Gods arrive from India, myths grow Tinguely and meat gets sensual – the week in art

A blockbuster show of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist art, a revolutionary marriage and Helen Chadwick inside a washing machine – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Ancient India: Living Traditions
Ambitious blockbuster that shows how Hindu, Jain and Buddhist art assumed their shapes and inspired the world.
• British Museum, London, 22 Mayto 19 October

Also showing

To Improvise a Mountain
The conceptual painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye selects art that inspires her, from Bas Jan Ader to Walter Sickert.
• Leeds Art Gallery until 5 October

Helen Chadwick: Life Pleasures
Retrospective of the brilliant artist who saw the sensuality of meat and made piss-holes in the snow.
• The Hepworth Wakefield, 17 May to 27 October

Heiress: Sargent’s American Portraits
Small but loving show of Sargent’s supremely stylish and characterful paintings.
• Kenwood House, London, until 5 October

Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely: Myths and Machines
These wildly inventive artists also happened to be married to each other. It must have been fun at their house.
• Hauser and Wirth Somerset, Bruton, 17 May to 1 February

Image of the week

Helen Chadwick’s prolific if tragically short career is getting its first big showing in more than two decades. It includes a vast chocolate fountain filled with 800kg of molten Tony’s Chocolonely and her Piss Flowers, white bronze sculptures cast from the holes she and her husband made by peeing in thick snow. Laura Smith, curator of the retrospective at the Hepworth Wakefield, says: “She was trying to disrupt societal conventions, including gender normativity … She was really pioneering and wasn’t afraid of art being sexy or funny, either.”

What we learned

New museum Fenix Rotterdam shows the realities of migration alongside esoteric art

Treasures of sacred art from India are very much a live tradition

Lee Miller’s unseen war shots are on show at Photo London

Anna Perach makes extreme, wearable carpets

How Linda Rosenkrantz recorded the NY art crowd’s secrets in the 60s

Pioneering American video artist Dara Birnbaum has died aged 78

Street artist Nicolas Party has unveiled a huge mural at Bath’s Holburne Museum

Australia is sending its first all-Indigenous team to the Venice architecture biennale

Koyo Kouoh, set to have been the Venice Biennale’s first African cuator, died aged 57

Masterpiece of the week

Portrait of a Young Man by Vincenzo Catena, about 1510

You can tell we’re in Venice. It’s something about that open blue sky speckled with light puffy clouds – like the equally airy skies in other Venetian paintings by Giovanni Bellini and Titian. Catena, a less famous Venetian painter than them, was probably Bellini’s pupil. In fact, in this portrait he sticks with his teacher’s style at a time when it was getting old. Why change it if it works? Whoever posed for this frank, bold full face painting was probably delighted to be recorded with such bright-eyed precision, in a world when only an oil painting, drawing or sculpted bust could preserve a face. Catena does a faithful, useful job of holding up a mirror to this man.
• National Gallery, London

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