Exhibition of the Week
Lucian Freud: Drawing Into Painting
Dig deep into the vision of this great artist with an exhibition that follows his portrait process from paper to canvas.
• National Portrait Gallery, London, from 12 February to 4 May
Also showing
Gwen John: Strange Beauties
One of the most original and authentic British artists of the early 20th century brings it all back home to her native Wales. Read the review.
• National Museum Cardiff, from 7 February to 28 June
Lynda Benglis and Giacometti
The artist who subverted minimalism with floppy molten slumping artworks takes on Giacometti.
• Barbican, London, from 12 February to 31 May
Vincent Hawkins
Make like Madonna and go to the Kent coast to catch this show of expressive paintings by Margate-based Hawkins.
• Tracey Emin Foundation, Margate, from 7 February to 29 March
Origin Stories
The story of art schools in Scotland since 1826, the year the Royal Scottish Academy was founded.
• Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, until 8 March
Image of the week
The artist Charmaine Watkiss explained to the Guardian how she has explored the botanical links connecting the Caribbean, the UK and the African continent in the context of the transatlantic slave trade. “While in my studio, I thought: all this knowledge must have travelled with the enslaved.” This led her to illustrated portraits depicting women of African descent alongside medicinal plants, evoking the herbal knowledge they drew on to survive. Read the full interview
What we learned
Gabrielle Goliath sued South Africa’s arts minister for banning her Venice Biennale show
Artists including Marina Abramović are filling Kerala’s Fort Cochin for its biennale
Artist Sarah Sze explained how she makes work that ‘unravels over time’
Writer Daisy Lafarge described how acute pain made her take up painting
A new show looked at the many ways the human body has been captured on film
A painting imagining Donald Trump conducting an orchestra got a lot wrong
Ovid’s unsettling Metamorphoses informed a wide-ranging show at the Rijksmuseum
Claire Tabouret’s stained-glass windows cast Notre Dame in a new light
A hidden detail found in an Anne Boleyn portrait was a ‘witchcraft rebuttal’
Masterpiece of the week
Portrait of a Man (Self-Portrait?) by Jan van Eyck, 1433
His eyes gaze at the world with cool, calm openness, as if every object, every colour and shade of light, pours into those moist orbs and is preserved. The keenness of these two perceptual windows is one reason to believe this really is the self-portrait of the artist who put observation at the centre of painting for the first time in history. No one before had ever painted real faces with the clarity Van Eyck here gives his own. We see not only his lucid eyes but the wrinkles under them, together with the stubble on his chin, flare of his nostril, a shadow under his nose, the pursed lips – all these stark fleshy facts decorated and set off by the magical red swathing of his extravagant headdress that proclaims pride in his success and fame. Van Eyck even adds a motto, “As I can”, and in an age when artists rarely signed their works he does so with bold emphasis: “Jan van Eyck made me on 21st October 1433.” That’s nearly 600 years ago. But he is in your moment, now, alive with you, when you look into those eyes.
• National Gallery, London
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