Dark Depths with Amin, a Gay Saint and Powerful Political Posters – The Week in Art | Art and design

Exhibition of the week

Crossing into darkness
Tracey Emin curates an exhibition on the thresholds of despair and the power of melancholy featuring Goya, Munch, Bourgeois, Baselitz and other visionary artists.
Carl Friedman Gallery, Margate, opens on Sunday

also appear

Ming Wong
The National Gallery’s artist-in-residence responds to the proverbial paintings of Saint Sebastian.
The National Gallery, London, until 5 April

souvenir
Artists Ian Forsyth and Jane Pollard curated this tribute to lost London in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with Michael Bracewell, Sal Bateman and others.
Fitzrovia Abbey, London, until 8 February

Story illustrators and picture writers
The power of narrative and the mysterious relationship between words and images attract artists here including Julian Bell, Jala Hills and Jane Griffiths.
St John’s College, Oxford, from 20 January to 2 February

Solidarity wins
Posters, posters and other artwork made by the local community bear witness to the strength of grassroots struggle in north Edinburgh.
Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, until 30 April

Picture of the week

The rural scene “The Bull” by Paulus Potter is one of the star paintings at the Mauritshaus in The Hague. But research has shown that the artist halved the size of the bull’s testicles out of respect for seventeenth-century sensibilities. The image above shows the original outline of the monster’s structure, versus the final appearance of the painting. Abby Vandiver, the museum’s conservator, says:[The bull’s] The balls were bigger and smaller, and his entire ass changed, but in reality, the balls were the biggest change. More details here.

What we learned

Ian McKellen will lip-sync to never-before-heard audio tapes of LS Lowry

Theater artist Cheng Hsieh lived in a cage, jumped out of a window and spent a year chained with a friend

David Bowie visited a psychiatric clinic in 1994 to spend time with artists from abroad

Joseph Beuys’s bathtub contains all the horrors of modern history

Piet Mondrian may owe its success to a cross-dressing lesbian artist who lived in Corniche Bay

Abstract painter Sean Scully uses loss, breakdown and education by ‘creepy nuns’ to fuel his art

Trump has put museums and galleries at risk across the United States

Martin Römers’s wonderful photo series Homo Mobilis tells us what a person’s car says about them

Masterpiece of the week

Saint Cecilia by Pietro da Cortona

Women often take center stage in Baroque religious art—the passionate, sometimes provocative, often awe-inspiring style that emerged in Italy in the early 17th century to serve a renewed Catholic Church in its battle for hearts and souls. This paved the way for a visionary woman, Artemisia Gentileschi, to depict women as heroes and avengers: but as this work by one of her male contemporaries in early seventeenth-century Rome reveals, the focus on the female was not limited to her. This may have been the church’s way of engaging and controlling women, because Cortona depicts Saint Cecilia as a sweet-faced icon of chastity: the story of this early Christian figure is that she refused to let her husband touch her. She also stands next to the pipe organ, because Cecilia became the patron saint of music in the Middle Ages. Harmonious and virtuous, Cecilia Cortona urges women to imitate her, and do what the Church asks of them.
National Gallery

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