Black British painting, gay New York photography and Dr Eno will see you now – the week in art | Art and design

Stella McDaniel

Exhibition of the week

Life Between Islands
Alberta Whittle, Sonia Boyce and Hurvin Anderson are among the stars of what promises to be a definitive survey of Caribbean British art since the 1950s.
Tate Britain, London, from 1 December to 3 April

Also showing

Alvin Baltrop
Truly arresting photographs of gay life around the ruinous Hudson River piers in 1970s and 80s New York, taken by a voyeur of genius who never got his due in his lifetime.
Modern Art Bury Street, London, until 22 January

Salvador Dalí to Jenny Saville
A showcase of recent acquisitions by Scotland’s modern art museum, which also includes pieces by Alberta Whittle, Dorothea Tanning and Bridget Riley.
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One), Edinburgh, from 27 November

Journeys
A look at how contemporary art helps the healing process at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, with Brian Eno among the aesthetic surgeons.
Saatchi Gallery, London, until 13 January

Sirens
Margate artists Sophie von Hellermann and Anne Ryan collaborate on a new installation that looks out on the winter sea.
Turner Contemporary, Margate, until Spring 2023

Image of the week

Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

Mayfair Tennis Ball Exchange, Stephen Friedman gallery, London
David Shrigley’s new show Mayfair Tennis Ball Exchange is an evolving work of psychedelic op art involving 12,166 tennis balls – new at first but intended to be exchanged for used balls, one by one, over the course of the exhibition, by members of the public.
Read his interview all about it here

What we learned

Fashion photographer Helmut Newton had a lasting influence on visual art

While fashion photographer Fabrice Monteiro’s best shot summons a spirit from a rubbish dump

Lubaina Himid has spoken to the Guardian about her early life … and explained the meaning of some of her paintings … which are on show at Tate Modern in London

Kehinde Wiley spoke to the Observer ahead of his show at the National Gallery

Andy Warhol’s and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s friendship is being dramatised for the London stage … and they aren’t the only artists whose stories make good drama

Jarman award-winning video artist Jasmina Cibic is concerned for Europe

An ambitious exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary envisions a strange future

NFT is the “word of the year”

Tech advances could help the Parthenon marbles return to Greece

Indigenous Australian photographers are exhibiting in New South Wales

Photographer Steve McCurry focuses on the children of the world … while Natalie Grono focuses on her own daughters … and Pia Bramley sketches the truth about new motherhood

René Magritte was a bit of a mystery, Albrecht Dürer liked to travel and Belkis Ayón was a giant of Cuban art

A priceless ancient Roman mosaic spent 50 years as a coffee table

Tim Sumner wants to tell a social history of Britain through paper bags

Masterpiece of the week

Still Life with Apples, by Cezanne
Photograph: Andrew Norman/The Fitzwilliam Museum, Image Library

Paul Cézanne: Still Life with Apples (1877-78)
These are some of the greatest apples ever painted. Cézanne does not aim for a crisp photographic realism as, say, Caravaggio does in his paintings of fruit, but instead paints the process of trying to see, feel and share these apples. You sense the physicality of every brushstroke as if it were a deep thumb gouge in a lump of clay. You follow his relentless scrutiny of the apples’ solid substance, their marvellous unique existence – their applehood, or appleness. His colours don’t float outside the apple but penetrate its being. Cézanne looks past the skin of life and sees its core.
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

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