Vanessa Bell’s mindful modernism, a landscape throuple, and climbing aboard the Hay Wain – the week in art

JMW Turner faces off against fellow observers of nature, Constable is contextualised, and the Romani community are represented in textiles – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Vanessa Bell: A World of Form and Colour
The subtle and sensitive paintings of this Bloomsbury Group stalwart prove modernist art doesn’t have to be explosive to be interesting.
• MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, from 19 October until 23 February

Also showing

Land Sea Sky: Ingrid Pollard, JMW Turner and Vija Celmins
An intriguing encounter between three contrasting artists of landscape that pits JMW Turner against Ingrid Pollard, with Vija Celmins as referee.
• The Box, Plymouth, from 19 October until 12 January

Discover Constable & The Hay Wain
If you think The Hay Wain is just a Tory view of quaint rural England … shame on you, it’s a masterpiece that paved the way for impressionism.
• National Gallery, London, until 2 February

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas
Painterly group portraits that are actually textile collages by this Romani artist, who works in her village in Poland as a community activist as well as artist.
• Tate St Ives, from 19 October until 5 January

Pass Shadow, Whisper Shade
Group show that takes its poetic title from an Irish proverb. Hannan Jones, Emelia Kerr Beale, Josie KO, Katherine Fay Allan, Clarinda Tse and Rowan Markson feature.
• Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, until 22 December

Image of the week

The Elizabeth Line was announced as the winner of the 2024 RIBA Stirling prize for the best architecture in the UK. With its futuristic panels, airy tunnels and elegantly unified design, the 73-mile Lizzie line provides a dazzling demonstration that Britain is still capable of pulling off gargantuan transport infrastructure projects with style and panache. Read more here.

What we learned

The National Gallery in London has tightened security after activist art attacks

It’s not all cobblestones and whippets – Yorkshire is becoming the UK’s cultural powerhouse

Buying new masterpieces at Frieze art fair is stressful stuff

Hew Locke’s British Museum looting exposé is ‘inescapably shocking’

Photographer Letizia Battaglia chronicled life on Palermo’s blood stained mafia-ridden streets

Photographer Frank Habicht captured the ‘heart and restlessness’ of 1960s London

Australia’s National Gallery has plans for seven new sculpture gardens

A new film brings the late Scottish artist Wilhelmina Barns-Graham’s work to life

Masterpiece of the week

Still Life With a Bowl of Strawberries, a Spray of Gooseberries, Asparagus and a Plum by Adriaen Coorte, 1703

Paintings like this one, depicting humble, everyday foods, fruits or flowers, were dismissed for a long time as minor works, yet they were radically reclaimed by the modernist movement as precursors of a more truthful way of seeing, anticipating the likes of Cézanne and Vanessa Bell. Adriaen Coorte is a perfect example of how the neglected still life appealed to eyes schooled by such artists: he was practically unknown in his lifetime, forgotten afterwards, but rediscovered in the early 20th century. The precise way he depicts a simple arrangement of glistening red strawberries, pale-stemmed purple-tipped asparagus, white-veined gooseberries and a black plum does in fact look precociously modern. There’s no hint of allegory, just a quiet wonder at nature’s variety.
• National Gallery

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