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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Lifestyle
Jonathan Jones

German punks, Scotland’s impressionist love affair and a pickle on the ceiling – the week in art

Montagne Sainte Victoire by Paul Cezanne, part of A Taste for Impressionism at the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh.
Montagne Sainte Victoire by Paul Cezanne, part of A Taste for Impressionism at the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh. Photograph: National Galleries of Scotland

Exhibition of the week

A Taste for Impressionism: Modern French Art from Millet to Matisse
A newly discovered Van Gogh is among the highlights of this survey of Scotland’s love affair with impressionism and its legacy, along with Monets and Matisses galore.
Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, from 30 July until 13 November

Also showing

Ishiuchi Miyako
This haunting photographer focuses her lens on the things we leave behind.
Stills Centre, Edinburgh, until 8 October

Young and Wild?Art in 1980s Germany: Punk, Painting & Prints
Germany’s 1980s neo-expressionist scene in all its riotous intensity, including Elvira Bach, Ina Barfuss and Georg Baselitz.
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, from 30 July until 20 November

Houses Fit for People: Tessa Lynch
Prints that explore alternative models of housing and collaborative play.
Edinburgh Printmakers, until 18 September

George Shaw: The Local
This painter sucks you into his melancholy vision of modern Britain.
The Box, Plymouth, until 4 September

Image of the week

Capizzi: Children.
Capizzi: Children. Photograph: Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum Photos Paris

The Italian Magnum photographer Ferdinando Scianna has reached the end of a glorious six-decade career, but in a highly entertaining and insightful interview he gave us, he claims to think that only a tiny percentage of the pictures he took – including this one of shadow play in his Sicilian home town – were any good. Read the full interview here

What we learned

Italian Magnum photographer Ferdinando Scianna has reached the end of a glorious career

Damien Hirst plans to burn more than 5,000 of his paintings

An Australian artist is asking NZ$10,000 (£5,200) for a McDonald’s pickle flung on to a gallery ceiling

Avant garde feminist photography is going on show in France

A secret art society in Kherson is producing harrowing visions of life under Russian occupation

Artemisia Gentileschi’s Rome now exists in a thrilling virtual reality

Nina Katchadourian has recreated the incredible ordeal of a Scottish family adrift in a dinghy in the Pacific for 38 days

King Kong is making a comeback in Birmingham ahead of the Commonwealth Games

Nyaparu ‘William’ Gardiner’s stunning work captures the stockmen and landscape of his native Pilbara in Western Australia

Climate activists glued themselves to Botticelli’s Primavera

Arthur Lanyon’s new work sees the painter taking stock of major life events – his father’s death and his son’s birth

The site of a Roman fort on Hadrian’s Wall has been rebuilt in wild colour to mark its 1,900-year anniversary

The V&A honoured the year’s best work in illustration

Masterpiece of the week

Christ Crowned with Thorns, workshop of Dirk Bouts c. 1470-75

Christ Crowned with Thorns, workshop of Dirk Bouts c. 1470-75
Crystalline spheres of salt water hang on Christ’s face. The shocking reality of his tears is just one of the ways this painting sets out to harrow you with the most painful, pitiful, direct encounter it can create with the suffering of God’s incarnate son. His eyes are bloodshot with sorrow and suffering, their redness mirroring the dark blood pouring down his forehead as the crown of thorns cuts into him. Flemish painters discovered a raw eye for reality in the late middle ages that allowed them to create a work like this where matter-of-fact physical detail builds up to nightmarish intensity. Bouts, whose apprentices or assistants probably painted this in his style, takes this cocktail of the fantastic and real to a disturbing extreme in his masterpiece The Fall of the Damned. This little painting (43.8 x 37.1 cm) almost makes Christ himself look hellbound.
National Gallery, London

Don’t forget

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