Hockney bounces back, a Myanmar blockbuster and fantasy in the library – the week in art

Hockney’s life and art, the crises of modern Myanmar, new works by Yinka Shonibare, and a celebration of the many worlds of fantasy – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

David Hockney: Drawing from Life
This exhibition, returning after its original run was cut short by Covid, is a moving chronicle of Hockney’s life in his art.
• National Portrait Gallery, London, 2 November-21 January

Also showing

Burma to Myanmar
A blockbuster that seeks to understand the crises of modern Myanmar through its history.
• British Museum, London, 2 November-11 February

Fantasy: Realms of Imagination
Art, literature, film and comics in a grand celebration of making stuff up.
• British Library, London, until 25 February

Yinka Shonibare: Free the Wind, the Spirit, and the Sun
New works by Shonibare himself as well as artists who have had residencies in his Guest Artists Space Foundation in Lagos, Nigeria.
• Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, until 11 November

Zarina Bhimji: Flagging It Up
Photography, film and installations exploring power and selfhood, from the 1980s to now, feature in this mid-career retrospective.
• Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 28 October-28 January

Image of the week

Over this Halloween weekend, Historic England is asking people to help record the “ghost signs” still to be found on buildings across England and send them in for an online map. Duncan Wilson, the chief executive of Historic England, said he found ghost signs very evocative. “These mysterious pieces of secret history are a reminder of the people who came before us, and the urban spaces and high streets they made their own.” Read the full story

What we learned

Florence Houston’s paintings turn wobbly jelly into wondrous still life

Sunspot, a no-frills development in Jaywick, Essex, brings a ray of hope

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs take the Hayward Gallery into new realms

Rachel Maclean’s candy-coloured shop of art put fun back on the high street street

RB Kitaj’s kaleidoscopic collage-paintings were haunted by the Holocaust

At 94, Ghanaian photographer James Barnor looked back on his pioneering career

The Wellcome Collection’s new show puts the £660bn beauty industry on display

Hans Holbein’s sketches showed the secret life of the Tudors

David Shrigley turned 6,000 Dan Brown books into Nineteen Eighty-Four

A biologist solved a century-old art riddle

Masterpiece of the week

Four Figures at a Table, by the Le Nain Brothers, c 1643

It often seems the art of pre-modern Europe is a cavalcade of kings and queens and aristocrats. Yet in the age when Van Dyck was painting silk-clad cavaliers, Antoine, Louis and Mathieu Le Nain painted the French peasantry. This is a typically blunt and bleak example of their unvarnished records of real life. An older woman looks right at us, despairing, while a younger woman also casts us a melancholy glance. She is holding a plain ceramic water jug, to go with the dry bread the young boy in the picture is eating. Life’s no picnic for these country folk – it is an all but bare table. Dull brown light adds to the atmosphere of plainness and poverty. About 150 years before the French Revolution, the Le Nain Brothers reveal the injustice that sustained the brilliance of upper-class life.
• National Gallery, London

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