The world according to Jet magazine and a century of…

The world according to Jet magazine and a century of bodywork – the week in art

Surreal … a detail from Lorna Simpson’s Unanswerable at Hauser and Wirth in London. Photograph: James Wang

Exhibition of the week

All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life
The genius of Lucian Freud and his meaty friend Francis Bacon seen in a context of British “figurative” art from Sickert to Paula Rego and beyond.
• Tate Britain, London, 28 February to 27 August

Murillo: The Self Portraits
This 17th-century Spanish painter’s self portraits are haunting metaphysical meditations on fame, time and death.
• National Gallery, London, 28 February to 21 May

Lorna Simpson: Unanswerable
Surreal collages and dreamlike paintings that reuse old Ebony and Jet magazines to explore African American identity.
• Hauser and Wirth, London, 1 March to 28 April

In the Land
Hepworth, Nicholson, Piper ... it’s the usual suspects in a survey of landscape in mid-20th-century British art.
• Whitworth, Manchester, until 28 October

Jasmina Cibic: This Machine Builds Nations
The politics of modernist design explored in a trilogy of films entitled Nada, shown in a specially created installation.
• Baltic, Gateshead, until 28 May

Masterpiece of the Week

The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, completed in 1475, by Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo

The human body is good to paint, especially when it is suffering. Francis Bacon knew that and so did the Pollaiuolo brothers, who created this visceral image of torture at a time when the nude had only recently been revived as an artistic theme after centuries of censorship. They painted this altarpiece for the church of Santissima Annunziata in Florence, whose possession of a “miraculous” medieval painting gave it a special association with artists and made it the perfect place to demonstrate the very latest techniques. What this shocking picture does is dramatise and eroticise the male nude by having soldiers fire phallic arrows into Sebastian’s bare flesh at close range. Every detail, from their crossbows to the perspective of the landscape, is state of the art for 1470s Florence. This painting takes us to the bloody heart of the Renaissance.

National Gallery, London

Image of the week

A drawing of the red ladder symbol from the La Pasiega cave near Bilbao in Spain

Neanderthal paintings are seen in a cave in Pasiega, Spain in this photo obtained February 21, 2018. — The ladder painting itself at La Pasiega. Photograph: Reuters

This is a drawing, executed in 1913, of the red ladder symbol from the La Pasiega cave near Bilbao in Spain. The original painting it depicts is at least 64,000 years old, though it is unclear whether the animals and other symbols were painted later. In what was described as a “major breakthrough in the field of human evolution”, scientists said that Neanderthals had painted on cave walls in Spain tens of thousands of years before modern humans arrived. The discovery overturns the widely held belief that modern humans are the only species to have expressed themselves through works of art.