Scottish pop stars, Egyptian surrealists and pastiche from Obama's painter: the week in art

Modern art takes the high road, the desert Dalís cringe before Paris, and Barack Obama’s portraitist puts black fishermen centre stage – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Charles II: Art and Power
The Restoration in 1660 saw a rapid return of royal finery after the republican rule of Oliver Cromwell. Even the crown jewels needed remaking. Yet far from a frozen mask of reimposed regal authority, the new king, who had picked up some dissipated ways in his years of exile, created a libertine court. The sensualist royal painter Peter Lely captured all the decadent opulence perfectly.
• Queen’s Gallery, London, 8 December to 13 May.

Also showing

A New Era: Scottish Modern Art 1900-1950
Scottish modern art from the fauve rawness of JD Fergusson to the pioneering pop of Eduardo Paolozzi is celebrated in this survey of the period from 1900 to 1950.
• Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two), Edinburgh, 2 December to 10 June.

Jakub Julian Ziolkowski
Bizarre and grotesque paintings, ceramics and sculpture from this contemporary Polish surrealist.
• Hauser & Wirth, London, 1 Dec to 10 February.

John Stezaker
Dadaist photographic collages of the human face that reawaken the subversive visions of early-20th-century art.
• The Whitworth, Manchester, 1 December to June 2018.

David Bomberg
One of the most powerful British artists of the early 20th century, this talented East End youth rebelled against his teachers at the Slade to paint in an explosively futuristic style on the eve of the first world war.
• Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, until 4 February.

Masterpiece of the week

The Courtyard of a House in Delft, 1658, by Pieter de Hooch
A quiet moment in a Dutch town more than 350 years ago is preserved in all its ordinariness and wonder by this magical painting. Bricks and stone flooring are depicted with a meticulous observation of reality that goes back in north European art to the early 15th-century masterpieces of Jan van Eyck. By the time de Hooch put this little courtyard into oils, the scientific revolution was adding a new dimension to the exactitude of Dutch art. One of de Hooch’s fellow Delft burghers was Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, inventor of the compound microscope. Another was the still sharper observational painter Johannes Vermeer. This is a lovely survival from a golden age of seeing.
• National Gallery, London.

Image of the week

Fishermen at Sea (Jean-Frantz Laguerre and Andielo Pierre) by Kehinde Wiley
In Search of the Miraculous is an exhibition of works by the superstar American artist, famed for placing beautiful black men in kitsch pastiches of Old Master paintings, and for being Barack Obama’s official portraitist. At Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, until 27 January.

What we learned this week

John Baldessari goes big on emojis

São Paulo is giving Oscar Niemeyer a facelift …

… while the city’s art galleries face a backlash against nudity

Rose Wylie’s five-star art is a childlike joy

Florence has copyrighted Michelangelo’s David

Ceramicist Molly Hatch researched her family’s history through crockery

Trevor Paglen is a landscape artist for a secret world

Photographer Albert Watson has a way with celebrities

Robert Rauschenberg unpacks his wares at SFMoma

The ICA glimpsed the world through the eyes of post-cyber feminism

Madeleine Waller’s photographs explore sibling dynamics

There’s a Florida town where all the carnival folk live

Oliviero Toscani is back at Benetton

Iranian photographer Shahrokh Hatami turned his lens on the Beatles

Egypt’s surrealists suffered from cultural cringe

Buddha is visiting Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria

Leeds’ Grade I-listed Temple Works is in a sorry state

And we remembered stage designer Paul Brown

Get involved

Our A-Z of Art series continues – share your art with the theme Y is for Yearning.

And check out the entries we selected for the theme X is for Xenophilia.

Don’t forget

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