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The painting that put the first lady of surrealism on the map

Dorothea Tanning presents herself as an artist-sorceress in this 1942 self-portrait, with the power to make over the world through imagination and dreams. Costume has always been a means of changing character but Tanning ups the ante, with her skirt made from amorphous nude bodies.

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The designer Shohei Shigematsu is leading the redesign and expansion of the auction houses’s space on the Upper East Side of New York.

A master watchmaker and an antiquarian horologist at their family-run workshop in the heart of the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham

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A Tufts University project seeks to make “history more visible” — from slavery to Black Lives Matter — with a map of historic African-American sites in Boston and beyond.

A colossal painting, once claimed to depict a Confederate victory, has carried an evolving meaning. Now, a spectacular restoration at the Atlanta History Center unravels its complex tale.

Our guide to new art shows and some that will be closing soon.

Thousands of publicly owned artworks to be listed in database over next two years

Eve is a beautiful, biblical sculpture that Auguste Rodin originally intended to be part of his ambitious Gates of Hell project in Paris. Today she enjoys a spot which the artist could never have imagined – outside a Nando’s in Harlow.

Rodin’s stunning 1882 statue is one of the first thousand publicly owned sculptures to be listed in a new UK database being created over the next two years.

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Memorable moments from a weekend of new fairs where art trumps celebrity-watching.

Squeezed amid the City’s garish landmarks is a glorious, free-to-enter roof garden borne of public-private dealmaking … so what’s the catch?

Sometimes the planning system just works. The untrammelled interests of global capital come up against a set of rules designed to ensure maximum public benefit, and something better is spawned in the process. The bounty is usually so small as to be negligible. Perhaps a few apartments will be marginally less overpriced, and called “affordable”, or there will be a tiny garnish of lawn, labelled on the plans as “park”. Which makes what has happened at Fen Court, a new office block on Fenchurch Street in the City of London, all the more remarkable.

As a member of the public, you can now sit on a bench beneath a bower of wisteria 15 storeys up in the air, or eat your sandwiches next to a little pond while suspended among the rooftops of the Square Mile. The gothic space-rockets of Tower Bridge rise to the south, while the mad bulge of the Walkie Talkie looms to the west, along with the gleaming pipes and rooftop cranes of the Lloyd’s building and the dome of St Paul’s beyond.

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Masked musicians, military tanks and Batman all play parts in the daily theatre captured by Betsy Karel of New York City’s famous intersection – loved by tourists, shunned by locals

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‘There was this trend of eating sushi from a woman’s naked body. So when I found the perfect papaya, I knew exactly how to shoot it’

A decade ago, I was fascinated by papaya – the colour, the shape, the seeds that are almost like fish eggs. So when I found the perfect one, I knew exactly how I wanted to shoot it.

My boyfriend Moro and I were living in Brooklyn at the time. This was our first apartment in New York. There were no windows in our bedroom, but the kitchen gave on to the backyard and had good light. So that’s where I worked.

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The teenage Wasp has inherited her father’s mission for justice. Like him, she must also learn to live with a mental health condition.

Leonor Fini’s post-internet paintings; contemporary sculptures from the French Caribbean and Haiti; Luke Stettner’s painfully personal show; and Joseph Urban’s sumptuous theater sets.

Dean Valentine started collecting art during a painful time in his life and says, “a mortality event almost always lies at the core of some collection mania.”

Fantagraphics Books will publish four of his books, starting with “The Underground Sketchbook,” in October.

In a number of new exhibitions, increased visibility for Latin American artists continues to challenge the status quo

Latin American artists haven’t always been allowed into centre stage. Pushed to the sidelines of mainstream art history, artists like Zilia Sánchez were overlooked from the New York art scene in the 1960s, while Latinx artists have only recently gained attention from blockbuster museums.

Related: Zilia Sánchez: 92-year-old artist gets her first museum retrospective

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The influence of Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus school on architecture as covered by the Manchester Guardian

Founded by architect Walter Gropius in Weimar Germany in 1919, the Bauhaus school has had a huge global influence on art, architecture and design. After relocating to Dessau (arguably its most famous premises) in 1925, it moved to Berlin in 1932, before being closed down by the Nazis the following year. Gropius left Germany in 1934 and spent three years in Britain, before moving to the US in 1937. It was during the 1930s that the Manchester Guardian first started reporting the influence of the Bauhaus on British design, covering lectures given by Gropius as well as interviewing him.

