Exhibition of the week
Emil Nolde
This superb exhibition is a lurid blast of colour and raw imagination shadowed by the nightmares of 20th-century history.
• Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two), Edinburgh, until 21 October.
Also showing
Free the Pussy!
Yoko Ono, Hayley Newman and Judy Chicago are among the artists gathered to praise Pussy Riot by curator Tamsyn Challenger.
• Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 23 September.
John Keane
Savage political art by a painter with a punk spirit whose targets include Tony Blair, Vladimir Putin and Stalin.
• Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 23 September.
Jacob’s Ladder
An inspiring look at how contemporary artists including Cornelia Parker and Katie Paterson translate astronomy into art.
• Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, until 20 October.
The Great Spectacle
Last chance to see a historical survey of (nearly) 250 years of the Royal Academy’s summer show, from Thomas Gainsborough to Tracey Emin.
• Royal Academy, London, until 19 August.
Masterpiece of the week
This sensual nude was painted about 40 years after Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, and the difference between the two shows how rapidly art was revolutionised in the Renaissance. Botticelli’s Venus is a chaste goddess. Titian’s Venus is a woman, painted from life. She looks more like she’s in the bath than the sea. Her salty toilette is created with unabashed pleasure by an artist for whom painting was a sexual act.
• Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh.
Image of the week
“I wanted to focus on Grace’s masculinity – to use what other people thought an embarrassment, and turn it around to her advantage. I wanted to create – with her, of course – a new character. It went beyond just a haircut, it was an attitude. It was new and strong and ambiguous. You didn’t know if it was a man trying to be a girl or a girl trying to be a man. It was a revolution. I remember the A&R guys at Island saying, ‘Are you fucking crazy? This is never going to work.’ And of course it did.” Artist Jean-Paul Goude remembers the co-creation of Grace Jones’s One Man Show.
What we learned
The Royal Photographic Society wants to reward a ‘hundred heroines’
Central Park’s first female historical monument will arrive in 2020
An international hunt has begun for Grayson Perry’s lost work
The National Gallery has won a grant to save art conservation skills
Photographer Cindy Sherman is to receive a first UK retrospective
What the “herstory” of women’s art looks like
What happens when rock bands get their own football badges
Robert Capa’s shell-damaged slum in Madrid is to be restored
Candy-coloured funfairs can take on a surreal edge
A big top can make us ponder our place in the universe
What the world’s most beautiful libraries look like
Trump’s toxic relationship with the arts is impacting the biennale
What some of the world’s most striking pedestrian bridges look like
Sex, death and decadence defined art the Nazis condemned
It takes Beyoncé to get a black photographer on the cover of US Vogue
How these shots capture the modern British landscape
What the UK’s best coastal photography looks like
Don’t forget
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