Picasso's tumultuous year of love and the Mona Lisa's doing a runner – the week in art

Britain awaits Picasso’s greatest works, Da Vinci’s masterpiece could leave the Louvre and the photographer who shared a joint with Jim Morrison – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Picasso 1932: Love, Fame, Tragedy
Picasso said his art was his diary and this exhibition takes that literally to investigate one year of his creative and personal life.
• Tate Modern, London, 8 March to 9 September

Also showing

Victorian Giants: The Birth of Art Photography
Outstanding exhibition of the daring and originality of the 19th-century photographers Julia Margaret Cameron, Oscar Rejlander, Clementina Hawarden and Lewis Carroll.
• National Portrait Gallery, London, 1 March to 20 May

Ian Cheng/ Sondra Perry
Two American artists working at the cutting edge of technology and politics.
• Serpentine Galleries, London, 6 March to 20/28 May

POP! Art in a Changing Britain
The Beatles and Mick Jagger make guest appearances in this survey of British pop art starring Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake, Eduardo Paolozzi and more.
• Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, until 7 May

Eric Fischl: Presence of an Absence
Strange painted scenes of well-heeled but unsatisfying American life.
• Skarstedt Gallery, London, until 26 May

Masterpiece of the week

The Toilet of Venus (The Rokeby Venus), 1647-51, by Diego Velázquez

If this painting seems voyeuristic, turn your eyes from the model’s back to her face reflected in the mirror. Velázquez has deliberately created an uneasy disjunction between the sensual nude lying on an exquisitely painted sheet of grey silk and her melancholy, introspective expression. This great artist of reality, whose paintings delight in paradox and ambiguity, shows us both the woman’s eroticised body and her mysterious inner life. This double vision of her is unsettling and profound. A nude picture becomes a rich insight into the complexity of human life.
• National Gallery, London

Image of the week

Femme au Béret et à la Robe Quadrillée (Marie-Thérèse Walter), 1937, by Pablo Picasso

Sold this week at Sotheby’s for £49.8m, this was highest price achieved by a painting at a European auction. The portrait was until recently owned by the artist’s estate and its value was estimated at £35m. Harry Smith, a London art adviser, bought this for an unnamed client, along with three other Picasso pieces at Sotheby’s and nine of the artist’s works the previous evening at Christie’s, a haul totalling £113m. Interest in the artist has been boosted by Tate Modern’s first solo exhibition of Picasso’s work.

The portrait of the artist’s lover at the time was painted just months after Picasso completed his 1937 masterpieces Guernica and Weeping Woman, which added to the painting’s appeal. It was created at a time of flux in Picasso’s personal life, as his new muse, Dora Maar, was entering the frame.

What we learned this week

The Mona Lisa might be going on tour

It’s possible to make skis out of tree trunks

A long-lost portrait of Nigerian princess Tutu was found in a London flat …

... and an x-ray test discovered a hidden painting of Modigliani’s partner under one of his masterpieces

The National Gallery’s edit of Murillo’s paintings recasts the 17th-century Spaniard as a profound artist

Photographer Bobby Klein smoked hash with Jim Morrison

There’s such a thing as “an architectural detective agency”

You can see Peggy and David Rockefeller’s vast private art collection before it goes under the hammer

The Barbican’s latest photography exhibition brings outsiders in

Tate Britain’s survey of modern figurative painting, All Too Human, is a five-star exhibition

Wolfgang Tillmans has edited a collection of essays that investigate the post-truth era

Grey Hutton’s photographs of homeless people taken with a thermal imaging camera are chilling

Architects from all over the world are working to make cities more child-friendly ...

... and Richard Sennett, a sociologist of urban design, is a keen but nervous gardener

Carrie Boretz has published a book of her photos of New York street life in the 70s, 80s and 90s

Don’t forget

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