Degas at the circus, Emin’s rebirth and rococo inspo – the week in art

Richard Wright hits Glasgow, London Gallery Weekend brings the glamour and fashion photography claims its place as art – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

London Gallery Weekend
The capital’s commercial gallery scene perhaps needs this booster celebration that features talks, openings and fun in a host of glamorous venues.
• Galleries across London, until 2 June

Also showing

Discover Degas and Miss La La
Take a trip into the 19th-century Parisian circus and meet its female stars.
• National Gallery, London, from 6 June to 1 September

Richard Wright
The Turner prize winner unleashes his latest ecstatic site-specific painting.
• The Modern Institute, Glasgow, from 6 June to 5 September

Flora Yukhnovich and François Boucher: The Language of the Rococo
A 21st-century artist responds to the sensuality and painterly dash of this museum’s unrivalled collection of 18th-century rococo masterpieces.
• Wallace Collection, London, from 5 June to 3 November

Beyond Fashion
Exhibition claiming that fashion photography is avant garde art, with Nick Knight, Viviane Sassen and more.
• Saatchi Gallery, London, until 8 September

Image of the week

This small but luminous oil painting of the scourged Christ had been due to go under the hammer for €1,500 in April, but was saved after experts at the Prado rang Spain’s culture ministry to share their suspicions that the painting had been misattributed. After painstaking examination and restoration the work was finally authenticated as a Caravaggio and is now is on display in all its priceless glory. Read the full story.

What we learned

Lucian Freud’s daughter writes about sitting for her father in her compelling memoir
Nan Goldin says Gaza shows we are living in “chilling McCarthyist times”

Modern art star Alvaro Barrington says Biggie, Tupac and Ghostface saved his life

Tracey Emin is just as radical and ravishing as ever and is only just getting started

Gareth McConnell has got up close and personal with Belfast’s sectarian murals

Donald Rodney was a young artist who struck at Britain’s sick, racist heart

Rennie Ellis captured how generations of real Australians dressed, danced and loved

The “world’s rarest album” is to be played to the public for the first time

Artist Joe Bloom invites strangers into a telephone box to share “amazing revelations”

Masterpiece of the week

The Dominican Blessed by Fra Angelico, c1423-4

In his Life of Fra Angelico, the 16th-century writer Giorgio Vasari praises his true piety and says all religious artists should be as Christian as him – which prompts the question of which ones were not. Vasari was right that Fra Angelico’s faith is intense and makes his art both simple and sublime. He was a Dominican friar and painted this for the church of his own convent in Fiesole, near Florence. It is part of a large altarpiece he did free of charge. Fra Angelico’s holiness did not hold his career back: he was also commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici to fresco San Marco in Florence in what is one of the wonders of religious art. Why did this humble artist appeal so much to the sophisticates of Renaissance Florence? Look at the faces of the male and female Dominicans in this heavenly scene and they are all sensitively characterised with an eye for human individuality. Mystical as his worldview may be, Fra Angelico is a pioneer of realism.
• National Gallery, London

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