Exhibition of the week
Klimt/Schiele Drawings
This is a beguiling and engrossing show of sensuality and reverie from Sigmund Freud’s sexually supercharged Vienna.
• Royal Academy, London, from 4 November until 3 February.
Also showing
I Am Ashurbanipal
The Assyrian empire stomps out of the past in all its brutal glory and severe splendour.
• British Museum, London, from 8 November until 24 February.
Lorenzo Lotto
The portraits of this Venetian-born Renaissance melancholiac delve deep into human psychology and individuality.
• National Gallery, London, from 5 November until 10 February.
Patrick Heron
English abstraction by the seaside as a colourful dreamer comes to Margate’s wintry shore.
• Turner Contemporary, Margate, until 6 January.
Alex Katz
Coca-Cola ads provide the inspiration for the latest cool paintings from this deadpan American master.
• Timothy Taylor gallery, London, until 21 December.
Masterpiece of the week
Portrait of a Young Man, circa 1540-45, Moretto da Brescia
This self-consciously gloomy youth adopts a pose that has symbolised melancholy since the early middle ages. He rests his head on his hand just like the spirit of introspection in Albrecht Dürer‘s 1514 print Melencolia I. Yet the image Dürer popularised had much older roots: that same symbol of melancholy can be seen in the queen who rests her face gloomily on her hand in the 12th-century Lewis Chessmen. Moretto’s portrait is fascinating because it shows a real person adopting this pose, in other words, playing the part of a melancholiac to look cool. The same fashion for sadness can be seen in portraits by Moretto’s contemporary Lorenzo Lotto. It is immortalised in Shakespeare’s character Melancholy Jacques, and reaches its apotheosis in Hamlet.
• National Gallery, London.
Image of the week
Peterloo memorial, Manchester, by Jeremy Deller
The British artist unveiled the designs for a memorial to the Peterloo massacre of 1819, when soldiers attacked a crowd rallying to demand democratic reform in Britain. The names of the 18 men, women and children killed will be inscribed, and compass arrows will point to the sites of other democratic uprisings, from China to Egypt. Read the full story.
What we learned
Mark Wallinger has invited young footballers to kick his arty balls
Lorenzo Lotto’s portraits are a five-star wonder
Gonzo illustrator Ralph Steadman thinks Trump is a lout
Lynn Savery won Australia’s prestigious Doug Moran portrait prize
You could snap up a masterpiece if you follow our route to cheaper culture
Only the smartest buy Alex Katz’s paintings
Jeff Wall makes modern tableaux like an old master
Illustrators draw battle lines over Brexit
Klimt and Schiele found common cause in the flesh
Betye Saar helped spark the black women’s movement
A drop of mouse wine? Head to Sweden’s Museum of Disgusting Food
A New Zealand sculpture is killing birds
Female artists are fighting oppression
Matt Hamon photographed his little daughter making sense of the natural world
Frankenstein inspired an outpouring of creative imagination
The V&A’s future east London offshoot will see culture in the round
Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts has acquired a magnificent collection of photographs
Norah Smyth had a frontline view of East End suffragettes
Ben Uri gallery is to be reinvented to promote immigrant artists
Don’t forget
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