Yoko Ono’s broken pottery and the fragility of love

Yoko Ono’s broken pottery and the fragility of love – the week in art

Yoko Ono’s Mend Piece 1966. Photograph: Image courtesy the artist / photo: Iain Macmillan

Exhibition of the week

Yoko Ono
Help mend Ono’s broken pottery in a participatory artwork she first staged in 1960s London.
• Whitechapel Gallery, London. 25 August-2 January

Also showing

Marilyn Stafford
Survey of this pioneering American photographer at the former home of her peer, Lee Miller.
• Farleys House and Gallery, Muddles Green, Sussex until 31 October

Ellen Harvey and JMW Turner
Harvey shows her paintings of vanished tourist sights, and selects works by Margate hero Turner.
• Turner Contemporary, Margate until 26 September

Mary McIntyre
Photographs of forgotten and neglected places commissioned by DCA from Irish artists McIntyre.
• Dundee Contemporary Arts until 21 November

Tarek Lakhrissi
Poetry and art combine to meditate on the fragility of love and community from a queer perspective.
• Oriel Mostyn, Llandudno until 19 September

Image of the week

The two recovered Van Goghs. — The two Van Goghs, found hidden behind a bathroom wall in 2016. Photograph: Peter de Jong/AP

One of Italy’s most wanted men, an alleged top drug trafficker suspected of having bought two stolen Van Gogh paintings on the black market, has been arrested in Dubai. Raffaele Imperiale, an alleged kingpin in the Naples-based Camorra organised crime syndicate, was arrested on 4 August, Italy’s state police and financial crimes police corps said. In 2016, two Van Gogh works, stolen in 2002 from an Amsterdam museum, were found stashed in a farmhouse on property owned by Imperiale in the Naples-area town of his birth, Castellamare di Stabia. “The wealth illicitly accumulated allowed him to buy on the black market two Van Gogh paintings of unquantifiable value,” police said. They referred to the 1882 View of the Sea at Scheveningen and a 1884-1885 work, Congregation leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen, which had been stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Italian police found the paintings wrapped in cotton sheets, stuffed into a box and hidden behind a wall in a bathroom. Read the full story here.

What we learned

Chuck Close, painter of outsized photorealist portraits, died aged 81

Performance artist Anne Bean thinks the Beatles ruined Yoko Ono

Artists pulled an exhibition at the Whitworth after a statement of solidarity with Palestine was removed

Maggi Hambling lost half her teeth during an agreeable lunch

A Kinshasa collective transforms dumped dolls and discarded flip-flops into surreal costumes

Cammie Toloui turned the camera on her peep show customers

Banksy was definitely behind British seaside ‘spraycation’ artworks

A new book shows how Bloomsbury’s female artists saw a radical side to domestic life

Monaris’s opulently coloured photographs transform cities into film sets

Marvel Harris has documented his gender reassignment surgery in a photo book

Levon Biss captures the minuscule structures of seeds

Judith Black’s photographs show the freedom and joy of family gatherings

We got a glimpse inside the Udine home of Italian designer Patrizia Moroso

Masterpiece of the week

JMW Turner, Sun Rising Through Vapour, Before 1807
It’s the dawning of a new day and the sun is just breaking through a veil of sea mist. You can look at it without hurting your eyes – of course you can, it’s a painting, but in some of Turner’s works that searing dot really does seem to burn your retina. Here, the world is gentle, the sea so still it holds reflections of boats and light. But this is most of all a painting of people. They gather and go about their morning business in one of his most down to earth scenes, a joyous memory of the seaside as a working world.
• National Gallery, London