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After Norwich’s Goldsmith Street was awarded the Stirling prize, readers discuss the ability of councils to build more homes, what constitutes high-quality housing, and the insecurity of being a private tenant

It was gratifying to learn that the RIBA Stirling prize has been awarded for Norwich council’s Goldsmith Street during the centenary year of Christopher Addison’s Homes Fit for Heroes initiative (Award for best new UK building goes to council housing project for first time, 9 October).

As Oliver Wainwright reports, the council could build more housing if right to buy was reformed – or, better still, abolished. When the scheme was first introduced in 1979, Norwich councillors – led by their housing chair, the late Lady Patricia Hollis – took a stand against the Thatcher government by refusing to treat sales as an urgent priority. The minister responsible, Michael Heseltine, sent in Whitehall officials to oversee sales for several years. Let’s hope that in future councils will be able to circumvent legislation on forced privatisation.
Dr Michael Passmore
Greenwich, London

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On the cover of a Rolling Stone issue from 1982, Steve Martin is captured in a giddy jump in front of a Franz Kline painting, camouflaged in a white tuxedo smeared with black paint. Viewers to this

Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris
The visionary French architect and designer is celebrated in a new exhibition – although, as in life, her generous, joy-filled work is partially obscured by that of her male contemporaries

In most of the photographs of Charlotte Perriand, whether as a precocious pioneer in the 1920s or as a contented old woman in the 1990s, she is smiling. In one of the most famous you can’t tell, as she turns her naked back to the camera in order to salute with upraised arms a snowy mountain landscape, but you can guess that she is. It is certainly an exultant image. The famous creators with whom she worked – Le Corbusier, Fernand Léger, Isamu Noguchi – are more often shown solemn and serious, in keeping with their image as men of destiny.

There are many things that can be said about Perriand (1903-99) – that she was the principal author of some of the 20th century’s most memorable pieces of furniture, that she could be as inventive with traditional materials such as bamboo as she was with tubular steel, that she could turn her unique hand and eye to furniture, to photographs, to impassioned political photomontages, to a 30,000-bed ski resort. Among the most important is that she believed in “the joy of creating and living”, as she put it, “in this century of ours.”

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The Louvre has asked to loan Salvator Mundi for a major exhibition – but many doubt the much-disputed work will make an appearance

Will it or won’t it appear? This is the question being asked across the art world about the Salvator Mundi - the first Leonardo to be discovered for more than a century - as the Louvre prepares for its blockbuster da Vinci exhibition.

With just under two weeks to go before the show opens, there are now serious doubts as to whether the star of the exhibition will be included, as the Paris museum had hoped.

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The precocious photographer died young but his work was a major influence on the likes of Martin Parr

Tony Ray-Jones took this picture at the Windsor horse show in 1967. He was 25, and engaged in an all-consuming personal project to capture the essence of “the English way of life … before it becomes more Americanised”. A precocious talent, Ray-Jones had won a scholarship from the London School of Printing to study at Yale School of Art when he was 19. He befriended the freewheeling young stars of American photography, Garry Winogrand and Joel Meyerowitz, was mentored by Richard Avedon and returned home in 1965 with notebooks full of strategy. “Get more involved (talk to people),” began one typical list of these notes to self. “Stay with the subject matter (be patient). See if everything in the background relates to the subject matter. NO MIDDLE DISTANCE.”

With these principles in mind, Ray-Jones took himself off in a camper van in search of Englishness. He found a good deal of it on beaches – windbreaks and frigid paddling and Thermoses balanced on shingle – and at all levels of pageantry, from Glyndebourne and the Chelsea flower show to local beauty parades and fun fairs. This photograph, in which the horse takes more interest in the cafe than the cafe takes in the horse, was typical of his eye.

