Emma Stibbon: Melting Ice | Rising Tides A personal project to observe the climate crisis, from the Arctic to British coasts, in drawing and photography. Towner Eastbourne, 9 May-15 September
Ranjit Singh: Sikh, Warrior, King Art, weapons and armour bring to life Ranjit Singh, “Lion of the Punjab”, who established the Sikh empire in the early 1800s. Wallace Collection, London, until 20 October
Paul Maheke: To Be Blindly Hopeful Immersive installation that includes X-ray like spectral images of selfhood. Mostyn, Llandudno, until 29 June
Simon Starling Houseboat for Ho is Starling’s design for housing in a Danish community threatened with inundation by the sea. Modern Institute, Glasgow, until 25 May
Image of the week
Look familiar? You may recognise Yan Wang Preston’s delightfully subversive He from Manet’s Olympia. The UK-based Chinese photographer’s reworkings of famous artists’ works are clever, concise reversals that reveal the original’s assumptions and exclusions: rewriting art history, one liberated pair of buttocks at a time.
This painting does not immediately look revolutionary to modern eyes. Yet when it was done 600 years ago it was challenging not only artistic traditions but human cognition itself. Look at the Virgin Mary’s throne and you can see it is pictured in deep, realistic perspective. This illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat painted panel was a scientific wonder in the early 1400s. Masaccio reveals the solidity and roundedness of physical existence with a precision artists before him had barely attempted. Once you see the perspective of the throne you can also see how full and lifelike the faces are. Yet it is a stern, severe work. Masaccio has a moral edge. Why does the Virgin’s throne resemble an ancient Roman building? When this was painted, Masaccio’s city state Florence was gripped by the ideal of reviving the civic virtue of the Roman republic. This masterpiece is not just religious but political. National Gallery, London
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
