Stars, stripes and screens – the week in art

The Sun: Living With Our Star is at the Science Museum, London. — Getting warmer … The Sun: Living With Our Star is at the Science Museum in London. Photograph: Jody Kingzett/Science Museum

Exhibition of the Week

The Sun
Images of our star, whose sunstruck creators range from Bronze Age Scandinavians to the European Space Agency, mingle with the Science Museum’s collection of designer shades.
• Science Museum, London from 6 October to 6 May.

Also showing

Toulouse-Lautrec
The subtle and sensitive art of this bohemian visionary is a homage to the women workers of late 19th-century Paris.
• Scottish National Gallery from 6 October to 20 January.

Liquid Crystal Display
We look at LCD displays all the time but this exhibition puts today’s digital workhorse to more psychedelic uses.
• Site Gallery, Sheffield, until 27 January.

Sean Scully
Sculpture and paintings in the Yorkshire landscape by a diehard practitioner of serious abstract art.
• Yorkshire Sculpture Park until 6 January.

Puvis de Chavannes
Strange and marvellous pictures of mythology and ethereal landscapes by one of the most mysterious of 19th-century French artists.
• Michael Werner Gallery, London, until 10 November.

Masterpiece of the week

Dido building Carthage by Turner — Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Images

Dido Building Carthage by JMW Turner (1815)
Turner is said to have cried out on his deathbed: “The sun is god!” But even if he never spoke those words, this painting expresses a similar sentiment. Turner’s sun is so bright that it almost hurts to gaze directly into it. Your mind is fooled into reacting as if to real sunlight. The penetrating power of the vast nuclear reactor we roll around fills every millimetre of this painting with a bright and hopeful yet also an inescapable and all-knowing light. It is whatever people mean by “god”.
• National Gallery, London

Image of the week

ai face — Photograph: David Westwood/National Maritime Museum, London. Courtesy of the artist and Blain Southern

The Mask of Youth by Mat Collishaw
We were brought face to face with a spooky likeness of Queen Elizabeth I in Collishaw’s regal installation for the Queen’s House in Greenwich. Her robotic majesty contemplates her famous Armada Portrait while putting the wind up the subjects of her royal namesake, 400 years on.
• Queen’s House, London.