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Tracey goes Munching and fantastic beasts go roaming – the week in art

Exhibition of the week

Richard Hamilton
The most icily ironic of pop artists, a Duchampian and a history painter – this great British modern was a complex visionary and a prophet of our time.
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 5 December to 18 April.

Also showing

Tracey Emin and Edvard Munch
The most authentic artist of the 21st century finds common ground with Norway’s expressive master. Both are modern greats.
Royal Academy, London, until 28 February.

Fantastic Beasts
Not just for JK Rowling fans but an exploration of how myth, magic and natural history intersect.
Natural History Museum, London, 9 December until August.

Art of the Blitz
Henry Moore’s powerful drawings of Londoners sheltering in the underground get a suitably subterranean showing in the atmospheric government bomb shelter.
Churchill War Rooms, London, until 30 April.

Mariana Castillo Deball
This Mexican artist reveals the lives that museums marginalise using ceramics, textiles and photography.
Modern Art Oxford, 5 December to 17 January.

Image of the week

Christmas lights at a house in Brentry, Bristol, where the building is decked out with thousands of festive bulbs and displays each year. PA Photo. Picture date: Tuesday December 10, 2019. Photo credit should read: Ben Birchall/PA Wire
Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA Wire Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA

Homeowners across the country are doing their bit to raise post-lockdown spirits with spectacular Christmas illuminations. This house in Brentry, Bristol, is decked out with thousands of festive bulbs every year.

What we learned

Tate is cutting 120 gallery jobs in £4.8m cost-cutting drive

Black Lives Matter topped the art power list after a year of driving change

Art Basel Miami 2020 was dominated by the climate crisis

Female artists revealed how motherhood is taboo in the art world

Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell thought her portrait might upset fellows at the Royal Society

Tracey Emin celebrated her deep affinity for Edvard Munch at the Royal Academy

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye filled Tate Britain with the kind of art it normally shuns

Palestinian photographer Jehad al-Saftawi said working in Gaza was like walking barefoot in a field of thorns

The Queen found a Caravaggio in her loft

A mural of Diego Maradona adorns the wall of a bombed house in Syria

Drawing comics can help you mentally survive lockdown

An exhibition of portraits of first ladies aimed to rectify the absences of women in US history

Masterpieces by Alabama quilt-makers shook America

On World Aids Day, an audio project delivered a vital message

Photographer Alison Jackson revealed: “I’m always almost getting arrested”

New York’s Dyckman Farmhouse Museum honoured the legacy of Black America

David Bailey’s biographer demanded a civility clause

Want to pay £12,000 for an MDF bookcase? You need Italian design group Memphis

A mystery pedant has views on designer John Pawson’s qualifications

The Observer’s best images included rappers, actors and a stormy seafront

Rowan Moore said London’s 350-metre Tulip should be nipped in the bud

Ghostly ferns and writhing peppers were on display at Dulwich Picture Gallery …

… 300 years after citrus fruits were celebrated in an extraordinary collection of images

Neil Leifer went to great heights for a knockout shot of Muhammad Ali

Photographer Arseniy Kotov wants to preserve the memory of Soviet-era architecture

David Levene took a deep dive into deserted swimming pools …

… while Sarah Lee caught the atmospheric fading light in lockdown London

Designer Ilse Crawford sees bathing as a spiritual experience

Fine art has a (small) place on postcards

We remembered artist Aldo Tambellini who was obsessed with the colour black …

… and Irina Antonova, the museum director who took the Mona Lisa to Moscow

The late Keith Newstead was the UK’s pre-eminent maker of automata

Masterpiece of the week

A Young Woman Playing a Harpsichord to a Young Man, probably 1659, by Jan Steen
Music must have been very erotic in the 17th century to judge from sensuous paintings of it being performed, by the likes of Caravaggio and Vermeer. The tremor of a harpsichord seems to have thrilled listeners to their core. Steen, who is best known for his rollicking pub scenes, gives that cultured romance a coarser note. Forget silken suggestiveness and take a look at the big stringed instrument a boy is bringing. It’s inclined at the same angle as the man’s body and its phallic imagery is blatant. Steen is showing that he’s getting an erection. Those madrigals, eh?
National Gallery, London

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