Online exhibition of the week
Helmut Newton 100
The photographs of Helmut Newton are some of the most real-seeming ever taken. His powerful black and white contrasts give depth and form to bodies in space, however you see them – in a gallery, book or online. Oh and some might find them sexy. Launches digitally on Thursday on IGTV.
• Newlands House gallery, Petworth.
Also showing digitally
Young Rembrandt
Simon Schama is your authoritative guide to the Ashmolean’s Rembrandt show on BBC Four on 28 April.
Glasgow International
This year’s cancelled Glasgow International has launched an ambitious digital replacement, featuring Georgina Starr, Alberia Whittle, Jenkin van Zyl and more.
Aubrey Beardsley
The depraved and exquisite art of this Victorian reprobate boggles the eye and mind, even when filtered through the comparatively respectable lens of a curator’s tour on the Tate website.
Artists’ Film International
Online screenings from the Whitechapel gallery of films by artists all over the world, including Dominika Olszowy and Miguel Fernamdez de Castro.
Image of the week
Parallel Lives, 2020, by George Condo
Featuring an estranged couple with too many eyes and mouths, Parallel Lives – created under lockdown in New York State – is typical of Condo’s work. It’s a hot mix of the desiring and devouring, aggression and the ridiculous. Read more here.
What we learned
Ai Weiwei told us how he turned his 81-day confinement into art
Domestic art became a lockdown obsession …
… as the National Gallery kicked off its “slow looking” lessons
A human artwork is still sitting in an empty gallery for six hours a day
Charlotte Gainsbourg is selling a self-portrait to help fight Covid-19 …
… and Wolfgang Tillmans is selling £50 posters to support threatened venues
Grayson Perry wants bored Britons to get creative at home
A healthcare worker clashed with an anti-lockdown protester
Choreographer Akram Khan posed online for Sky’s Portrait Artist of the Year
Seen from above, the empty streets of Sydney have an eerie beauty
More UK museums devised quizzes for Guardian readers to explore their collections
Olafur Eliasson released ‘“dotty” interactive works for Earth Day
Tristram Kenton celebrated Shakespeare’s birthday in pictures
Photographer Ryan McGinley revealed the terrors of his religious youth
Where Spain’s loneliest people are to be found …
… where the world’s most inspiring rock-climbing locations are …
… and how a Sumatran tiger took a selfie in the jungle
Terry O’Neill was licensed to shoot James Bond
How the late photographer Peter Beard communed with the wild
The day a Van Gogh painting was stolen in a sledgehammer raid
Masterpiece of the week
The Exhumation of St Hubert, late 1430s, by Rogier van der Weyden and workshop
This is a surreal marriage of modern artistic methods and a truly medieval world view. Rogier van der Weyden was one of the first artists to master the realistic portrayal of people and space, and, in this panel from an altarpiece he and his team created in Brussels almost 600 years ago, his consummate abilities are on display. Look at the way the Gothic architecture of a cathedral curves around the scene in eye-fooling depth and the lifelike faces of the priests. But he uses these new techniques to depict a macabre miracle. As they uncover the body of a bishop who has been dead for a century, the assembled clergy are astonished to see his flesh perfectly preserved. Rogier’s realism lets us contemplate this wonder, too. Explore this painting on the National Gallery’s website.
Don’t forget
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