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John Giorno, whose kaleidoscopic work fused and furthered poetry, visual art, and activism, has died at age eighty-two. He is survived by his husband, the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. From the 1960s

As a boy, Andrew Martin’s father worked for British Rail, and he soon developed a passion for railways. He’s written a number of books on the subject and has now turned his attention to moquettes, the thick fabrics seen on London transport and created by leading designers and artists of their era, such as Paul Nash.

“Londoners are spoiled really,” says Martin. “They have this soft material that’s often beautifully coloured and carefully designed. They spend half their lives on public transport; I think they should know more about what they’re sitting on.”

• Seats of London (Safe Haven Books, £12.99) by Andrew Martin is available from London Transport Museum

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Young photographer Howard Grey captured the mixed emotions of West Indian arrivals at Waterloo in 1962, in images that lay undeveloped for more than 50 years

• See a gallery of Howard Grey’s Windrush images

The Windrush generation has been much in the news – and rightly so – since the scandal of the threatened and actual deportation of hundreds of them by the Home Office came to light last year. Numerous poignant and moving photographs of the original pioneers have been published, too, but few have packed the punch of Howard Grey’s extraordinary, historic shots taken at Waterloo Station 57 years ago. It would be hard to find pictures more emblematic of the Windrush era than these, yet for over five decades they remained not only unseen but unprinted, tucked away in a drawer in the photographer’s studio.

It was early in 1962 when word spread in the Caribbean that the British were about to change the laws on immigration making it much more difficult for West Indians to come here to live and work. The news created a panic in the soon-to-be-former colonies and there was a surge of people hurrying to the UK before the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of that year was passed.

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In 1962, the young photographer Howard Grey captured the last of the Windrush immigrants as they disembarked from the boat train at Waterloo station in London. The extraordinary pictures he took, however, were not processed for more than five decades until advances in scanning technology brought the underexposed negatives to life. Here the photographer talks us through some of his favourite images from the three films he exposed.

• See more at autographabp-iadl.co.uk
• Read an interview with Howard Grey

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A reinvigorated contemporary art fair, opening this week in the Grand Palais, is one sign of a renaissance for the French capital

“If our generation did not reinvigorate the French art market, what would we be leaving to the younger people?” asks Jennifer Flay, director of the international fair of contemporary art in Paris. “So we decided to take ourselves seriously.”

As the 46th Foire internationale d’art contemporain (FIAC) prepares to open the doors of the Grand Palais this week, it is clear that not only did Flay and her colleagues achieve their goal, but they also created an environment in which artists and their work could flourish. The fair has gone from dusty irrelevance during a long sojourn in the suburbs to a glittering fixture on the art world calendar.

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National Portrait Gallery, London
A retrospective of the New York artist’s ethereal portraits is both fabulous and frustrating

The National Portrait Gallery’s mini-retrospective of New York painter Elizabeth Peyton offers a heart-swelling, eye-pleasing parade of exquisite faces, from the gifted and famous to the merely really good-looking.

Peyton rose to fame in the 1990s for painting beautiful boys – from friends to pop stars – and has been stereotyped and belittled for it since. But I love these works for their freshness, vivid colour and immediacy. Peyton gives us unabashed, rapturous admiration and desire. She takes the priapic male screen idol or rock god and melts his symbolic phallus in the heat of the female gaze, in intense paintings small enough to hold. In Peyton’s world of female looking and longing, men are dream figures as ethereal and alluring as unicorns, more beautiful than life. Not all men, obviously.

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Photographer Jessica Wynne captures the peculiar devotion of academics to working out their problems with chalk

Another year, another wave of students trampling across autumn leaves, making their way to their first lectures heady with a cocktail of excitement, apprehension and a nasty hangover. But while every year brings new faces, one feature of the academic landscape remains ever-present: the huge, imposing blackboards.

Now photographer Jessica Wynne, a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, has thrown a spotlight on this workhorse of academic endeavour, travelling across the US and beyond to capture the blackboards of mathematicians.

