A sculptural whirlwind lands in Yorkshire and butterfly wings hit the canvas – the week in art

Portraits by Freud, Rego and Himid come together and we go deep on a portrait of a Napoleonic battle – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

People
People who need people … a survey of the art of the human starring Rebecca Warren, Lucian Freud, Michael Andrews, Paula Rego and more.
• Modern Art, London, 6-30 September

Also showing

Mandy El-Sayegh
Abstract paintings in an immersive installation inspired by Sigmund Freud’s consulting room.
• Thaddaeus Ropac, London, until 30 September

Leonardo Drew
Haunting installation in a former chapel by this Brooklyn-based artist.
• Yorkshire Sculpture Park until 29 October

Gabriel de la Mora
Paintings that combine modernist grids with an eye for the natural world – using materials such as butterfly wings, feathers and eggshells.
• Timothy Taylor, London, until 30 September

Entwined
Artists Pamela Singh, Qiana Mestrich, Serena Chopra and Gayatri Ganju explore science and spirituality.
• Cromwell Place, London, until 6 October

Image of the week

This wall on Brick Lane in east London was the site of a work by Wang Hanzheng, a student at the Royal College of Art. The artwork – which spelled out the Chinese government’s “socialist core values” – was designed to be a “silent reminder of the oppression of thought, press freedom and free speech that is still rampant in China in 2023”. Then, in a move described by some as ironically totalitarian, Tower Hamlets council painted over the slogans and issued Wang a £50 fine. It is now being graffitied afresh. Read our interview with Hansheng here.

What we learned

The Clock artist Christian Marclay’s global success became a nightmare

Missing treasures from the British Museum will take decades to recover but they should invest in a detective

Roy Lichtenstein took his pop art into the third dimension

A photographer flipped the script on Helmut Newton’s sexist nudes

Pablo Picasso’s grandson has come to his defence

A statue of a roman emperor has been seized from a Cleveland museum on suspicion that it was looted from Turkey

The inaugural Photofairs NY boasts images of alternate realities, Kenyan camouflage and a cut-up Andy Warhol

Allen Ginsberg was a photographer as well as a poet

A London art student caused a political storm in China

Photographer Philip Fong is magnetically drawn to Tokyo’s coin laundries

Masterpiece of the week

The Battle of Montmirail by Emile-Jean-Horace Vernet, 1822
There is an eerie realism to this panoramic painting of one of Napoleon’s last battles. A chilly, ice-clear sky laced with floating clouds hangs over a brutally honest scene of slaughter. Ranks of disciplined soldiers in their fine uniforms move calmly towards a chaotic killing ground of smoke, flame and close-quarters combat. It was a victory for Napoleon but by this time – the battle took place in 1814 – he was defending French soil itself, not conquering elsewhere, as his enemies closed in. Vernet pictures war as a callous, cool mechanism grinding armies in its relentless wheels. Yet his haunting sky suggests a Romantic wistfulness for Napoleon.
• National Gallery, London

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