American action, blockbusting birds and Alvaro Barrington’s gallery takeover – the week in art

A forgotten star from the golden age of abstraction, avian amazements and new ideas in a grand neoclassical hall – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Ed Clark
Abstract American paintings from New York’s artistic golden age, by a lesser-known and perhaps marginalised action painter.
• Turner Contemporary, Margate, from 25 May to 1 September.

Also showing

Alvaro Barrington
This artist who combines painting, assemblage and installation promises to be an exciting shaper of Tate Britain’s Duveen space.
• Tate Britain, London, from 29 May to 26 January.

Birds: Brilliant and Bizarre
The natural history of birds, including their evolution from dinosaurs, gets the blockbuster treatment.
• Natural History Museum, London, until 5 January.

Beatriz Milhazes
The Brazilian painter takes on the beautiful spaces and modernist art heritage of Tate St Ives
• Tate St Ives from 25 May to 29 September.

Vanessa Bell
The Bloomsbury artist who shines in Tate Britain’s Now You See Us can also be seen in this small focused display.
• Courtauld Gallery, London, from 25 May to 6 October.

Image of the week

In 1958 the hugely acclaimed Australian artist Clifton Pugh was among 11 artists commissioned to paint Kelvinator fridges, but only one – by Arthur Boyd – was known to have survived. Until collector Dacre King took a closer look at a large object gathering dust in his shed … Read the full story.

What we learned

Spanish police recovered a Francis Bacon painting worth €5m
A concrete basement hides a ‘joyous, time-forgetting labyrinth of sound and vision’

At least 1,000 Damien Hirst artworks were painted years later than claimed

Anne Enright considered the ways women are exposed by photography

Jonathan Yeo’s divisive Charles III portrait suggests such works may now be irrelevant

A survey of 400 years of women’s art contains wonders and mysterious omissions

At 84, feminist artist Judy Chicago’s ‘time has come!’

The life of black artist Nellie Mae Rowe offers a social history of 20th-century Atlanta

Avant garde superstar Matthew Barney has revisited a notorious American football tackle

Masterpiece of the week

The Water-Lily Pond by Claude Monet, 1899

You can dream looking into this painting as you might in an actual garden. The warming light is nicely cooled by the blue shady tones of the arched bridge, and you can almost feel you are standing on it looking down into that still water where the world above is reflected between the water-lilies. Monet’s perfect eye for reality glows from every sunkissed leaf, yet he subtly questions what that “reality” is. For a start, this is a view of a world he himself has created and shaped with flamboyant artifice. It is his garden at Giverny, cultivated and designed by him to provide a place of pastoral reverie. The bridge is inspired by bridges in the Japanese prints he and other impressionists admired. Then there’s another layer of ambiguity as we see the garden and its fragmentary watery reflections. In Monet’s many paintings of his water-lilies he takes this mystery of mirroring to sublime heights, or depths, that lead you to meditate on space, time and memory. Here are the beginnings of abstract art.
• National Gallery, London

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