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Letters from the archives of the Wakefield gallery show he had the chutzpah every young artist needs

Acts of audacious self-promotion in the contemporary art world now tend to be linked to names such as Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin, the Young British Artists who grabbed public attention in the 1990s. But research in the archives of a Yorkshire gallery has revealed that in the 1960s a student called David Hockney was also capable of a bold stunt.

The aspiring artist invited a leading light of the Yorkshire art scene to Skipton to see some of his first public paintings, according to a letter discovered by curators preparing an exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield.

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After years of neglect, the female painters and makers of the pre-Raphaelite era are getting their first dedicated exhibition – and it’s enough to make any grandmaster look to his laurels

At first glance, Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamund looks like a classic piece of pre-Raphaelite art. It shows the moment when Henry II’s queen Eleanor, according to legend, discovers her husband’s sequestered mistress in her secret hiding place and dramatically offers Rosamund the choice of death by dagger or poison. The scene was a firm favourite with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. It had everything: the opportunity to go full-medieval, with leaded gothic windows and flowing gauzy gowns and Rosamund’s unloosed wavy red hair. The allegorical binaries, too, could be laid on thick – enraged Eleanor is accompanied by a diabolic crew of apes and lizards, while cowering Rosamund is circled by fluttering doves and cupids. Finally, there was the irresistible chance to work with a magnificent colour palette – all those ruby reds and golds glowing as if they had been transferred straight from a 14th-century psalter.

This painting, though, is not by one of the big boys of pre-Raphaelite art. It is the work of Evelyn De Morgan, a woman whose painting was often compared to that of Burne-Jones. Sir Edward, indeed, was scathing about the young artist in his private letters, a sure sign that he felt rattled by her talent. She had been a big success at the Grosvenor Gallery, which was generally regarded as Burne-Jones’s own manor. And even in De Morgan’s earlier pieces, such as the luscious Night and Sleep (1878) made when she was just 23, you sense the painterly confidence and feeling for colour that might make any established grandmaster look to his laurels.

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Extinction Rebellion demonstrations, protests in Hong Kong, Turkey’s military offensive against Kurdish forces and Simone Biles at the artistic gymnastics world championships – the past seven days, as captured by the world’s best photojournalists

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At 83, he is the master of museum disruption. Curators have tried to ignore him. Who knows what he’ll do at the New Museum.

The Czech Ministry of Culture has appointed economist Anne-Marie Nedoma interim director of the National Gallery in Prague, https://www.monopol-magazin.de/neue-interimsspitze-fuer-prager-nationalgalerie

Omnia sunt communia: “All things are held in common.” The artist Minerva Cuevas, who lives and works in Mexico City (where she was also born), asserts this notion time and time again with “Disidencia”

On October 2, 2019—the 150th anniversary of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s birth—the Kolkata-based sculptor Debanjan Roy transformed this space into a veritable Madame Tussauds dedicated solely to the shiny

Lena Herzog’s mixture of enigmatic film and immersive sound evokes a global crisis of linguistic disappearance.

The French billionaire art collector François Pinault announced that his $170 million contemporary art museum in Paris is slated to open next June near the Louvre and the Centre Pompidou. The Bourse de

The institutional revisionism of figures including Anni Albers and Ruth Asawa seems to suggest that textiles have been permitted entrance into the holy vault of acceptable art-historical media. Yet as

For residents of eco-friendly Goldsmith Street, heating bills could be as little as £150 a year

After two years living in a third-floor flat in Norwich, Alex Jenkins, her partner and two young sons moved into a new council house in December. They are not alone in their adoration for their home, with its two large bedrooms, sunny back garden and high ceilings.

Goldsmith Street, a development of 105 brick properties on the outskirts of the city centre, on Tuesday became the first social housing project to be awarded the Stirling architecture prize. The judges hailed the development, owned wholly by the city council, as a “modest masterpiece”, saying it represented “high-quality architecture in its purest, most environmentally and socially conscious form”.

