Exhibition of the week
Machine Gods: Art in the Age of Technology and Warhol and Paolozzi: I Want to Be a Machine
Modern art’s fascination with the age of mass production and information is explored in two shows that stretch across the 20th century from Picabia to Pop.
• Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, from 17 November until 2 June.
Also showing
Moments of Silence
Recordings of the two-minute silence make this eerie sound installation a powerful image of the absent dead.
• Imperial War Museum, London, until 31 March.
Martin Parr: Return to Manchester
The photographer of unvarnised reality explores his lifelong fascination with the north-west’s metropolis.
• Manchester Art Gallery from 16 November until 22 April.
Penny Woolcock: Fantastic Cities
Images of inequality in film and photographs.
• Modern Art Oxford from 17 November until 3 March.
Peter Howson: Acta Est Fabula
Visceral new paintings by the veteran of the New Glasgow Boys movement.
• Flowers Gallery, London, until 22 December.
Masterpiece of the week
Salome Receives the Head of John the Baptist, circa 1609-10, by Caravaggio
The executioner who lowers the severed head of John the Baptist on to Salome’s platter has a battered, street-worn face with a broken nose. Caravaggio’s early biographers criticised him for never making preparatory drawings but instead painting directly from the model. Even without such testimony, we’d guess that a real individual, someone broken, poverty-stricken and hard, posed as the executioner. Yet it is also a kind of self-portrait, for when he painted this, close to the end of his short life, Caravaggio was a murderer on the run. The bleak desperation of his life hangs in the shadows and infects the pale decapitated head.
• National Gallery, London.
Image of the week
Frontispiece of The Love Books of Ovid (The Bodley Head, 1925)
It’s the pictures that make books dirty, prudish Victorians decided in Oxford. Now the university’s Bodleian Libraries are allowing the public to see some of the books deemed too corrupting for students to view. Read the full story.
What we learned
Artists live in fear of Brazil under Bolsonaro
The National Trust’s Cragside cover-up was “ridiculous”
Assyrian art didn’t pull its punches
Alex Urso has designs on your doormat
Larry Bell has never stopped experimenting
Milena Dragicevic throws a party for the dead
Guy Bourdin’s dreamlike view of sex, supermodels and champagne
At Paris Photo, you can grab an Eiffel of classic French snaps …
And you can take in its global perspective
Thomas Heatherwick has turned shopping into an Instagram opportunity
The chair of a new buildings watchdog is no fan of modern architecture
Rankin thought fashion treated models like cattle
Susan Meiselas is on the Deutsche Börse shortlist
Guido Guidi finds greatness in the ordinary
An Oxford museum is turning Syrian refugees into tour guides
The Forest Finns are a fiery bunch
Vivian Maier brought colour to Chicago’s streets
Chrissie Hynde paints to escape the pressures of pop
Shirley Baker watched Britain go to the dogs
Hip-hop portraitists revealed their secrets
Tate Britain is inviting Van Gogh to stay
How early black designers made their mark
Kerry James Marshall is named most influential contemporary artist
Don’t forget
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