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The recent court decision against the neighbours of Tate Modern in London belies a much wider problem – everyone is constantly being watched

Alexander McFadyen says that he and his family were “more or less constantly watched” while they were at home. They had to be “properly dressed” at all times, and even then they were often photographed or filmed, and sometimes spied on with binoculars. McFadyen set out to measure the problem. While working at the dining table, he counted 84 people taking photographs in 90 minutes. This is the reality of living in a glass-walled flat in Block C of Neo Bankside, just 34 metres from the viewing gallery at Tate Modern, which receives up to 600,000 visitors a year.

A neighbour, Claire Fearn, said being watched like that made her “sick to her stomach”. People waved and made obscene gestures at her and her family. Her husband, Giles Fearn, found pictures of their home posted online by strangers. Many of the images are still on Twitter, often with amused remarks about the misfortune of their wealthy owners. (The flats are worth an average of £4.35m each.) Another neighbour, Lindsay Urquhart, visited the viewing gallery and heard someone remark that she and the other residents of Block C deserved to lose their privacy because they were “rich bastards”.

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Erwin Blumenfeld was one of the most celebrated fashion photographers of his time. He mostly worked in black and white, but this selection focuses on his colour output and boldly experimental images made in New York in the 40s and 50s

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After too long a silence, art is finally tackling global warming. Here are the big players – including the artist who’s lighting up Alaska

In 1975, photographer Michel Comte stood up before scientists, business leaders and politicians at the Club of Rome to deliver a speech about the climate disaster he believed was on the horizon. Back then, he was still a student, and a little nervous – but he could sense the future. Now, Comte’s recent works incorporating black carbon fallout from the jet stream, shown in Rome, Milan and Hong Kong, prove just how right he was to speak out.

Comte’s message was echoed last week in the UK, when thousands of schoolchildren – inspired by 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg – took to the streets to pressure the government into taking action on climate change. Like Comte, they have seen a bleak future ahead and are speaking out.

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National Portrait Gallery, London
These tiny masterpieces, blazing with passion, desire and mystery, are among the most magical creations in British art

A young man with dark hair erupting like fire in a crest on his forehead poses with his white shirt open to expose his chest. Golden flames surround him but he is unscathed. It’s an image straight out of an Elizabethan love poem. This unknown but red-hot youth was portrayed by Nicholas Hilliard in about 1600 on an oval piece of vellum just under 7cm tall – which makes it one of his larger works. Yet this tiny masterpiece is also a key to how his miniature art functions, its purpose, and why it is still so full of life after more than 400 years.

Around his neck the ardent young man wears a gold chain, and with his left hand he fondles the ornament it suspends. Within that is another miniature – the image, surely, of the person for whom this one was painted. This portrait is a none too subtle symbol of blazing desire, given as a love token – but to whom?

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Mr. Webster captured memorable images of the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Simon & Garfunkel, the Mamas & the Papas and numerous others.

The number of lawsuits nationwide nearly tripled in 2018. Is it an overdue move for the rights of the disabled or a way for lawyers to make a quick buck?

J.R.R. Tolkien — the artist, the writer, the scholar — is the subject of an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum. The show is a comprehensive view of his alternate reality.

My former colleague Elaine Thomas, who has died aged 68 of a heart attack, was the founding vice-chancellor of the University for the Creative Arts.

In 2003, when I was director of the Kent Institute of Art & Design, I approached Elaine, then director of the Surrey Institute of Art & Design, with the idea of joining our institutions to form a specialist art, design and architecture university. Cautious at first, Elaine soon embraced the suggestion, which was partly aimed at protecting the colleges from a takeover by mainstream multifaculty universities.

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The Hockneys: Never Worry What the Neighbours Think offers an intimate look at the painter David by his brother John

A new book on David Hockney is set to offer readers the chance to view the artist from a fresh perspective – that of his younger brother.