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Our weekly series of exclusive Guardian print sales continues with a flock of birds in flight over Blackpool beach at sunset, photographed by Graeme Robertson, October 2007

Blackpool beach is captured here at low tide by Guardian photographer Graeme Robertson, the setting sun casting a bewitching, painterly light across the scene. The town’s iconic seafront bisects the picture, with wheeling seabirds above, and the sun reflecting off the water below. Robertson was in town for the Conservative party conference – the last time the Lancashire seaside resort hosted one – and took a break to grab some fish and chips and watch the sun go down from the north pier. It is from there that the picture is taken.

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A dadaist rebel comes to Tate Modern while Warwickshire feasts on photo glamour – all in your weekly dispatch

Nam June Paik
The dada maverick who invented video art gets a well-deserved survey of his witty works.
• Tate Modern, London, 17 October to 9 February.

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The British Museum show is a bold attempt to look at orientalist art as a cultural exchange that influenced paintings, ceramics, travel books and fashion. Our writer gauges its success

The British Museum’s new exhibition, Inspired By the East: How the Islamic World Influenced Western Art, attempts to present orientalist art as not only one where western artists traded in cliche, but also to show how portrayals of the east in the west were more than just racist pastiches. It attempts to present orientalist art as a sort of cultural exchange, rather than plunder, more of a long-term interaction between east and west that influenced not just paintings but also ceramics, travel books and watercolour illustrations of Ottoman fashion. It also presents orientalism as an effort to understand other cultures at a time when there was not much travel, and perhaps an idealised longing for a life in an Islamic world that had not yet been untethered from the familiar by industrialisation and secularisation.

The exhibition succeeds in achieving some of this. There is little here along the lines of The Snake Charmer, the painting famously used on the cover of the first edition of Edward Said’s Orientalism, which dominates discourse on the topic. In this tasteless depiction, a naked snake-charmer draped in a python entertained turbaned, cloaked men sitting on the ground. There is a mix of the dramatic romanticism of the early orientalists and the more iconoclastic realism of daily life, albeit still restricted broadly to the settings of the bazaar or the street throng.

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The artist blends nature, fashion and science to create an elegant, race-spanning amalgam of femininity

Wangechi Mutu’s 2019 figure stalks and struts, a cultural hybrid encompassing an Afrofuturist queen, samurai warrior, eco-avenger, disco diva and dominatrix. She doesn’t talk, she walks the walk. You wouldn’t mess.

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The Nubians of ancient Sudan left behind artwork as fine as the Egyptians’. Now it’s on view at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

If they moved Monet, don’t despair. There are stimulating ideas and unexpected talents at every turn, from Africa, Asia, South America, and African America. (And plenty of works by women.)

As the Museum of Modern Art in New York prepares to reopen next week following a $450 million https://www.artforum.com/news/new-york-s-moma-will-close-this-summer-to-complete-expansion-78563 expansion

As the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York prepares to reopen on October 21 following a $450 million https://www.artforum.com/news/new-york-s-moma-will-close-this-summer-to-complete-expansion-78563

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

The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs has commissioned artist Vinnie Bagwell to create a public work to replace the Central Park statue of J. Marion Sims, the nineteenth-century gynecologist

Museum of Modern Art will reopen with an additional 47,000 sq ft of space and famous works alongside lesser-known artists

New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) unveiled its new $450m expansion on Thursday in a revamp of the gallery – including a radical “remix” of its permanent collection, which will see famous works exhibited alongside those of lesser-known artists.

The popular Manhattan museum, which attracts 3 million visitors a year, has been closed since June for the renovation and rehang but will reopen to the public on 21 October with an additional 47,000 sq ft of space – an increase of nearly 30% – after the installation of a new glass and blackened steel extension.

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Two exhibitions look at how Gandhi’s image has been appropriated, even by forces completely antithetical to his message.

Pierre Soulages’s astonishing black monochromes; Alma Thomas’s vibrant abstractions; Elaine Cameron-Weir’s sculptures; and photographing ‘the criminal type.’

