Jonathan Jones's Blog

From Michelangelo and Leonardo to Picasso and Matisse, bitter feuds have defined art. But are contemporary artists more collaborative than their renaissance predecessors?

“He has been here and fired a gun,” John Constable said of JMW Turner. A shootout between these two titans would make a good scene for in a film of their lives, but in reality all Turner did at the 1832 Royal Academy exhibition was add a splash of red to a seascape, to distract from the Constable canvas beside it.

That was by far the most heated moment in what seems to us a struggle on land and sea for supremacy in British art. It’s impossible not to see Tate Britain’s new double header of their work this way. For it is a truth universally acknowledged, to paraphrase their contemporary Jane Austen, that when two great artists live at the same time, they must be bitter and remorseless rivals. But is that really so, and does it help or hinder creativity?

Artists turn from the heroic to the everyday, Paula Rego gives everyone a fright and a stealth wealth still life is subtly revealing – all in your weekly dispatch

Monument to the Unimportant
With the birth of modernism, artists turned their gaze from the heroic to the “unimportant”. This attention to the everyday continues, as Rachel Whiteread, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Gober and others demonstrate.

• Pace Gallery, London, until 14 February

In three thrilling works by Caravaggio, the same boy’s face crops up. As one – the astonishing Victorious Cupid – arrives in Britain, we ask: who was this anarchic model and muse?

The boy howls as his head is held down, a huge thumb pressing into his cheek as his father’s mighty hand holds him by the neck. This is The Sacrifice of Isaac and I am looking at it in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, feeling distressed by how Caravaggio has so chillingly rendered the face of this suffering child from the biblical tale. It looks as if Abraham, who has been told by God to kill his son, could break his neck with just one twist. Yet Abraham’s preferred method is with the silvery grey knife he holds in his other hand, ready to slit Isaac’s throat. One thing’s for certain – whoever posed as Isaac for this astonishing work was a great actor. There is not just dread, shock and pleading in his darkened eyes but also grief that a guardian could betray him so utterly.

Standing in front of the painting, I know this is a real face, an accurate record of a young model, because the same boy – recognisable by his tousled hair and almost black eyes – appears in two other paintings by Caravaggio. In each, that richly expressive face steals the show. In John the Baptist, he looks mischievously out of the shadows while cuddling a ram. In Victorious Cupid, he grins with a hardness learned on Rome’s streets, his black feathery wings demonic, a naked kid running riot in a well-to-do house.

Caravaggio’s masterpiece hits the UK, Margate goes dotty for Riley, and it’s paintbrushes at dawn for Turner and Constable – all in your weekly dispatch

Caravaggio’s Cupid
The shock of the old hits London as Caravaggio’s most confrontational and mind-boggling masterpiece goes on free display. Prepare to be dazzled and traumatised.

• The Wallace Collection, London, 26 November to 12 April

★★★★★ / ★☆☆☆☆
Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art Projects, London
The two artists, friends, are paired in this joint show that juxtaposes Lucas’s precise and witty sculptures with Hambling’s semi-abstract dollops

Thirty-five years ago the Young British Artists crashed into Britain’s senescent art world and dumped two fried eggs and a kebab on its top table. Or at least that was the myth. Now Sarah Lucas, toughest of the YBAs, is 63, her fried eggs and kebab are art history, and she’s besties with Maggi Hambling, 80, one of the last of the old-school painters. Lucas admires Hambling not just as an artist but a woman, and in Maggi the Maggi, she has created a loving, heroic image of Hambling’s face made entirely of cigarettes. Hambling returns the compliment with Sarah at Work which, like all her paintings here, is a slapdash mess. But it’s hard to pay much attention to Hambling’s daubs when your eyes are full of balloon breasts (by which I mean boobs moulded on party balloons), shiny red bums thrust in the air, floppy phallic ears and spindly pipe cleaner legs wearing shoes Lucas must have bought in bulk from a fetish shop.