The Hockneys: Never Worry What the Neighbours Think is written by John Hockney, the youngest of four siblings, and promises to examine the close and complex relationships between the family members, as well revealing more about the life of one of Britain’s best-loved artists. According to a brief statement by David: “John has a view of me no one else has.”

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Baltic, Gateshead
The winners of the prize for up-and-coming artists – Ingrid Pollard, Kang Jungsuck and Aaron Hughes – take on war, racism and reality itself

As Iraq war veteran Aaron Hughes contemplates his new commission for the Baltic Artists’ award, he tells the Guardian that “creativity can push back against the divisions that drive conflict”. Deployed to Iraq on behalf of the US army in 2003-04, Hughes became disillusioned by the destruction of war, and chose to turn his hand to creativity.

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The American Kennel Club has opened its collection of all things canine in New York. Here is a tour of the art of the dog.

Serpentine gallery, London
Why would anyone want to watch a hologram of the famous performance artist doing nothing? Abramović’s much vaunted show is tedious and trite

People are standing around with hi-tech devices strapped to their heads. I am one of them. Through the lenses that protrude from my face, I can see how daft my fellow audience members look. We’re like a bunch of drunks playing that game where you have a word stuck to your forehead. This is Mixed Reality, which lets you see a virtual image within a real physical space. In the middle of the gallery stands the world-famous performance artist Marina Abramović, wearing a bright red dress with her dark hair tied back. She paces a bit. She holds out an arm and stares at it as if mystified. Then she dissolves in a cloud of blue dots.

Abramović, you see, is present only in digital form. She has been filmed by 36 cameras to create a mobile simulation of herself. This virtual animated sculpture seems to walk on the actual floor of the gallery. At times she vanishes, leaving just her shadow to move around the room, creeping towards audience members.

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Tate Modern, London
He was a drunk desperate to prove himself as an artist. His clumsy papiermache twists, lumpy objects and wearable sculptures testify that he succeeded

A misshapen snowball or a discarded gobstopper. Four more pink balls kebabbed on a pink stick, reaching for the sky in dumb emulation of Brancusi’s Endless Column – or, just as plausibly, an item from the sex shop anal play section. Don’t point that thing at me. One green and one yellow thing, another white thing on its own, and a deeper pink thing whose writhing musculature is tying itself in a knot. They all stand about outside Tate Modern looking like a cartoon of public sculpture. “No head-scratching necessary,” a sign should say.

These friendly, disarming objects provide an introduction to the Franz West retrospective, which takes us from dirty drawings rife with sexual encounters (including urination and cartoonish humiliations and jokes about Viennese Actionism) to room after room of sculptures, posters, installations and collaborative works made with his friends and accomplices.

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In the ’70s, the artist Jack Ceglic created the gourmet grocer's aesthetic, with industrial touches aplenty. His own home in East Hampton is even more appealing.

At 82, this titan of Modernism is talking about the past, taking stock and putting some of his works and part of his collection up for auction.

Hans Rausing gives Britain’s oldest art school its biggest ever donation

Britain’s oldest art school, a 250-year-old institution which offers postgraduate students a three-year art course free of charge, has received its biggest ever donation.

The Royal Academy of Arts said on Monday that the £10m gift from the Tetra Pak heir Hans Rausing would go to restoring and renewing a historic central London campus which many people do not even realise exists.

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Photojournalist Achilleas Zavallis has been in Syria covering the collapse of Islamic State across the region and the resultant displacement of families

For the past week the Syrian Democratic Forces have been trying to defeat the last remnants of Islamic State that fortified themselves in the small town located on the banks of the Euphrates River, near the Iraqi border.

