Exhibition of the week
I Am Van Dyck
So who was Anthony van Dyck? This 17th-century Flemish painter who died in Britain as the civil war started is a strangely elusive figure. The most brilliant pupil of Rubens and one of the great technical masters of all time, he seems to have been happy to ply his trade as a portraitist of the cavalier aristocracy in Charles I’s England. Some of his portraits have a startling truthfulness – and that goes for his celebrated last self-portrait, which is scrutinised in this show alongside self-portraits by Turner prize-winner Mark Wallinger. Is Van Dyck, then, the true father of modern British art?
• Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 12 January-24 April.
Other exhibitions this week
Champagne Life
Fourteen women from around the world show works that range from photorealist paintings to massive clay cows, in an exhibition that aims to upset male domination of the art market.
• Saatchi Gallery, London, 13 January-6 March.
Annie Leibovitz
Portraits of women now by the brilliant photographer, whose work has spanned Hollywood glamour and modern war. Leibovitz’s new pictures are touring the world, starting in London this week, and survey the lives of contemporary women.
• Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, London, 16 January-7 February.
Tim Stoner
New paintings by this engaging and idiosyncratic artist.
• Modern Art, London, 15 January-13 February.
Park Seo-Bo
The Korean artist strives for a minimal emptiness rooted in eastern aesthetic ideals.
• White Cube Mason’s Yard, 15 January-12 March.
Masterpiece of the week
What a body. The glorious corpulent flesh of Silenus slops all over this mighty painting with an abandon that mixes classical myth (Silenus is the companion of the wine god Bacchus) with north European carnival traditions. Painted in the studio of Rubens and ripe with his rollicking approach to high art, it may be mostly the work of the young Van Dyck, but the grapes are by nature artist Frans Snyders. Alcohol warnings? What alcohol warnings?
• National Gallery, London.
Image of the week
What we learned this week
What the most unmissable art and design exhibitions for 2016 are
Meet the outsider artists who have turned their homes into masterpieces
After 30 years, the Saatchi gallery will have its first all-female show
That an image of New Year’s mayhem in Manchester went viral for resembling a ‘beautiful painting’
But is it really Sistine perfection – or just a pissed-up Manchester street scene?
Waiting to die: inside the Iranian prison where child inmates face execution
What the 10 best concrete buildings are
A wholesale power grab: how the UK government is handing housing over to private developers
Have I got nudes for you: Emer O’Toole on the art of being naked
That super slides are the slippery slope into art’s babyish new era
Step into Silicon Forest, Putin’s secret weapon in the global tech race
That the controversial artist Richard Prince has been sued (again) for copyright infringement
How Velázquez gave Laura Cumming consolation in grief – and set her on the trail of a lost portrait
About the extraordinary life of Paz Errázuriz: the woman who dared to defy the Pinochet regime
That ORLAN’s best shot is a striptease in the style of Botticelli
That the curator of “show of the decade” Goya exhibition is preparing a poignant farewell
