The inner life of India, Warhol’s America and the Munch bunch – the week in art

Edvard Munch’s weird and creepy portraits, Arpita Singh’s first major UK exhibition and a sea view from East Anglia – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Arpita Singh: Remembering
First major UK exhibition for this veteran Indian painter of modern life.
• Serpentine North, London, from 20 March until 27 July

Also showing

Edvard Munch Portraits
This great painter of inward states turns his eye on external appearances in a survey of his portraits.
• National Portrait Gallery, London until 15 June

Andy Warhol: Portrait of America
The excellent Artist Rooms collection offers up its holdings of the Popfather.
• MK Gallery, Milton Keynes from 15 March until 29 June

Towering Dreams
Romantic visions and follies in architectural drawings from Sir John Soane’s Museum.
• Compton Verney, Warwickshire from 15 March until 31 August

A World of Water
How the sea – especially East Anglia’s “local” North Sea – has been depicted in art from the 1600s to now.
• Sainsbury Centre, UEA, Norwich from 15 March until 3 August

Image of the week

Having fled war in Eritrea at 16 Ficre Ghebreyesus, who died in 2012, said painting gave him back his life. His vertiginous paintings celebrate family, the diaspora and his own turbulent story and his first European solo exhibition charts this remarkable journey. Read the full story

What we learned

Ceramicist Carol McNicoll, who gave everyday objects a surreal twist, died aged 81

Fifty years in 14th-century Siena in Italy may not sound electrifying, but it is

The Pompidou Centre in Paris is beginning work on a €262m refit

Sylvie Fleury gives Matisse’s drawings and cutouts a modern punk twist

Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan are demystifying ‘the idea of art as an individual pursuit’

Painter Celia Paul says the YBA era was a party ‘I was definitely excluded from’

William S Burroughs regretted shooting his wife but still made art with guns

Masterpiece of the week

Salisbury Cathedral and Leadenhall from the River Avon by John Constable, 1820

The place is placid, the brushwork stormy. This is an oil sketch, painted on the spot, in the open air, more than 50 years before the launch of impressionism. French artists and art lovers were in fact among the first to see Constable’s originality. Modest and conservative in his life and views, this painter from Suffolk simply put his canvas in front of nature and painted what he saw – but in doing so daubed his feelings. He was staying in Salisbury in 1820 as a guest of the bishop. In his eyes the peaceful cathedral environs become charged with energy and passion. Every puff of grey cloud and each dappled tree seems wrenched from the palette of his heart. It may seem gentle but this is a masterpiece of the Romantic age, poetically connecting the outward mystery of nature and time (symbolised by the centuries-old spire) with the inward state of the artist.
• National Gallery, London

Sign up to the Art Weekly newsletter

If you don’t already receive our regular roundup of art and design news via email, please sign up here.

Get in Touch

If you have any questions or comments about any of our newsletters please email [email protected]