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An extreme concentration of wealth in a city where even the air is for sale has produced a new breed of needle-like tower

• Read the text version here

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Harry Cory Wright’s photographs of one of Britain’s most radical postwar buildings capture its dramatic spaces, rich textures and carefully selected materials. From its flowing multi-levelled spaces and wood-panelled concert hall to the jungle of its tropical conservatory, the Barbican Centre offers a remarkable variety of experiences within a single building

Barbican Centre by Harry Cory Wright, with an introduction by Sir Nicholas Kenyon, is published by Thames & Hudson

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An exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute takes a new look at Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch’s controversial 1968 photo essay, which sought to enhance public understanding of the Black Panthers

• Vanguard Revisited: Poetic Politics & Black Futures is on until 7 April

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This scandalously mismanaged ‘gift to the people of London’ will cost the taxpayer £43m. For nothing

We are invited to embark on an adventure. It will be an emblem of the enterprise of a proud people. Its cost will be zero, or not much, or a sum that, if quite large, will absolutely be worth it. Naysayers are pooh-poohed. Practical objections are for losers. A deadline is imposed, meaning we have to rush ahead with it at all costs. And driving it all forward are the quipping, gurning, dissembling features of Boris Johnson.

For Brexit, read the garden bridge, an earlier vanity project promoted by the former mayor of London and foreign secretary. For it was Johnson who picked up the charming-sounding idea, conceived by Joanna Lumley, of building a flower-filled crossing from London’s South Bank to the Temple. For whatever selfless or selfish reasons (you decide), he chose to throw his mayoral power behind it, steamroller objection and commit public money to an architectural unicorn.

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Whitechapel Gallery, London
The Whitechapel revisits its groundbreaking 1950s exhibition, pairing architects with artists to present changing visions of what’s to come

“Strange, yes,” barks a Pathé news voiceover, calling us across the decades from 1956, “but provocative and exciting.” He’s talking about an exhibition, This Is Tomorrow, at the Whitechapel Gallery that – for the strength of its thinking and the later achievements of its protagonists – still reverberates. Coordinated by the architect Theo Crosby, its aim was to bring together art forms in what Pathé primly called “proper collaboration”. It featured the young brutalists Peter and Alison Smithson and the proto-pop artists Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi. Ernö Goldfinger, whose 31-storey Trellick Tower is now an unofficial national treasure, was in it. Reyner Banham, the most exciting architectural writer of his time, wrote an introduction to the catalogue in the form of a semi-poem.

With their new show, Is This Tomorrow?, the Whitechapel is consciously remaking its old hit, with the historic newsreels shown by way of reminder. Here, too, artists are teamed with architects and asked to consider, in some way, the future. They have recruited a thoughtful and talented crew. Also a multinational one, with representatives from Mexico, Bangladesh, China and Spain, and others with origins in Iran, Ghana and Japan.

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Hayward Gallery; Tate Britain, London
The riveting street photography of Diane Arbus is an intense, two-way exchange, while Don McCullin’s urgent lifetime’s work amounts to a history of our times

It is 1957, and a girl clutching schoolbooks to her small body steps from the gutter to the sidewalk of an empty New York street. She is getting home on her own, native wit condensed in her determined face. Sun gilds the distant buildings, but she seems to live in a foreground of grimy shadows – young and yet prematurely old, the pompom on her hat a frivolous betrayal of her toughness. She shoots a dark glance at the photographer.

Diane Arbus (1923-71) saw the street as a land of secrets, each passing figure properly mysterious. Roaming about with her old 35mm camera, she shows New Yorkers exactly this way. A woman in costly furs stares back at her, startled, barely holding herself together. A young mother carrying her child appears as grave as the Madonna in a Pietà. And a transfixing image of a taxi waiting at the lights is a miniature travelling theatre. Inside, the almost illegible figure of a man turns away from his female companion, who is furiously biting her nails as she smokes. The driver, noticing Arbus, seems equally bemused by the photographer outside, crouching down with her lens, and the tension inside his vehicle.

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During the apartheid years, it was the everyday resilience of black South Africans that captured the imagination of the Soweto-born photographer

This picture was taken by Santu Mofokeng, a Soweto-born South African photographer, in 1986. It is part of a series of pictures that Mofokeng, then aged 30, took of a spontaneous ritual that had emerged among the workers who took the early morning and late-evening trains from the townships into Johannesburg. Mofokeng, who worked as a darkroom printer in the city, witnessed how his fellow commuters formed a “train church”. In each carriage, community preachers led their packed-in congregation in a raucous Christian service, with sermons, prayers and gospel singing, accompanied by drumming on the train’s sides and the ringing of bells.

