African identities, surreal genius Ken Dodd and doors, doors, doors – the week in art

Exhibition of the week

Julianknxx: Chorus in Rememory of Flight
An audio-visual poetic installation that meditates on African identity, including choirs from across Europe.
• Barbican Curve, London, from 14 September until 11 February.

Also showing

Happiness!
A celebration of ineffably surrealist Liverpool comedian Ken Dodd including documents and treasures from his archives.
• Museum of Liverpool, from 9 September until 3 March.

Christian Marclay: Doors
A new video montage from the creator of The Clock. This time the theme is doors, with all they can suggest about openings and closures.
• White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, until 30 September.

Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance
A museum whose founder inherited a fortune derived from slavery re-examines its own legacy and purpose.
• The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until 7 January.

The Stuff of Life/The Life of Stuff
The art of recycling found stuff is seen anew in the climate crisis, as part of a season on the planet’s future.
• Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, from 10 September until 14 January.

Image of the week

The facade of the Opera Garnier in Paris, under renovation until 2024, has been decorated by the renowned street artist and photographer JR whose work depicts a huge cave.

What we learned

An alternative scene of Constable’s Hay Wain has been rediscovered

An artist scaled Mont Blanc to capture the impact of the climate crisis

The patron of Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst is selling off her art collection

Tightropes and dangling pianos are all in a days work for daredevil artist Catherine Yass

Christian Marclay’s new show is a nightmarishly entertaining video labyrinth

Artists are tackling antisemitism with digital billboards

Theresa May’s new portrait seems to be saying: ‘Don’t seem so terrible now, do I? Suckers’

Joseph Wright of Derby is a master of light and shadow

A new book analysed the sartorial choices of the Bloomsbury set

Masterpiece of the week

Oedipus and the Sphinx by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, about 1826

French art embraced the classical ideals of Greece and Rome in the age of the French Revolution, seeing them as pillars of reason and virtue. Here, with the revolutionary era over and France defeated, Ingres explores the darker side of Greek myth. Oedipus attempts to answer the Sphinx’s riddle, in a remote cave with the flames of war on the skyline. The monster poses a conundrum that Oedipus must make sense of, or die. This painting is classical in style yet its emotive power is the stuff of traumatised Romanticism. Ingres defines Oedipus as a truly modern hero, braving madness and mystery, in a vision that anticipates, and influenced, Sigmund Freud.
• National Gallery, London.

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