Magical Monet and Tracey Emin's message for travellers – the week in art

Emin has a warm welcome for everyone arriving at St Pancras station, as the National Gallery probes Monet’s mind and Linder Sterling roughs up Chatsworth House – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Monet & Architecture
This exhibition is a beguiling journey into the mind of Monet that reveals the serious purpose behind his visual brilliance.
• National Gallery, London, 9 April-29 July.

Also showing

Tracey Emin
A warm 20-metre-long message for everyone arriving at St Pancras station is Emin’s most ambitious public artwork to date.
• St Pancras International station, London, from 10 April.

Bumped Bodies
Sarah Lucas, Rebecca Warren, Enrico David and more in a survey of embodiments in contemporary art.
• Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 10 April-12 August.

Linder Sterling
The fruits of a residency by the punk artist at this splendid stately home.
• Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, until 21 October.

The Classical Now
Yves Klein’s Blue Venus is the best thing in this interesting but inadequately worked-out and slightly superficial survey of how contemporary artists draw on the heritage of ancient Greece and Rome.
• King’s College, London, until 28 April.

Masterpiece of the week

The Enchanted Castle (1664) by Claude Lorrain
Before Claude Monet there was Claude Lorrain, traditionally known simply as Claude. This 17th-century French artist who settled in Rome created, alongside his contemporary Nicolas Poussin, the idea of landscape as a lofty, serious artistic genre full of symbolism as well as natural beauty. In this painting, the looming classical building by the sea adds a sinister note to a landscape of dreamlike luminosity. In the foreground, the ancient Roman story of Cupid and Psyche is being played out. The soft twilit atmosphere is strange and eerie. No wonder it helped inspire John Keats to weave the reverie of his poem Ode to a Nightingale, with its haunting description of this picture’s “Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam / Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn”.
• National Gallery, London.

Image of the week

“I created this image of a 1955 scene at Vancouver’s Hastings Park racing track in 2008,” says the artist Stan Douglas, whose exhibition DCTs and Scenes from the Blackout is at David Zwirner gallery in New York until 7 April. “We seated the performers on the kind of wooden benches they would have been sitting on and gave them exact facsimiles of the racing cards and magazines they would have bought … This image captured the moment when the group gave way to the individual. Some turn into themselves, others try to reach out and make contact with others. There’s the guy in the bottom left telling off-colour jokes, and the woman is clearly offended.”

What we learned this week

Australian photographer Mike O’Meally has been chasing the great American dream

Artists from Belarus and Russia created a clown festival for April Fools’ Day

Iranian art is on show in London and selling fast

The V&A may return looted Ethiopian treasures on long-term loan

Photographing Istanbul by night can get you locked up

Cristiano Ronaldo’s sculptor has had a second go

Todd Webb was responsible for some pioneering documentary photography in 1950s sub-Saharan Africa

Mexico City has a gay cruising scene on its underground network

The Ashmolean in Oxford is brimful of little-known US modernist painters

We have skateboarding to thank for a sensible South Bank renovation

Junya Ishigami designs buildings that float

Richard Burton’s childhood cinema is to be refurbished as a community hub

Writer Laura Barton and photographer Sarah Lee walked down Santa Monica pier to explore the final US frontier

Tate Liverpool’s chief art handler has taken over the gallery

… and fine art is taking over Instagram

Don’t forget

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