German punks, Scottish impressionist love affair and pickle on the ceiling – art week | Art and design

Exhibition of the week

The taste of impressionism: French modern art from Millet to Matisse
A recently discovered Van Gogh is among the highlights of this investigation into Scotland’s love affair with Impressionism and its legacy, with Monets and Matisses galore.
Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, July 30 to November 13

Also showing

Ishiuchi Miyako
This mesmerizing photographer focuses her lens on the things we leave behind.
Stills Centre, Edinburgh, until October 8

Young and wild?Art in 1980s Germany: punk, painting and prints
The German Neo-Expressionist scene of the 1980s in all its tumultuous intensity, including Elvira Bach, Ina Barfuss and Georg Baselitz.
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, from July 30 to November 20

Homes Fit for People: Tessa Lynch
Prints that explore alternative models of housing and collaborative play.
Edinburgh Prints, until September 18

George Shaw: The Local
This painter takes you into his melancholy vision of modern Brittany.
The Box, Plymouth, until September 4

Picture of the week

Magnum Italian photographer Ferdinando Scianna has reached the end of a glorious six-decade career, but in a very entertaining and insightful interview he gave us, he claims to think that only a tiny percentage of the photos he has taken – including that of shadow play in his Sicilian hometown – were good. Read the full interview here

What we learned

Italian Magnum photographer Ferdinando Scianna has reached the end of a glorious career

Damien Hirst plans to burn more than 5,000 of his paintings

Australian artist demands NZ$10,000 (£5,200) for McDonald’s pickle thrown from gallery ceiling

Avant-garde feminist photography exhibited in France

Secret art society in Kherson produces poignant visions of life under Russian occupation

Artemisia Gentileschi’s Rome now exists in thrilling virtual reality

Nina Katchadourian recreated the incredible ordeal of a Scottish family adrift in a canoe in the Pacific for 38 days

King Kong makes a comeback in Birmingham ahead of the Commonwealth Games

Stunning work by Nyaparu ‘William’ Gardiner captures the ranchers and landscape of his native Pilbara in Western Australia

Climate activists stuck to Botticelli’s Primavera

Arthur Lanyon’s new work sees the painter take stock of major life events – the death of his father and the birth of his son

The site of a Roman fort on Hadrian’s Wall has been rebuilt in wild color to mark its 1900th anniversary

The V&A rewarded the best illustration work of the year

masterpiece of the week

Christ crowned with thorns, workshop of Dirk Fights c. 1470-75
Crystalline spheres of salt water hang over the face of Christ. The shocking reality of his tears is just one of the ways in which this painting sets out to overwhelm you with the most painful, pitiful, and direct encounter it can create with the suffering of the incarnate Son of God. His eyes are bloodshot with grief and suffering, their redness reflecting the black blood that streams down his forehead as the crown of thorns cuts into him. Flemish painters discovered a raw eye for reality in the late Middle Ages that allowed them to create a work like this where factual physical detail morphs into nightmarish intensity. Bouts, whose apprentices or assistants probably painted this in his style, takes this cocktail of fantasy and reality to a disturbing extreme in his masterpiece The Fall of the Damned. This small painting (43.8 x 37.1 cm) almost gives the impression that Christ himself is in hell.
National Gallery, London

do not forget

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