Exhibition of the week
LS Lowry
The strangest and perhaps most truthful painter of modern Britain gets a thorough looking at.
MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, 24 October to 28 February
Also showing
Allen Jones
Kinky pop art from the diehard naughty boy of 1960s British painting – the Hockney of Soho?
Gazelli Art House, London, until 18 December
Multiplied Wonders
Woodcuts by Jacopo de’ Barbari, Albrecht Dürer and more reveal the power of the reproduced image in the Renaissance.
British Museum, London, until 21 March
Beyond Bayeux
Yinka Shonibare, Hurvin Anderson and others design tapestries in collaboration with Edinburgh’s Dovecot Studios, in a somewhat opportunistically titled show.
Guildhall Art Gallery, London, until 21 March
Anne Redpath
Landscapes on Skye with white houses and bright green fields tenderly depicted in gouache and watercolour.
National, Edinburgh, until 6 December
Image of the week Photograph: Justin Theodore Benttinen/Nikon Small World
Sheep dung, snails and mouse brains are all beautiful … if you look closely enough. This artwork could be a newly discovered planet or an abstract piece by Stanley Donwood for Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool, but the truth is tinier: this is the tip of a ballpoint pen, a winning entry from the Nikon Small World photography competition.
What we learned
Bowie, bodybuilders and a blubbering Frenchman have changed the way we see masculinity
Light and Magic: The Birth of Art Photography at Tate Modern will stop you in your tracks
Photos of bustling dancefloors show a changing America through the decades
Frieze art fair is open, and we’ve identified 10 things worth seeing
Bondi beach in Sydney is alive with sculpture
Olivier Mourgue, whose Djinn armchairs featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died
Great Pottery Throw Down judge Keith Brymer dressed up for a trip down memory lane
Federico Veronesi’s best photograph is a devastating portrait of a grieving elephant
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A new book documents the key players in Cameroon’s vast visual art history
A Paris exhibition explores Ghana before and after it was ripped to shreds by colonialism
Masterpiece of the week
St Jerome and the Lion: Predella Panel by Fra Filippo Lippi and Workshop, 1455-60
Photograph: piemags/Alamy
Filippo Lippi was the wild man of early 15th-century Florentine art, if the stories told about him in the Renaissance are anything to go by. It was even said his patron Cosimo de’ Medici had to lock him in the Medici palace to stop his debauchery. There is a core of fact behind the tales, as Filippo – a friar – is known from legal records to have had children with an escaped nun, Lucrezia Buti. Their son Filippino also became an artist. But whatever his life was like, there’s no lack of piety in this painting of the early Christian Jerome, a real historical figure who translated the Bible into Latin. The lion tamely lets the holy man pull a thorn from its paw, in an intricately painted mountainous landscape with a pink church. Jerome concentrates on his work, as you would if you were de-thorning a dangerous big cat. This is just a small panel from the base of an altarpiece but it packs in the emotion and humanity that makes Lippi a great artist, in spite of, or because of, his sins.
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