Naked Erotica, Japanese Giants Confront, and Spring Arrives in Oxford – The Week in Art | Art and design

Exhibition of the week

In Bloom: How Plants Changed Our World
Beautiful flower paintings herald the arrival of spring, but all is not as it seems in this survey of how science, commerce, and the tulip craze helped shape the modern world.
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, from 19 March to 16 August

also appear

Alexis Ralivao
Paintings that hover provocatively between abstraction and fleshy sensuality.
Pilar Correas, London, until 23 May

Under the great wave
Hokusai and Hiroshige get the Turner and Constable treatment in this look at two masters of printmaking.
Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, from 14 March to 15 November

Seth Price
Cave paintings, Renaissance art, and the digital revolution are among the themes of this video installation.
Sadie Coles Headquarters, London, from 17 March to 2 May

Lucknow swords
Last chance to view this exhibition of glittering 18th and 19th century blades from the Lucknow court.
Wallace Collection, London, until 22 March

Picture of the week

Performance artist Zak Mennell has waded into Britain’s waterways to highlight sewage pollution and the way benefit claimants are labeled a drain on society. ‘Well,’ thought Menil, ‘I’ll be the parasite.’ But their take on pollution was more literal than they intended; They contracted Weil’s disease from rat urine in the water. Read the full article.

What we learned

World Heritage Sites in Iran were damaged by US-Israeli bombing

The European Commission will cut funding for the Venice Biennale if Russia is included

The Deutsche Börse photography prize ranges from real prison life to invented facts

A new display of the art of the great British painter George Stubbs is quite small

The redesigned Gilbert galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum represent a complex legacy

David Hockney’s vision of nature 90 meters away looks great only on your phone

Painter Harold “Kangaroo” Thornton lived an extraordinary and forgotten life

Politics is everywhere at the Sydney Biennale – but with nuance, beauty and heart

Masterpiece of the week

Bowl of Flowers by Marie Blancour, 1650s

This painting is signed by Marie Blancour, a 17th-century Frenchwoman, and is her only known work. Clearly she was talented. Tulips, daffodils, poppies and other flowers curl and coil in flowing, sail-like sheets of color, providing intense strokes of yellow and red and variegated tulips of white and pink. Nature itself seems to join the Baroque style here, with its stunningly graceful theater of spiraling form and bright colors that flourished across Europe and beyond in the 17th and early 18th centuries. So, on the seemingly small and modest scale of a flower arrangement, this artist explores big, bold aesthetic ideas with a glowing paintbrush. Who was she? What happened to her other works? Why is this rare painting by an early modern artist not currently displayed in the National Gallery?
National Gallery, London

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