Warhol on Beuys, Pauline Boty’s swinging 60s and jugs in abundance – the week in art

Warhol captures his friend with icy darkness, Bruce McLean chooses pottery over provocation and a contemporary gem on the north Wales coast – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Andy Warhol: The Joseph Beuys Portraits
Haunting images by the great American artist of his German peer. With typical icy darkness, Warhol sees fragility and fear in Beuys.
• Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, London, 14 December to 9 February

Also showing

Pauline Boty: A Portrait
Pop art with a difference as Boty sees the swinging 60s from a female perspective.
• Gazelli Art House, London, until 24 February

Christine Ay Tjoe – Lesser Numerator
Swirling abstract paintings that explore the artist’s inner truth.
• White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, until 13 January

Bruce McLean: Sculptures of Jugs and Paintings of Sculptures of Jugs
One-time provocative performance and conceptual artist McLean shows his latest sculptures and paintings.
• Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London, until 22 December

Taloi Havini
One of the artists in this year’s Artes Mundi shows at this lively contemporary space in north Wales’s most elegant seaside resort.
• Oriel Mostyn, Llandudno, until 24 February

Image of the week

A lost star of the Florentine Renaissance shines again at the Pesellino show at the National Gallery, displaying works that only fill a single room. The Florentine artist was a master of light, colour and the miraculous everyday life in the walled city. Catch it until 10 March 2024. Read the full review here.

What we learned

‘A frenzy of judgement’: artist Candice Breitz on her German show being pulled over Gaza

Sunshine returns to St Petersburg: Claudine Doury’s best photograph

Turner prize winner Jesse Darling: ‘I’ve been a dancer, a decorator and a circus clown’

Jesse Darling wins the 2023 Turner Prize

Hockney in Hawaii: museum curates artist’s largest print exhibition to date

From a 100-mile city to a desert ski resort: why is Saudi Arabia spending billions on architectural ‘gigaprojects’?

‘Every time I visit this sculpture park, there is something beautiful to capture’: Jennifer Cheung’s best phone picture

Parts of Anselm Kiefer sculpture stolen from French warehouse

Nixon, Monroe and cheeky male buttocks: the soul-affirming photography of Elliott Erwitt

Masterpiece of the week

Seated Man, Woman with Jar and Boy by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, c 1740-6

Within the perfumed colours and breezy decorative lightness of this painting, a totally unexpected rawness hits you. The man sitting in the foreground in an elaborate antiquated costume may simply look like a quirky invention, but the woman he’s looking up at and the boy behind her have a strong, vivid reality like people seen in the street. The rococo art style of the early 18th century is full of moments like this when an apparent fantasy world becomes contemporary. Tiepolo was one of the greatest European artists of the rococo and in demand far beyond his native Venice. He painted this for a Venetian palace, and the light and space of the lagoon city seem to be in it. Art often makes weighty claims it fails to justify but here Tiepolo, in his levity, creates a moving image of the mystery of life.
• National Gallery

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