Kent

Coronet designed by Albert for Victoria is V&A’s new star

RIBA’s new show proves community architecture can be beautiful

Photojournalist Kiliii Yuyan documents traditional hunting in Alaska

Christian Marclay’s 24-hour concept film, The Clock, has arrived in Melbourne

From Daedalus’s prison to Mark Wallinger’s plaques, artists are amazed by labyrinths

Australia’s most prestigious photographic portrait prize announces its nominees – here are some top picks

Polymath Grace Wales Bonner speaks about creative fluidity and ritual

From a leopard attack in India to a tornado in Havana, the Top 20 photographs of the week

Stage, song and Sambuca – the best photography commissioned by the Observer in January

‘It’s a Beatle haircut’: historian claims 15th-century portrait is from the 1960s

Stephan Zaubitzer is on a mission to photograph unusual cinemas around the world …

… while Anja Niemi’s series Darlene & Me puts the photographer in the shoes of people from the past

A Royal Academy exhibition exploring Michelangelo and Bill Viola risks diminishing both artists

Don McCullin and Giles Duley in conversation ahead of the former’s major retrospective

The US transcontinental railroad’s 150th birthday is being celebrated in pictures

Halfway through the shoot for Oasis’s Definitely Maybe album cover, Liam Gallagher took off on a Lambretta

Architecture teacher David Dunster influenced a generation of luminaries

Robert Doisneau captured the sounds of 20th-century Paris … in pictures

George Shaw is the only artist who can unite England

Russian artists invite visitors to donate blood to an exhibition

Da Vinci’s A Deluge depicted civilisation’s end

Buy your own Guardian classic photograph: Muslim schoolboys in 1989

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