Iggy Pop goes nude, the Turner grows up and Cecily Brown gets wrecked – the week in art

The legendary singer poses for a life drawing class, Lubaina Himid wins art’s top prize and it’s shipwrecks ahoy at the Whitworth – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

From Life
The tradition of drawing from life is explored through history and in the art of today, including a life class staged by Jeremy Deller with Iggy Pop as nude model.
• Royal Academy, London, 11 December to 11 March.

Also showing

Cecily Brown
Drawings of shipwrecks inspired by Théodore Géricault’s 1819 masterpiece of nautical suffering The Raft of the Medusa.
• The Whitworth, Manchester, until 15 April.

Astronomy Photographer of the Year
Remarkable photographs of nebulae, galaxies and the aurora borealis.
• Royal Observatory, London, until 22 July.

Soutine’s Portraits
Faces you will never forget in an exhibition of intense and enduring humanity by a Jewish expressionist in 1920s Paris.
• Courtauld Gallery, London, until 21 January.

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov
A magical mystery tour through immersive installations that fill you with delight until you contemplate their underlying message of historical horror.
• Tate Modern, London, until 28 January.

Masterpiece of the week

The Brazen Serpent, c 1635-40, by Peter Paul Rubens
A swirl of suffering, a fleshy sea of pain ripples through this painting. The children of Israel have been afflicted by God with a plague of serpents. A snake bites into a woman’s arm as she writhes in terror while others clutch their wounds, desperately try to protect their babies or lie on the earth, dead or dying. In their hour of torture Moses calls them to look at the brazen serpent he has set up on a pole, for seeing it will cure them. This painting was probably made with the help of assistants, reflecting the huge success of Rubens as the most in-demand painter of 17th-century Europe and therefore one who needed a big team to fulfil all of his commissions. Yet its horribly real vision of an entire community sharing in affliction is profound and moving. Surely this collective sickness reflects the plagues that regularly tore through the world in which Rubens lived. It also functions as a symbol of all communal disasters from war to genocide.
• National Gallery, London.

Image of the week

A Fashionable Marriage, 1987, by Lubaina Himid
The 63-year-old artist became the oldest – and first woman of colour – to win the Turner prize, after the award’s upper age limit of 50 was dropped.
• Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, until 7 January.

What we learned this week

Lubaina Himid wonders what she might have achieved if she’d won the Turner prize sooner

… while UK city of culture Hull had mixed feelings about the show

Charles II exhibition reveals how he tackled “the king’s evil”

Leonardo’s record-breaking Salvator Mundi will go on show at the Louvre Abu Dhabi

New York’s Metropolitan Museum was accused of voyeurism

Art helped Yorkshire Ripper victim Mo Lea turn the tables on her trauma

The Royal Society promotes science through photography

Irish sculptor Dorothy Cross is a sorcerer

The young artist who died in the Grenfell Tower fire will have a posthumous exhibition

Chilean artist Juana Gomez embroiders her family history

LA’s Museum of Failure has a shelf reserved for the president

Fine art is outpacing wine as an investment

Emile Zola’s photos are up for sale

Fashion has a place at the culture table

Winnie the Pooh is visiting the V&A for Christmas

Sydney commuters have a new reason to slow down

Arizona is a fascinating place, as David Hurn proved

Oxford’s Ashmolean will be visited by Americans

We remembered pre-Raphaelite art historian Virginia Surtees

Get involved

Our A-Z of Art series continues – share your art with the theme Z is for zero. And check out the entries we selected for the theme Y is for yearning.

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