Seaside surrealism, a techno Man Ray and new paintings from Billy Childish

Tate St Ives hosts an intriguing show by occultist and artist Ithell Colquhoun, the Warburg Institute explores tarot and the Barbican exhibits Noah Davis’s dreamlike paintings of everyday Black life – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Ithell Colquhoun: Between Worlds
Seaside surrealism gets a show by the picturesque shores of St Ives, in an intriguing survey of this British occultist and modern artist.
• Tate St Ives, Cornwall, 1 February to 5 May

Also showing

Noah Davis
Skilful and dreamlike paintings of everyday Black life with glimpses of mythology.
• Barbican Art Gallery, London, 6 February to 11 May

Tarot: Origins and Afterlives
This Renaissance research centre is the ideal venue for a show on the mysteries of tarot cards, invented in 15th-century Italy.
• Warburg Institute, London, until 30 April

Thomas Ruff: Expériences Lumineuses
The German artist digitally manipulates abstract photography, in a techno answer to Man Ray.
• David Zwirner, London, until 22 March

Billy Childish: ‘like a god i love all things’
New paintings of Kent, California and his family by the veteran punk and former Stuckist.
• Lehmann Maupin at 9 Cork Street, London, until 15 February

Image of the week

The world’s most famous portrait, the Mona Lisa, is to get a room of its own in the Louvre, as the director of the world’s most visited museum warned that visiting the overcrowded building had become a “physical ordeal”. Read the full story here and why the decision is a misguided act of snobbery.

What we learned

Peter Hujar’s intense photographs of 70s and 80s New York will sweep you away

Flávio de Carvalho donned a skirt and sparked a Brazilian art revolution

A rediscovered ‘mystery’ Munch painting will go on display in the UK for first time

Artist Theaster Gates has an alternative vision for making America great again

Banksy now has a dedicated museum in Madrid

Carl Bloch’s lost masterpiece found fame again in Athens

Eric Tucker’s nephew has written a moving account of the painter’ secret vocation
Stories are woven in cloth in Pakistan’s first textile museum

The dramatic work of Paule Vézelay is being honoured in her home city of Bristol

Masterpiece of the week

A Shipwreck in Stormy Seas by Claude-Joseph Vernet, 1773

Romanticism is often seen as an early 19th-century cultural movement but, as this painting shows, it started decades earlier. Vernet depicts survivors scrambling ashore from a wooden ship that has foundered in spewing, boiling waves, but this is not a real-life scene to fill you with pity. It is instead a psychological drama that summons up sensation and horror – the feelings that 18th-century aestheticians called “sublime”. Vernet has composed his spectacle for maximum sublimity: not only are there violent seas, one or even two doomed ships, and terrified people – but the shore is big and rocky, there’s a castle-like lighthouse, and the sky is partly ablaze with eerie orange light. The same cocktail of terrors would stir the wild seas of JMW Turner, who was born two years after this was painted.
• National Gallery, London

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