Futuristic daring and Renaissance reveals – the week in art
Exhibition of the week
Young Bomberg and the Old Masters
David Bomberg depicted life in the Jewish East End of London in canvases of futuristic daring before 1914 – and drew on Renaissance art to do so, reveals this exhibition.
•National Gallery, London, until 1 March.
Also showing
Theaster Gates: Amalgam
The American installation artist explores the forgotten history of a US multiracial experiment in the 19th century.
•Tate Liverpool 13 December to 3 May.
Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2019
Amazingly, this survey of new art is in its 70th year – it has been defining the contemporary since 1949.
•South London Gallery until 23 February.
Animalesque/Art Across Species and Beings
Art that explores our relationship with the natural world, featuring Marcus Coates, Carsten Höller, Joan Jonas and more.
•Baltic, Gateshead, until 19 April.
Feast and Fast
Images of food in European art from the Renaissance to the Romantic age.
•Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until 26 April.
Image of the week
A new wave of indigenous art is heading for Britain, starting with Native American artists that are attempting to “reverse colonialism” in a show at Birmingham’s Ikon. Slaughter grounds thick with buffalo remains and a savaging of Thanksgiving myths are two of the highlights on display.
What we learned
The Turner prize winners told us more about their coup
Are Britain’s museums and galleries hopelessly overcrowded?
A Danish artist is fighting to stop his work being cut to make watches
Jeremy Deller gave his verdict on Brexit
A Paris show tells the complicated story of war and pissoirs
The US is sending quilts to keep Kent art lovers warm
Stonehenge is 150 … in photographic years
The British empire robbed Indian artists of recognition
Samuel Eder rescued lost pictures from the rubble in Ukraine
Wildlife photography lovers get to pick their favourites
Ceija Stojka painted so we wouldn’t forget the Holocaust
The streets of Leeds are United in art
Rory Doyle rode with the black cowboys of Mississippi
Hollywood staged a Christmas parade
We looked back at the Millennium Dome
The perspectives of women as both subject and photographer in African portraiture are explored
A lifelong Tottenham Hotspur fan turned his camera on fellow fans
Bridget Riley produced an anxiety-inducing illusion
Masterpiece of the week
The Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello, circa 1438-40
“Come to bed, Paolo,” pleaded Uccello’s wife when he stayed up all night drawing – but he was too distracted by “this sweet perspective.” So says the 16th-century writer Vasari, and in this flamboyant painting we see the fruit of his studies of how to translate a 3-dimensional world onto a flat wooden surface. Uccello delights in rounded armour and lances, the curving solids of horses and helmets, and standards fluttering in deep space. But his understanding of the new science of perspective, which was theorised in early 15th-century Florence by Leon Battista Alberti, is incomplete. The hill in the background rears up like a flat tapestry, instead of receding to a vanishing point. This experimental quality makes Uccello’s martial masterpiece resemble early 20th-century cubist and futurist art.
•National Gallery, London
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