Ships in storms, a desert Louvre and the posters that shook the world – the week in art

John Piper captures 1940s Britain on land and sea, Egyptian surrealists hit Merseyside and the Russian revolution delivers a lesson in graphics – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

John Piper
This romantic landscape artist’s paintings of wartime ruins and storm-tossed ships are moving memorials to 1940s Britain.
• Tate Liverpool, 17 November to 18 March.

Also showing

Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize
Maija Tammi, César Dezfuli and Abbie Trayler-Smith are the finalists in an exhibition that also includes a wide range of this year’s entrants and is a survey of the human image now.
• National Portrait Gallery, London, 16 November to 8 February.

Surrealism in Egypt
This intriguing take on the Paris-based art movement shows how it inspired Egyptian artists in the 1940s.
• Tate Liverpool, 17 November to 18 March.

Andrew Grassie
Hyperrealist yet eerily minimal tempera paintings that ponder the power of the brush in a photographic age.
• Maureen Paley Gallery, London, 18 November to 7 January.

Red Star Over Russia
The 1917 Revolution may have failed to establish a communist future but it did have a huge impact on graphics and the art of communication. See the posters that shook the world.
• Tate Modern, London, until 18 February.

Masterpiece of the week

Fantastic Ruins with St Augustine and the Child, 1623, by François de Nomé
This utterly surreal vision was painted in Naples by a French artist who emigrated there when it was at its artistic height. Naples in the 17th century, under Spanish rule, was creating magnificent Baroque monuments even as its inhabitants suffered plague and poverty. This melancholy spectacle of a city of ruins might be a revelation of the true, inner, decaying state of this sprawling seaside society. It also appears to mock religion, for the tiny figures on the beach illustrate a tale in which Saint Augustine met a child who had dug a hole in the sand to hold the sea. The child told Augustine that trying to explain the Trinity was just as futile. With its cocktail of theological absurdity, architectural decadence and eerie light, this bizarre and unique oddity is precociously modern in feeling.
• National Gallery, London.

Image of the week

The Louvre Abu Dhabi, by Jean Nouvel
The French president formally opened the Louvre Abu Dhabi, as an example of how beauty can “fight against the discourses of hatred”. Our architecture critic assessed the view from its “cosmic dome”.

What we learned this week

A grasshopper got stuck in a Van Gogh painting

The Australian public have the chance to buy their own Sidney Nolan artworks

Seoul has built a 400m-long marble run

London has a new statue, of George Orwell

Yayoi Kusama’s retrospective at the new Broad museum is the hottest ticket in Los Angeles

Ken Currie’s exhibition Rictus is not for the faint-hearted

The Moscow Times took a snapshot of Russia 100 years to the day from its Revolution

… while Tate Modern has put revolutionary propaganda art on display

Montreal is delving into the work of Leonard Cohen

Los Angeles and New York look more ordered from the air

… while the Andrews brothers have found abstract art in the eye of an aerial drone

Stan Peskett recalled the party that gave Basquiat his big break

Picasso’s effect on women is being explored theatrically … in a sandpit

London’s new Science Gallery is lifting the lid on menstruation

James Ravilious captured Devon’s vanishing rural way of life

… while Matjaž Tančič found another side to North Korea

Living With Gods did not instil our critic with fervour

… while Sir John Soane’s Museum is worshipping a pharaoh

Toy designer Tom Karen let us peek inside his home

Joël van Houdt has photographed the Afghan diaspora

Taschen is publishing a tome about Jamie Hewlett

The Observer’s latest prize-winning graphic novelist found inspiration in Frida Kahlo

Get involved

Our A-Z of Art series continues – share your art with the theme Y is for Yearning.

And check out the entries we selected for the theme X is for Xenophilia.

Don’t forget

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