The kinkiest art export, a hymn to breastfeeding, and Raphael's youthful genius – the week in art

A meditation on popcorn, women weavers celebrated, plus a terrifying portrait of a nation on the brink of disaster – all in your weekly dispatch
Stephen Sutcliffe: Sex Symbols in Sandwich Signs, which is part of the Edinburgh art festival. Photograph: Lindsay Anderson Archive

Jonathan Jones

Exhibition of the Week

Kate Davis
Step into this Old Town gallery for a stimulating encounter with some original and powerful feminist video art, which includes a hymn to breastfeeding illuminated by a montage of medieval and Renaissance paintings.
• Stills Gallery, Edinburgh, until 8 October.

Also showing

Raphael: The Drawings
There’s just a month left to see the best exhibition of the year so far, a pitch-perfect selection of Raphael’s drawings that makes you fall in love with this sensitive genius who died, too young, in 1520.
• Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, until 3 September.

Daughters of Penelope
Christine Borland and Linder are among the artists making guest appearances in this celebration of women as weavers. There’s a nice cafe too if you need a break from the fringe.
• At Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, until 20 January.

Michael Sailstorfer
Cars transformed into wood-burning stoves and a relentless popcorn cooker are among this sculptor’s uneasy meditations on nature and machines.
• Jupiter Artland , Edinburgh, until 1 October.

Portraying a Nation: Germany 1919-33
The formal photographs of August Sander and the grotesque imagination of Otto Dix make for a powerful combination in a terrifying portrait of 1920s Germany, a democracy on the edge of disaster.
• Tate Liverpool, until 15 October.

Masterpiece of the week
The Madonna of the Meadow, circa 1500, by Giovanni Bellini. Photograph: National Gallery

The baby Christ looks almost dead as he slumbers, anticipating his destiny on the cross. Mary prays rather than cuddling or playing with her child as was soon to become common in 16th-century paintings. This sombre vision is set within one of the most haunting landscapes in art. A white-cowled farmworker sways enigmatically in the field in front of a walled village whose buildings are blank against the blue yet brooding sky. A sinister bird perches on a branch. Everywhere you look, a bleak anxiety infects nature. Who says Munch invented expressionism?
• National Gallery, London.

Image of the week
Europe’s kinkiest art export … one of the subversive drawings by Touko Laaksonen, who worked under the name Tom of Finland. Read all about it here. Photograph: Tom of Finland Foundation

What we learned this week

Edinburgh international festival has burst into life with a series of prismatic projections

The city’s art festival, meanwhile, offers follies, broken statues and a surprise star

Yorkshire has been awarded £750,000 to spend on a sculpture exhibition

Art galleries are the new battlegrounds for political protest

Hypnotic video installations are the stars of the Edinburgh art festival

Our obsession with Instagram #foodporn is changing the way we eat

The winner of most upsetting Halloween costume in art: Donald Trump

Making art can help people to live with mental health issues

Igor Golomstock, the historian who exposed how totalitarians use art, has died

Ralph Steadman’s new illustrations fight for pandas, bees and chimpanzees

Photographer Justine Varga won the Olive Cotton award by not using a camera

The new Matisse exhibition is ruined by useless bric-a-brac

Tom of Finland invented a legendary gay aesthetic in his spare time

Get involved

Our A-Z of Readers’ Art series continues – please submit your artworks on the theme of U Is for Underwater.

Don’t forget

To follow us on Twitter: @GdnArtandDesign.