Exhibition of the week
Joseph Cornell
The romantic, ethereal, dream-sodden collages and assemblages of Joseph Cornell, magically caught in little boxes, are surrealist wonders and strange jewels of modern art.
Royal Academy, London, from 4 July until 27 September.
Other exhibitions this week
The M+ Sigg Collection
An important collection of contemporary art from China offers a different perspective on the art of today.
Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, from 1 July until 20 September.
Ben Rivers: The Two Eyes Are Not Brothers
This Artangel commission in the former BBC centre explores the surreal film sets for Hollywood blockbusters that linger on the edge of the Sahara desert.
Television Centre, White City, London, until 31 August.
Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions
This provocative survey of modern America confronts modern art with the politics of race.
Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, from 30 June until 18 October.
The Art of Bedlam: Richard Dadd
The strange visions of a Victorian outsider bring fairy magic to the Surrey countryside.
Watts Gallery, Guildford, Surrey, until 1 November.
Masterpiece of the week
John Constable – The Cornfield (1826)
Clouds, corn, shadows and sunlight: this painting creates a rural England I want to walk in. The boy takes a drink, the dog tends the sheep. Time stops. A folk song echoes two fields away.
National Gallery, London.
Image of the week
Katy Grannan spent years travelling to the parts of California where tourists do not roam. This is one of the desert dwellers from her exhibition The Nine and the Ninety Nine at Foam in Amsterdam until 23 August.
What we learned this week
The outsiders America doesn’t want you to see
What American civil war scenes look like today
How hard our pixelated art quiz is
What our darkest, dirtiest fantasies are – courtesy of phone sex workers
Havin’ a giraffe! How animals took their own safari selfies
That the Tate Britain’s Barbara Hepworth show locks her open-air spirit up in boxes
A Gustav Klimt piece has sold for almost £25m at Sotheby’s
Meanwhile, Hitler’s art of flowers and fairytale castles has sold for £280,000 at auction
... and how the Hitler art trade became riddled with fakes
Why Doug Aitken is a man on a mission for non-stop art
A police warrant is out for the street artist Shepard Fairey
Why a Tate gallery in Glasgow could save the union
What 70 years of Soviet photography looks like