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, announced that artist Firelei Báez has been commissioned to create her largest sculpture to date for the ICA’s Watershed, a seasonal project space in East

Roy DeCarava famously turned Harlem into his canvas, but there is much more to see — and feel — in his new retrospective.

The thirteen paintings in John Zurier’s solo exhibition—obliquely derived from the atmospheric conditions of Berkley, California, and Reykjavík, Iceland—affirm the artist as a deft painter of weather

Doug Aitken, Sterling Ruby, Gloria Kondrup, and Ini Archibong will be honored at the thirteenth alumni awards dinner at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, on November 16. The school

A sparkling show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., reintroduces the Florentine sculptor who set the bar for virtuosity.

In Bambitchell’s “Bugs and Beasts Before the Law,” a single-channel video installation focuses on four historical accounts of animal trials in America, Europe, and colonized countries. The footage culls

IF BONG JOON-HO’S PARASITE WERE AN EQUATION, it would be expressed as Space = Class^^2^^. Bong’s rippling socioeconomic comedy lays out inequality in both schematic and organic terms: two diametrically

The award of the Stirling prize to Goldsmith Street in Norwich suggests the age of brutalist housing is ending

Wonders never cease. The Royal Institute of British Architects has just given a prize to a street. Not to a vainglorious skyscraper, or an “iconic” bunker museum or a luxury pad in a field, but a living, breathing street. This street is not just a street but a “council street”. Norwich council’s chief executive, Laura McGillivray, claims no higher ambition than that “new social housing should be a fabulous place to live”. She did not seek some architectural “statement”, just a neighbourhood like the thousands that – at least in the private sector – have retained their popularity among Britons who have had choice in the matter for some three centuries.

Related: 'A masterpiece': Norwich council houses win Stirling architecture prize

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Robin McKenna’s documentary explores the social and ethical value of art.

In their New York apartment, Laila Gohar and Omar Sosa have created an urban oasis filled with art and design pieces created by their cherished guests.

MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
As this wonderful show makes clear, the artist celebrated for his paintings of horses was no less adept at other animals – while his portraits of humans drip with disdain

Surely George Stubbs can’t have recalled his own birth? In his icily brilliant illustrations for a book on midwifery, the 18th-century artist and anatomist depicts the process of delivering a child. Compressed and twisted babies lie in dissected wombs, or aim their heads at a narrow pelvic opening. Is it too much to see – in this uncomfortable study of birth – the early autobiography of this curious genius?

While Stubbs may not have been recalling his own birth, it’s worth pointing out that John Burton, the author of the midwifery book, is the model for Dr Slop in Tristram Shandy. The narrator of Laurence Sterne’s madcap 1759 novel actually does remember how he came into the world – starting with his conception. So it’s fitting that this uneasily beautiful survey of Stubbs begins with images of what Sterne called the little human “homunculus”.

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This group show is named after the tinted, convex pocket mirrors favored by British landscape painters from the eighteenth century: Claude mirrors. Reflected through the black glass, a surrounding scene

Maren Hassinger very nearly became a dancer. As it happened, two fortuitous turns in her education in the 1970s led her to create sculptures hewn of fibrous metal and knotted detritus. From her early

My father, Paul Birkbeck, who has died aged 80, was an artist and illustrator whose work is familiar to those of a certain generation brought up on BBC children’s TV programmes such as Crystal Tipps and Alistair, Play School and Jackanory. His distinctive style and keen eye for detail ensured that he became one of the BBC’s most-used artists through the 1970s and 80s.

Born in Woolwich, south-east London, to Guy Birkbeck, a radio engineer, and Emma (nee Farringdon), Paul attended Brighton college. Later, at Epsom School of Art, he met Sally Marsland, a fellow student, and they married in 1963. After completing his national service, Paul became the banjo player for the Dedicated Men Jugband, who signed to Pye Records in 1965. The band’s single, Boodle Am Shake, did not trouble the charts but Paul soon began designing sleeves for Decca Records.

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