In the latest iteration of her Bunny sculptures, laughable yet tragic creatures that render the Playboy Bunny absurdly literal, Sarah Lucas creates orgiastic hilarity and aesthetic mayhem. Limbs, eyes, nipples are everywhere as these poor things pose on concrete chairs in a style you might find in an exclusive sex club, or a male fantasy of some such place. It’s the stuff of the manosphere’s wildest dreams, a lurid monument to hyped-up internet-driven porn. Yet furious feminist satire is just one dimension to Lucas’s extraordinary works.

Hambling and Lucas join forces, Roger Fry gets a rare show and an aerial daredevil captures stormy Scotland – all in your weekly dispatch

Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas
These two very different artists became friends after meeting at the Colony Room (where else?) and now show together in an encounter of British art generations.

• Sadie Coles HQ, London, 20 November to 24 January

Joseph Wright of Derby’s shining innovation, Diane Arbus’s haunting portraits and an Uzbek angle on the end of the USSR – all in your weekly dispatch

Wright of Derby: From the Shadows
Two of the greatest paintings ever done about science – in which audiences are transfixed by lectures on an Orrery and Air-Pump – are brought together in this small but luminous show.

• National Gallery, London, until 10 May

David Zwirner Gallery, London
From cruel pictures of elderly widows to a shocking image of motherhood, the American photographer’s genius is on full display in a show that finds ugliness all around her

In 1971, at the age of 48, the American photographer Diane Arbus killed herself. Someone should have seen the clues, for her photography is not so much tragic as utterly alienated from the human species. Here is a woman nursing her baby, a modern Madonna – except the woman’s limbs are as thin as an addict’s, her face wizened and the infant resting in her arms, dressed in baby clothes, is a monkey. Just to make clear that this is an absurd, miserable travesty of Madonnas and motherhood Arbus captioned it: “A woman with her baby monkey, NJ, 1971.” It is an utterly pitiable image of desperation, of someone trying to make sense of a life that can’t be made sense of. And the despair mirrors that of Arbus herself.

You might want to see her many images of gender-blurring positively. There’s a photograph called Transvestite at Her Birthday Party, NYC 1969: she lies on her bed laughing, double chinned and gap-toothed in a blond wig, in a shabby hotel room with balloons. But Arbus actually said how macabre and pathetic she found the occasion: “She called me up and said it was her birthday party and would I come and I said, ‘How terrific.’ It was a hotel on Broadway and 100th Street … I’ve been in some pretty awful places but the lobby was really like hades.” The elevator was broken so Arbus walked up to the fourth floor. “You had to step over about three or four people every flight. And then I came into her room. The birthday party was me and her, a whore friend of hers and her pimp, and the cake.”

National Gallery, London
Joseph Wright of Derby’s vivid paintings depicted Enlightenment thinking and illumination amid the dark. So why are they so terrifying?

He looks like he’s up to no good. In the depths of the night, under trees and clouds turned silver and black by the full moon, a man is at work with a shovel. Is he burying a body or digging bits up for a Frankensteinian experiment? After all, this painting was done by Joseph Wright of Derby, a friend of pioneering scientists and industrialists in the Lunar Society of Birmingham, leaders of the new science that would inspire Mary Shelley.

But the man beside the foaming river Derwent is not collecting body parts. He’s doing something just as nefarious by 21st-century moral standards: blocking a fox den so the foxes can’t get back in and will be easy game for the hunt tomorrow. Maybe Wright shares my compassion for foxes, because An Earthstopper on the Banks of the Derwent genuinely is a bit sinister. Yet it has a hypnotic beauty. Two light sources – a lantern and the moon – make this night anything but dead as we almost hear leaves rustle, white water rush and the earthstopper’s spade clunk. It’s one thing to paint a landscape by day. Wright makes one come fantastically alive by night.

Anna Ancher echoes Vermeer, the children of modern Britain are laid bare, while Liz West and Squidsoup take you to the future – all in your weekly dispatch

Anna Ancher: Painting Light
This powerful Danish painter of every day life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries echoes Vermeer in her stilled scenes.

• Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, 4 November to 8 March