Exhibition of the week
Ancient India: Living Traditions
Ambitious blockbuster that shows how Hindu, Jain and Buddhist art assumed their shapes and inspired the world.
• British Museum, London, 22 Mayto 19 October
Also showing
To Improvise a Mountain
The conceptual painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye selects art that inspires her, from Bas Jan Ader to Walter Sickert.
• Leeds Art Gallery until 5 October
Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures
Retrospective of the brilliant artist who saw the sensuality of meat and made piss-holes in the snow.
• The Hepworth Wakefield, 17 May to 27 October
Heiress: Sargent’s American Portraits
Small but loving show of Sargent’s supremely stylish and characterful paintings.
• Kenwood House, London, until 5 October
Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely: Myths and Machines
These wildly inventive artists also happened to be married to each other. It must have been fun at their house.
• Hauser and Wirth Somerset, Bruton, 17 May to 1 February
Image of the week
Helen Chadwick’s prolific if tragically short career is getting its first big showing in more than two decades. It includes a vast chocolate fountain filled with 800kg of molten Tony’s Chocolonely and her Piss Flowers, white bronze sculptures cast from the holes she and her husband made by peeing in thick snow. Laura Smith, curator of the retrospective at the Hepworth Wakefield, says: “She was trying to disrupt societal conventions, including gender normativity … She was really pioneering and wasn’t afraid of art being sexy or funny, either.”
What we learned
New museum Fenix Rotterdam shows the realities of migration alongside esoteric art
Treasures of sacred art from India are very much a live tradition
Lee Miller’s unseen war shots are on show at Photo London
Anna Perach makes extreme, wearable carpets
How Linda Rosenkrantz recorded the NY art crowd’s secrets in the 60s
Pioneering American video artist Dara Birnbaum has died aged 78
Street artist Nicolas Party has unveiled a huge mural at Bath’s Holburne Museum
Australia is sending its first all-Indigenous team to the Venice architecture biennale
Koyo Kouoh, set to have been the Venice Biennale’s first African cuator, died aged 57
Masterpiece of the week
Portrait of a Young Man by Vincenzo Catena, about 1510
You can tell we’re in Venice. It’s something about that open blue sky speckled with light puffy clouds – like the equally airy skies in other Venetian paintings by Giovanni Bellini and Titian. Catena, a less famous Venetian painter than them, was probably Bellini’s pupil. In fact, in this portrait he sticks with his teacher’s style at a time when it was getting old. Why change it if it works? Whoever posed for this frank, bold full face painting was probably delighted to be recorded with such bright-eyed precision, in a world when only an oil painting, drawing or sculpted bust could preserve a face. Catena does a faithful, useful job of holding up a mirror to this man.
• National Gallery, London
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