Maggi meets Sarah, Anish Kapoor takes on Ice and Suffolk seduces Spencer – the week in art

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Exhibition of the week

Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas
These two very different artists became friends after meeting at the Colony Room (where else?) and now show together in an encounter of British art generations.
Sadie Coles HQ, London, 20 November to 24 January

Also showing

Beatriz Milhazes
This kaleidoscopic abstract painter shows her latest complex machineries of geometry and colour.
White Cube Mason’s Yard, London, 19 November to 17 January

Stanley Spencer
The unique British painter with a medievalist yet modern vision gets a showing in Suffolk, whose landscapes he painted.
Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, 15 November to 22 March

Roger Fry
An art critic often credited with bringing modernism to Britain more than a century ago gets a rare show of his own paintings.
Charleston, Lewes, 15 November to 15 March

Alfred Buckham: Daredevil Photographer
Stormy skies over Scotland captured by this heroic pioneer of aerial photography.
Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, until 19 April

Image of the week

US Border Patrol agents pose at the sculpture Cloud Gate, also known as the Bean, by Anish Kapoor.

“This is fascist America and it is beyond belief,” said Anish Kapoor of this photo showing his sculpture Cloud Gate, known to local Chicagoans as the Bean, being used as a backdrop by border patrol agents. The agents were reportedly celebrating after “military style” immigration enforcement raids where, the artist said, they were “abducting street vendors, breaking doors, pulling people from cars, using teargas on residential streets”. Kapoor filed a lawsuit in 2018 against the National Rifle Association, which used the sculpture in an advert, and settled out of court. “It’s a bit more complicated with this,” he said of the more recent incident, “because they’re a full, if you like, national army unit.” Read the full story

What we learned

A third of US museums have lost government funding since Trump took office

More than 150 Tate staff members will strike over pay this month

An image of a burn survivor has won the Taylor Wessing photo portrait prize

Harlem’s rehoused Studio Museum is a new destination for Black art in New York

Artist Luke Jerram is planting a living installation of 365 trees

Japanese-American photojournalist Jun Fujita shot early 20th-century Chicago – and Al Capone

A BBC film raises the possibility that JMW Turner may have been neurodivergent

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Artists and writers shared their advice on how to live life artfully

Guerrilla mosaics are brightening cities from Southampton to Sarajevo

Masterpiece of the week

A Young Man Holding a Ring by Follower of Jan van Eyck, c1450

It never rains but it pours. Or, in the Flemish words written under rain clouds in this late medieval painting, her las uber gan meaning “Lord, let it pass over”. The pattern of clouds pouring out black lines of rain, on stripes of white and blue, decorates a wall behind a man who’s holding up a ring between finger and thumb. You can tell it’s a wall painting, and not an abstract background, because he casts a shadow on it: for this is a technically revolutionary painting influenced by the great Bruges artist Jan van Eyck. Even the way the unknown portrait sitter holds up a ring is derived from a similar gesture in a Van Eyck painting. What does it all mean? A ring could symbolise love and marriage, or he could be a goldsmith. But I reckon this well-dressed, chubby-faced character is a merchant and the ring signifies wealth (just as the Medici family had diamond rings as a symbol.) If that’s so, his wall painting of rain clouds and prayer to God for better times probably refers to weathering financial storms.

National Gallery, London

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