Mofokeng’s photos captured what he called the “two most significant features of South African life: the experience of migrancy and the pervasiveness of spirituality”. The sudden religious ecstasy struck him as odd, in the first instance, and then as something profound. “These office cleaners, clerks, factory workers and general labourers enjoined in a cacophony of song and prayer; a catharsis of spirituality in a moving landscape.”

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Artist brands planned donation from pharmaceutical family to National Portrait Gallery unethical over OxyContin link

US art photographer and activist Nan Goldin has declared she will refuse a prestigious retrospective of her work at Britain’s National Portrait Gallery if it accepts a gift of £1 million from a branch of the multibillionaire Sackler family made wealthy by addictive prescription painkillers.

Goldin is threatening to boycott the gallery if it accepts the donation from the owners of the American pharmaceutical company that makes OxyContin, the Observer has learned.

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Although the court verdict has gone against the company, there’s still a chance of a revised plan being submitted

Step into the kitchen of Ian Jackson’s Gloucester home and a desktop screen panorama reveals itself.

In the foreground, a crisscross of paddocks remains obstinately green in the face of the crippling drought plaguing much of Australia’s east coast, dotted with gum trees and bisected by the Avon river.

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Reliant Robins, the celebrated three-wheeled British cars, have been given a makeover in Stuart Langley’s Stained Glass Cars. Inspired by the windows in Durham Cathedral, the project began in 2013 for Artichoke’s Lumiere festival. The Hartlepool-based artist fitted out three cars with British iconography, with a focus on north-east England: the Angel of the North appears on one; another depicts the Lindisfarne gospels. “The third car is a celebratory mashup of rock and royalty,” says Langley, “from Amy Winehouse to Prince Philip. He’s in the driving seat, but might be better as a passenger, given recent events.” The project will be showcased at Scarborough’s arts festival Coastival (22-24 February).

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A new exhibition at the Musée National de l’Histoire de l’Immigration celebrates the potent mix of migration, music, anti-racism and political activism that reshaped the cultures of France and Britain since the early sixties

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Captivated by Girl With a Pearl Earring, the author wrote a bestselling novel telling its story. Twenty years on, she recounts her quest to all of the artist’s paintings up close

Bucket lists are often about travel: visit Petra or Angkor Wat, Oktoberfest or the Venice carnival. Or they include physical feats of derring-do: bagging Munros, run a marathon. Rarely do they involve art.

When I was 20 I had no concept of a bucket list. However, I did set myself a goal: I decided to see in the flesh all of the paintings by the 17th-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer.

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Central American migrants in New Mexico, yellow vest protests in Paris, New York fashion week and the escape from the Islamic States’s besieged enclave in Syria – the week captured by the world’s best photojournalists

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This week in our series of classic Guardian photographs, Murdo Macleod captures a raven at the top of Stob Dearg on Buachaille Etive Mor, the autumn chill starting to set in and Glencoe in the distance

A raven at the top of Stob Dearg on Buachaille Etive Mor looks out to Glencoe and beyond in September last year, as temperatures start to dip below freezing and the first flurries of snow appear. Buachaille Etive Mor is one of the best loved of all Scottish peaks. The epic view of the mountain from the A82 makes it appear quite unassailable, and it is one of the most photographed sights in Scotland. This bird, one of a pair – the other had flown off seconds earlier – was amazingly tame, says photographer Murdo Macleod: “My fingertips could have touched it.” Macleod wasn’t on assignment that day; he had just scrambled up the side of Stob Dearg. What makes this photograph special? “It captures the drama and theatre of nature,” he says.

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If you buy a flat within a stone’s throw of one of London’s leading attractions, you’re going to get some attention too

When you live in the city, the world is full of nosy parkers. I should know because I am one. I remember my early forays up to London from the West Country on the National Express coach, coming in via the Westway as the sun was setting.

As the sky turned indigo, lights would flicker on in the flats that overlooked the dual carriageway, giving me a direct view into the lives of strangers. I would glimpse them standing at stoves, slumped on sofas, or sitting on the phone clutching a fag and a bottle of beer. These domestic scenes were, for the teenage me, fleeting urban postcards, idyllic snapshots of what my own life could be.

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Investigators found that the gold-sheathed coffin had been stolen from Egypt in 2011.