Danes with scythes, wacky Albion and Squidsoup’s pulsating techno – the week in art

8 hours ago 6

Exhibition of the week

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

Also showing

Ben Edge: Children of Albion
Wacky paintings of modern Britain with enthusiastic references to Blake and the Green Man.
Fitzrovia Chapel, London, from 6-26 November

Wayne McGregor
The renowned choreographer branches out into art installations that centre on the human body.
Somerset House, London, until 22 February

David Blandy
A film inspired by The Canterbury Tales that explores the lost history of Britain’s common land.
The Amelia Scott, Tunbridge Wells, until 11 January

Future Tense
Installations by Squidsoup and Liz West immerse you in the techno age with plenty of pulsing lights.
York Art Gallery until 25 January

Image of the week

Ben Edge explained to us how his dynamic new understanding of Britain today, as seen in grand paintings such as Children of Albion (above), was triggered by seeing a procession of druids march past a KFC. Read the full story

What we learned

Last week’s jewel theft at the Louvre is only the latest in a long history of heists

A Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired dream home has been built jutting out over Loch Long

David Adjaye’s first major project since scandal rocked his firm is a mazey art ambush

Mrinalini Mukherjee’s brilliant sculpture gains little from the group show around it

Don McCullin looked back on seven decades photographing war and tragedy

Donald Trump fired the federal board vetting his controversial White House ballroom

skip past newsletter promotion

New York’s Met museum is being sued for buying a Van Gogh looted by Nazis

The Artes Mundi 11 international exhibition is smug, stagey, up-itself nonsense

Masterpiece of the week

Saint Zeno Exorcising the Daughter of Gallienus by Filippino Lippi and Workshop, 1455-60

It is the power of Christ that commands you! Here’s a medieval predecessor of The Exorcist for Halloween. This 15th-century painting shows how deeply rooted the belief in possession by demons is in the European past. The victim here looks ill and distraught, her face agonised and eyes vacant, as the little devil that lived in her is cast out. In other words it’s a realistic painting of some kind of psychological or neurological crisis. In the world of medieval Christendom that might well be diagnosed as possession by a demon. Lippi and his team portray the demon as a dark creature with wings and claws, uncannily jumping out of the victim’s mouth. People would carry on being plagued by such visions into the late 1600s. Today we enjoy them as entertainment. Father, could you help an old altar boy?
National Gallery, London

If you don’t already receive our regular roundup of art and design news via email, please sign up here.