Exhibition of the week
A Call to Art
If you feel you need to see another exhibition about William Morris and the pre-Raphaelites, get yourself to Cambridge for this exploration of late Victorian art and politics.
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until 3 May
Also showing
The Night Journal
Aisling O’Beirn, Wilhelmina Peace and more meditate on the night: what does it mean when the world goes dark? One for Halloween maybe.
CCA Derry until 19 December
Robert Rauschenberg
A special display from the Artist Rooms collection of the great magician of found stuff, with an emphasis on his later work – was it a falling off, or seriously underrated?
Tate Modern, London
Móti Collective
A collective of no fewer than 17 artists and designers who work in Orkney celebrates their 10th anniversary in a gallery evocatively placed on Stromness harbour.
Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, until 24 December
Wilhelmina Barns-Graham
The Cornish landscape becomes a bony but ethereal abstraction in this modernist painter’s work.
Tate St Ives until 3 May
Image of the week Photograph: Lotus L Kang
This image may share the unpretentious quiddity of Giorgio Morandi’s bottle paintings and the prismatic lucidity of Rodric O’Conor’s, but it is not an everyday still life. At the Venice Biennale, Lotus L Kang arranged 49 bottles of spirits in front of film reels of tidal mudflats and visualisations of birdsong, to reflect the Buddhist belief that a soul spends 49 days between death and rebirth. The images are now part of Kang’s shortlisted entry for the prestigious Deutsche Börse photography prize.
What we learned
The Bayeux tapestry has become a pop culture hit
An excellent survey of LS Lowry depicts northern England as a spirit-crushing dystopia
The Iranian photographer Hoda Afshar’s work is beautiful – and shocking
Fans swarmed San Francisco for a BTS star’s art exhibition
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Masterpiece of the week
Autumn Evening by Henri-Joseph Harpignies, 1894
Photograph: National Gallery, London
This painting is a reminder that art isn’t really a progression from old to new, a wave of movements displacing the past, but a great big fascinating mess, with artists at any one time working in many styles, including archaic ones. For this calming, eerily beautiful view of rusty-leaved birches against a bronzed evening sky was painted in the 1890s when Cézanne, Munch and Toulouse-Lautrec were building modernism – but Harpignies has absolutely no interest in that. This painting is not even touched by impressionism, which had started in the 1870s. Instead it is completely loyal to the artistic ideas of the painter’s youth. Born in 1819, Harpignies was a diehard classicist steeped in the light of Italy that he saw on his travels. This landscape has the same charm as finding a totally archaic bistro in a remote French village and eating its coq au vin as the sun goes down.
National Gallery, London
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