Seaside surrealism, a techno Man Ray and new paintings from Billy Childish
Tate St Ives hosts an intriguing show by occultist and artist Ithell Colquhoun, the Warburg Institute explores tarot and the Barbican exhibits Noah Davis’s dreamlike paintings of everyday Black life – all in your weekly dispatch
Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds Seaside surrealism gets a show by the picturesque shores of St Ives, in an intriguing survey of this British occultist and modern artist. • Tate St Ives, Cornwall, 1 February to 5 May
Tarot: Origins and Afterlives This Renaissance research centre is the ideal venue for a show on the mysteries of tarot cards, invented in 15th-century Italy. • Warburg Institute, London, until 30 April
Thomas Ruff: Expériences Lumineuses The German artist digitally manipulates abstract photography, in a techno answer to Man Ray. • David Zwirner, London, until 22 March
The world’s most famous portrait, the Mona Lisa, is to get a room of its own in the Louvre, as the director of the world’s most visited museum warned that visiting the overcrowded building had become a “physical ordeal”. Read the full story here and why the decision is a misguided act of snobbery.
A Shipwreck in Stormy Seas by Claude-Joseph Vernet, 1773
Romanticism is often seen as an early 19th-century cultural movement but, as this painting shows, it started decades earlier. Vernet depicts survivors scrambling ashore from a wooden ship that has foundered in spewing, boiling waves, but this is not a real-life scene to fill you with pity. It is instead a psychological drama that summons up sensation and horror – the feelings that 18th-century aestheticians called “sublime”. Vernet has composed his spectacle for maximum sublimity: not only are there violent seas, one or even two doomed ships, and terrified people – but the shore is big and rocky, there’s a castle-like lighthouse, and the sky is partly ablaze with eerie orange light. The same cocktail of terrors would stir the wild seas of JMW Turner, who was born two years after this was painted. • National Gallery, London
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Alcove by Ithell Colquhoun, 1946. Photograph: © Samaritans, The Noise Abatement Society and Spire Healthcare Group 
