Black identity, Blake’s intensity and how to dust David – the week in art

Plus splashy colourful paintings, Korean colour pencil drawings and Yoko Ono’s huge retrospective – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure
Lubaina Himid, Kerry James Marshall and Amy Sherald are among the artists in this survey of Black identity in painting.
• National Portrait Gallery, London, until 19 May

Also showing

William Blake’s Universe
Enter the intense world of Blake and his fellow romantic artists, including Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich.
• Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until 19 May

Jemimah Stehli: Happenstance
Splashy abstract expressionist-like paintings by an artist best known for her subversive photographic work.
• Marlborough London, until 23 March

Do Ho Suh
Retrospective of this Korean-born, London-based artist’s poetic drawings and sculptures.
• Modern One, Edinburgh, until 1 September

Accordion Fields
Group show by painters including Tim Stoner, Pam Evelyn and Dexter Dalwood.
• Lisson Gallery, London, until 4 May

Image of the week

The trickiest part of the job for Italian restorer Eleonora Pucci is capturing the dust and spiders’ webs that lurk in David’s curls. The cleaning of Michelangelo’s statue at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence takes at least half a day and has been compared to cleaning a bathroom by the gallery’s director.

What we learned

An oversized herd of animal puppets is planning to walk 20,000km

One of Francis Bacon’s most emotive paintings is going on sale

David Hockney and other artists have picked their favourite paintings

Yoko Ono’s Tate Modern retrospective is huge, moving and full of surprises

Frederic Leighton’s clever, titillating Flaming June is visiting the UK from Puerto Rico

A sweet potato and a black cat are vying for a place on London’s fourth plinth

Zineb Sedira’s installations lead viewers through cinematic classics

Prism, a three-part film essay, turns the camera on race, colour and imperialism

A new John Singer Sargent show reduces his portraits to facts about hats and frocks

A tunnel 150m below the Atlantic boasts a six-mile-long art installation

Masterpiece of the week

The Skiff by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1875

Two women go boating on the Seine in a shimmering weightless utopia of light. Every brushstroke unleashes a different mix of gold, silver, green and blue in this amazingly dappled and variegated painting. Renoir raises a very ordinary scene of modern leisure to something sublime. Reality is consummately depicted yet seems to blaze with Arcadian majesty. Messing about on the river has rarely been so charged and poetic. The impressionist movement included women as artists, most brilliantly Berthe Morisot, and also in paintings as the autonomous subjects we see here, having fun without men.
• National Gallery, London

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