The Chapmans go to war, photographers turn feral and Cézanne blows us away – the week in art

Gateshead has a dream, Paris gets a sex sculpture and digital artists hack the gallery system – all in your weekly dispatch

Exhibition of the week

Cézanne Portraits
The searching and profound portraits of Paul Cézanne are the greatest painted in modern times.
• National Portrait Gallery, London, 26 October to 11 February.

Also showing

Age of Terror: Art since 9/11
Artists including Jake and Dinos Chapman and Gerhard Richter respond to the anxieties of our time.
• Imperial War Museum, London, 26 October to 28 May.

Starless Midnight
Season Butler, Karon Davis, Charles Gaines and Cauleen Smith are among the artists in this exhibition inspired by the legacy of Martin Luther King.
• Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, until 21 January.

Pioneers of Pop
The great Richard Hamilton leads this survey of the origins of pop art.
• Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, until 20 January

Wildlife Photographer of the Year
This ever-popular gathering of new images of nature returns.
• Natural History Museum, London, until 28 May.

Masterpiece of the week

The Avenue at the Jas de Bouffan (c.1868-70) Paul Cézanne
The intense enigmatic atmosphere of this gateway-like corridor of trees on his father’s Provence estate offers a glimpse of the radical power of Cézanne’s landscape art. The electrifying greens and severe shadows are beguiling. Your eye is led into the wooded avenue, where deep shade offers escape from the southern sun. It is as if someone might be waiting there – but who? The artist’s fascination with this place is unmistakable. It means something obscure to him, a mystery he is trying to solve by painting it. For Cézanne, a landscape is another kind of self-portrait.
• National Gallery, London.

Image of the week

Crab Surprise by Justin Gilligan
The winner of the Behaviour: Invertebrates category of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year, announced on Wednesday. Justin was documenting a kelp transplant experiment for the University of Tasmania and was taken by surprise when an aggregation of giant spider crabs the size of a football field wandered past. A Maori octopus seemed equally delighted with the unexpected bounty.

What we learned this week

Sydney’s annual Sculpture By the Sea festival has coasted in

… but Dutch sculpture was too rude for the Louvre

Chaim Soutine found beauty in the ordinary folk of Paris

Tim Storrier won the Doug Moran portrait painting prize

Digital artists are fighting back against the power of the market

Burkina Faso portrait photographer Sory Sanlé recalled his heyday

Albert Namatjira’s family have won their long fight for copyright

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov have made moving memorials to communism

Salvator Mundi fever grows

Rebecca Abrams has explored Jewish history at Oxford’s Ashmolean

Tajikistan is erasing its Soviet architecture

… while Kazakhstan is luring starchitects to shape its new image

The builders of Stonehenge ate Scottish takeaways

International photographers are united against wildlife crime

… while the winners of the 2017 Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards have been announced

Get involved

Our A-Z of Art series continues – share your art with the theme X for Xenophilia. And check out the entries we selected for the theme W for women.

Don’t forget

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