American anxiety, Georgian fireworks and a Black British pioneer – the week in art

Philip Guston paints an unhinged States, Claudette Johnson’s haunting drawings get a big show and a magical light is shone on the 18th century – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Philip Guston
Cartoon Klansmen smoke and stare in Guston’s grotesque satires on American madness.
• Tate Modern, London, 5 October-25 February

Also showing

Claudette Johnson
Haunting large-scale drawings by this pioneer of Black British art.
• Courtauld Gallery, London, until 14 January

Georg Baselitz
Rough-hewn wooden sculptures by the German expressionist master.
• Serpentine Gallery, London, 5 October-7 January

Georgian Illuminations
Fireworks and lightboxes, 18th-century style, in one of Britain’s most magical settings.
• Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 4 October-7 January

RE/SISTERS A Lens on Gender and Ecology
Judy Chicago, Ana Mendieta, Francesca Woodman and many more in a survey of feminist art with a feel for Gaia.
• Barbican Art Gallery, London, 5 October-14 January

Image of the week

An installation by Jesse Darling in the Turner prize 2023 exhibition

The four artists contending for the 2023 Turner prize, whose work is now on show at Towner Eastbourne, are each in their own way addressing our time of global multi-crisis – sometimes with humour, sometimes with direct confrontation. Read our review.

What we learned

Indian photographer Gauri Gill has won the Prix Pictet

Painter Sylvia Snowden had to work ‘twice as hard’ as white artists to be seen

An official ruling in the US said AI-generated art could not be copyrighted

A lost Artemisia Gentileschi painting was found in a palace storeroom in London

The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge put its historical links to slavery on show

Former star YBA Sarah Lucas took stock for a Tate retrospective at 60

Food writer Nigel Slater revealed his favourite ceramics, to eat off and admire

Edinburgh’s new National galleries of Scottish art are ravishing

Julian Schnabel thinks the Guardian didn’t look at his paintings long enough

New show reveals how naked breasts moved Rubens religiously

This year’s Turner prize nominees confront our dystopian condition

Masterpiece of the week

Portrait of an Archer, by Unknown artist (possibly Giorgione?), c.1506-10

He turns to look at you as if you’ve called his name. As his bearded face is caught in a warm soft light, his eyes contain multitudes of thoughts and memories. His hand in an archer’s glove touches his armour breastplate and is mirrored in its polished steel, the kind of opulent reflection that fascinated the short-lived genius Giorgio da Castelfranco, known as Giorgione, who revolutionised painting in Venice at the start of the 16th century. This is definitely in his style. The delicate use of oil paints, mysterious meaning, and haunting sensuality belong to the same Giorgionesque universe as his handful of definite works such as Laura and The Tempest. But like most works once attributed to him, it is now treated with suspicion by art historians. In this case, maybe it’s by a pupil or imitator. Whatever, this painting holds you with poetic hints of some untold story in the shadows.
• Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh

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