This week's art roundup features a quirky summer group show in Rye, an extended run of Leonora Carrington's surrealist exhibition in London, and a family blockbuster on ancient marine reptiles at the Natural History Museum.
The Air of Ideas in Rye
Artists represented by Kate MacGarry Gallery have taken over an 18th-century house in East Sussex for The Air of Ideas, a summer group show including works by Lisa Milroy, Marcus Coates, and Francis Upritchard. The exhibition runs until 31 August at 301/2 High Street, Rye.
Tish Murtha and Kuba Ryniewicz – Close to Home
At Baltic in Gateshead, from 4 July to 4 April, Tish Murtha's moving photographs of working-class life in Elswick, Newcastle during an era of dereliction and decline are complemented by contemporary responses from Kuba Ryniewicz.
Jacques Henri Lartigue: Life in Colour
Renowned French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue is usually remembered for his black-and-white work, but MK Gallery in Milton Keynes reveals his experiments with colour from the 1930s to 1980s, running until 4 October.
Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal
An extended run at the Freud Museum in London allows more time to experience the British surrealist's knowingly Freudian fun, until 10 August.
Jurassic Oceans: Monsters of the Deep
Take a deep dive into seas crowded with lethal ancient reptiles including pliosaurs and mosasaurs at the Natural History Museum's family summer blockbuster, running until 3 January.
Image of the Week: Ai Weiwei's Button Up!
Ai Weiwei's Button Up! exhibition opened this week in Manchester, featuring skeleton chandeliers, a real-life temple, and tonnes of buttons. It is a massive, ambitious takedown of colonial history, warfare, and the migrant crisis, showing the Chinese artist at his most monumental.
What We Learned
- Artist Lydia Wood is on a mission to sketch every pub in London.
- A valuable Spanish painting thought stolen was found on the street by a man who liked its frame.
- People are queueing online for up to nine hours for tickets to see the Bayeux tapestry in London.
- Ana Mendieta's art triumphs 30 years after her troubling death.
- The £1.3bn revamp of London's Olympia is an Aztec-tinged tiara-topped triumph.
- A David Bowie archive featuring saxophones, song charts, and a rejected Simpsons script is to tour the UK.
- John Hutton's glass engraving at Coventry Cathedral has been damaged during the set-up for a music event.
- There's plenty of free medieval art around if you know where to look.
Masterpiece of the Week: Saint Francis of Assisi with Angels by Sandro Botticelli
Painted around 1475-80, it was genuinely hard for the young Botticelli to restrain his feeling for beauty. At the time he painted this homage to Francis, the medieval saint who preached poverty and reverence for nature, he was mingling with the Medici and absorbing their cult of pagan gods and lush love affairs. That sophistication threatens to destabilise this early work. Francis is a harrowed ascetic figure in brown robes, contemplating the cross with an intense, inward face that resembles drawings by Botticelli's rivalrous friend Leonardo da Vinci, also starting his career in Florence at this time. Is Botticelli perhaps trying out Leonardo's style? However, the angels who surround Saint Francis are pure unadulterated Botticelli – their poetic, heavy eyes and wavy locks would have entranced a Victorian aesthete. Even in a painting of the patron of poverty, Botticelli delights in precious courtly fashion. The work is at the National Gallery.
