Arts and Design

A lost childhood home, magic mushrooms and arty face masks – the week in art


Exhibition of the week

Arshile Gorky and Jack Whitten

We live in serious times and so we need serious art. The Armenian-born American painter Arshile Gorky saw his mother die on a hunger march and summoned his lost childhood home in art that is brightly coloured yet spiky with sorrow. Alabama abstractionist Whitten was his lifelong admirer.

Also showing

Mushrooms

This psychedelic survey of our fascination with mushrooms, with an enthusiastically picked basket of artists from Cy Twombly to Carsten Höller and a strong emphasis on the more hallucinogenic fungi, was a hit before lockdown and is now visitable online. Come to think of it, magic mushrooms may be exactly what we need.

Kimono

The iconic Japanese garment has inspired artists and fashion designers for centuries and now you can explore its history in a curator’s tour of this V&A exhibition cut short by the pandemic.

Hepworth Ceramics Fair

The acclaimed Yorkshire gallery’s annual fair for stylish pottery takes place online this year.

Noteworthy Women

Money may be in short supply but this online exhibition from the Bank of England celebrates women who have made, and appeared on, our banknotes.

Image of the week

Astrid Kirchherr’s shot of the Beatles – Pete Best, George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Stuart Sutcliffe – at Hamburg Funfair.



Astrid Kirchherr’s shot of the Beatles line-up in 1960 – Pete Best, George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Stuart Sutcliffe. Photograph: Astrid Kirchherr/K&K/Redferns

Astrid Kirchherr, the photographer whose shots of the Beatles helped turn them into icons, died aged 81. Kirchherr took the first photo of the Beatles as a group, at the city’s fairground in 1960, when the bassist, Stuart Sutcliffe, and the drummer, Pete Best, were still members. She dated Sutcliffe, and cut his hair into the “moptop” style that came to be a key look for the early Beatles. Read Sean O’Hagan’s appreciation of her work here.

What we learned

Just what the world’s great cities look like without people

What design David Shrigley has put on a coronavirus face mask

What the world looks like from female photographers’ perspective

Why banning knockoff buildings might bring a renaissance in Chinese architecture

Beatles photographer Astrid Kirchherr has died

What Kirchherr’s eye for style brought to the Beatles

Welcome to the yurt-opolis! How Mongolia is helping its nomads adapt to big city life

Berlin’s cultural capital is in peril from exodus of billionaire art collectors

Even an art critic has an inner critic

Anish Kapoor believes Modi is using coronavirus to destroy India’s heritage

An Italian woman won a €1m Picasso in Christmas raffle

Massive Attack’s 3D raises £106,000 for Bristol food banks with an art print fire sale

Marc Quinn’s “viral paintings” form personal visual diary of the global health emergency

… and other artists are making upbeat coronavirus murals

Where Henry Wellcome kept his cats – and other great trivia in our great British art quiz

That Pompeii didn’t see catastrophe coming – and neither did we – as the British Museum shows

After the war, the arts came back stronger. They can do so again now, says Charlotte Higgins

Guardian critics say wifi could be the saviour of culture

Damien Hirst has few complaints about lockdown life

Edvard Munch’s The Scream needs to practise physical distancing, say experts

Masterpiece of the week

Death and the Devil, engraving, 1513, Albrecht Durer



Photograph: Alamy

Knight, Death and Devil, 1513, Albrecht Dürer

A rider who has armoured himself against life’s assaults looks straight ahead as he passes through the wild, rugged landscape of this hostile world. His gaze is fixed and rigid because if he glanced around, he’d see the horrors that dog him, and might despair. A grotesque devil follows closely behind, eager to tempt him into sin and madness. Meanwhile Death, the grim rider who accompanies us all, leers at the knight hungrily and holds up an hourglass. This was what it felt like to inhabit Dürer’s plague-ridden world, and what it feels like now. Put on your armour or at least your face mask.

National Galleries of Scotland

Don’t forget

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