Maggie meets Sarah, Anish Kapoor confronts Ace, and Suffolk seduces Spencer – The Week in Art | Art and design

Exhibition of the week

Maggie Hambling and Sarah Lucas
These two different artists became friends after meeting in the Colony Room (where else?) and now appear together at a meeting between generations of British art.
Sadie Coles Headquarters, London, from 20 November to 24 January

also appear

Beatrice Milhases
This abstract, kaleidoscopic painter shows off her latest complex devices of geometry and color.
White Cube Mason Yard, London, from 19 November to 17 January

Stanley Spencer
A unique British painter with a medieval and modern vision gets an exposure in Suffolk, whose landscapes he painted.
Gainsborough House, Sudbury, from 15 November to 22 March

Roger Fry
An art critic credited with bringing Modernism to Britain more than a century ago is getting a rare showing of his own paintings.
Charleston, Louis, November 15 to March 15

Alfred Packham: daredevil photographer
Stormy skies over Scotland captured by this heroic pioneer of aerial photography.
Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, until 19 April

Picture of the week

“This is fascist America and it is beyond belief,” Anish Kapoor said in this photo showing his “Cloud Gate” sculpture, known to Chicago locals as “Bean,” and used by Border Patrol agents as a backdrop. The agents were reportedly celebrating after “military-style” immigration enforcement raids where, as the artist said, they were “kidnapping street vendors, breaking down doors, pulling people out of cars, and using tear gas on residential streets.” Kapoor filed a lawsuit in 2018 against the National Rifle Association, which used the statue in an ad, which was settled out of court. “It’s a little more complicated with this one, because they’re a full unit of the national army, if you will,” he said of the latest incident.“. Read the full story

What we learned

A third of US museums have lost government funding since Trump took office

More than 150 Tate employees will go on strike this month

A photo of a burn survivor won the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize

The repopulated Harlem Studio Museum is a new destination for black art in New York

Artist Luke Jerram plants a living installation of 365 trees

Japanese-American photojournalist Jun Fujita photographed Chicago in the early 20th century – and Al Capone

A BBC film raises the possibility that JMW Turner may be neurodivergent

Artists and writers shared their advice on how to live life artistically

A guerrilla mosaic brightens cities from Southampton to Sarajevo

Masterpiece of the week

Young Man Carrying a Ring by a follower of Jan van Eyck, c.1450

It never rains but it pours. Or, in the Flemish words written under the rain clouds in this late medieval painting, Its Las Uber Gun Meaning “Lord, let it pass.” A pattern of falling clouds with black streaks of rain, on white and blue stripes, decorates a wall behind a man holding a ring between his finger and thumb. You can tell it’s a fresco, not an abstract wallpaper, because he casts a shadow over it: this is a technically revolutionary painting influenced by the great Bruges artist Jan van Eyck. Even the way the anonymous sitter holds the ring is derived from a similar gesture in a van Eyck painting. What does it all mean? The ring can symbolize love and marriage, or it can be a jeweler. But I think this elegantly dressed character with a full face is a merchant and the ring signifies wealth (just as the Medici family had diamond rings as a symbol). If so, his frescoes depicting rain clouds and praying to God for better times may indicate weathering financial storms.

National Gallery, London

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