Delve into Freud, follow Gwen John home and watch Giacometti melt – The Week in Art | Art and design

Exhibition of the week

Lucian Freud: Drawing In drawing
Delve into the vision of this great artist with an exhibition that follows his photographic process from paper to canvas.
National Portrait Gallery, London, from 12 February to 4 May

also appear

Gwen John: Strange beauty
One of the most original and original British artists of the early 20th century brings it all back to her native Wales. Read the review.
National Museum Cardiff, from 7 February to 28 June

Linda Benglis and Giacometti
The artist who subverts simplicity through fluid, molten works of art challenges Giacometti.
Barbican, London, from 12 February to 31 May

Vincent Hawkins
Make like the Madonna and go to the Kent coast to see this display of Expressionist paintings by Margate-based Hawkins.
Tracey Emin Foundation, Margate, from 7 February to 29 March

Origin stories
The story of art schools in Scotland since 1826, the year the Royal Scottish Academy was founded.
Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, until 8 March

Picture of the week

Artist Charmaine Watkiss explained to The Guardian how she explored the botanical connections linking the Caribbean, the UK and the African continent in the context of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. “While I was in my studio, I thought: ‘All this knowledge must have been passed down with the enslaved people.’” This led her to create illustrations of women of African descent alongside medicinal plants, evoking the herbal knowledge they drew upon to survive. Read the full interview

What we learned

Gabrielle Goliath sued the South African Arts Minister for preventing her from exhibiting at the Venice Biennale

An angel resembling Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has been removed from a fresco in a church in Rome after a huge uproar.

Artists including Marina Abramović fill Fort Cochin in Kerala during the biennale

Artist Sarah Sze explained how she creates works that “unfold over time.”

Writer Daisy Lafarge described how severe pain led her to take up drawing

A new presentation examines the many ways in which the human body has been depicted in film

I missed the painting depicting Donald Trump conducting an orchestra

Ovid’s disturbing Metamorphoses presented a large-scale display at the Rijksmuseum

Claire Taborette’s stained-glass windows shed new light on Notre-Dame

Hidden details found in Anne Boleyn’s portrait were a ‘refutation of magic’

Masterpiece of the week

Portrait of a Man (Self-Portrait?) by Jan van Eyck, 1433

His eyes look at the world with a cold, calm openness, as if everything, every color and shade of light, is poured into those moist orbs and preserved. The keenness of these two perceptual windows is one reason to believe that this is the self-portrait of the artist who placed observation at the center of painting for the first time in history. No one has ever drawn real faces with the clarity that van Eyck gives here. We see not only his clear eyes, but the wrinkles beneath them, along with the stubble on his chin, his wide nostril, the shadow under his nose, the pursed lips – all these stark facts adorned and accentuated by the magical red patch of his extravagant headdress that proclaims pride in his success and fame. Van Eyck even adds the tagline, “As much as I can,” and in an era when artists rarely signed their works, he does so with bold emphasis: “I was made by Jan van Eyck on October 21, 1433.” This is nearly 600 years ago. But he is in your moment now, alive with you, when you look into those eyes.
National Gallery, London

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