Exhibition of the week
Julian Opie
This stylish and scientific student of perception playfully reveals how simply art can suggest the real.
• Lisson Gallery, London, 4 May to 12 June.
Also showing
The Modern Portrait
Striking images of contemporary Scots by artists including John Byrne and Ken Currie.
• Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh.
Joan Miró
The great Catalan surrealist makes an unexpected, welcome visitor to a gallery in the English countryside.
• Newlands House Gallery, Sussex, 1 May to 4 July.
Night Fever
A virtual tour of renowned nightclubs including Studio 54 and the Haçienda, plus a survey of Scottish club culture today.
• V&A Dundee until 9 January.
David Hockney
A free big-screen showing of Hockney’s animated video of the sunrise that beams a bright message of hope in dark times.
• Piccadilly Lights Screen, central London, at 8.21pm on 1 May. Also online.
Image of the week
The Despacio Sound System in New Century Hall at the Manchester international festival, one of the trailblazing club nights honoured by the V&A Dundee’s major new show celebrating a half-century of club culture. Read our feature.
What we learned
Poussin’s The Triumph of Silenus will hang in the main National Gallery thanks to a new study
Emperor Constantine has found his missing finger
Aboriginal women have taken over the Sydney Opera House
Michael Stipe has shot Tilda Swinton, Beth Ditto and others for his third photography book
Martin Parr chose his favourite photographs of postwar Britain
Turner prize winner Tai Shani buys her flowers in Camberwell
Chalkie Davies shot the holy trinity of ska in October 1979
The V&A’s Tristram Hunt wants an end to museum culture wars
We got a sneak preview of Carlota Guerrero’s first photography book
Urban designer Thomas Heatherwick wants ‘soulful’ cities
Rachel Whiteread’s new show is a triumph of lockdown bric-a-brac
Britain’s emerging architectural practices are prioritising sustainability over wealthy clients
Doll’s house builder Carmen Mazarrasa is queen of the ‘miniacs’
West End art galleries are coming back to life
The Great British Art Tour took a look at Lloyd George’s birthplace, motherhood on a St Leonard’s beach and a 17th century protofeminist
How The Who Sell Out put the pop in pop art
Photographer Travis Fox gives a bird’s eye view of America’s pace of change
The late June Newton tried to steal her subjects’ souls when she shot their portrait
The LensCulture Portrait awards showcased Travellers, nurses and freshwater swimmers
Masterpiece of the week
The Painter, 1865, by Honoré Daumier
This intense, disturbing study of a human head with eyes that are gulfs of dark introspection looks like it could be a modern painting by Dubuffet or Auerbach. But it was by Honoré Daumier, an artist is still widely misunderstood as merely a gifted newspaper caricaturist who occasionally turned out a painting. It’s true Daumier was a brilliant satirist, the French Gillray, whose lethal graphic art made real political impact (he famously portrayed King Louis Philippe as a pear, a grotesquerie that stuck). But as his contemporary the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire recognised, he was also a pure artist poised powerfully between romanticism and realism, tragedy and comedy. We see that profound side here.
• National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
Don’t forget
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