Millet’s iconic Angelus visits the UK, Philly shows its subtle side, while east and west face off in a puppet retelling of history – all in your weekly dispatch

Millet: Life on the Land
The Musée d’Orsay has lent Millet’s iconic Angelus for this journey to the dark side of the landscape.
• National Gallery, London, until 19 October

A new exhibition highlights three Illinois photographers whose work captures the after-dark life of midwest cities and towns. Robin Bailey, Jim Hill and Dave Jordano capture unusually compelling contrasts and independent businesses that have survived decades of change, from Michigan to Ohio. Midwestern Nights is on display at the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, until 8 September

In a world beset with conflict, the 15th edition of Cortona on the Move photo festival focuses on reconciliation – personal, social and political. Exhibitions are spread across the ancient Tuscan hilltop town, featuring 76 artists from around the world. Come Together runs until 2 November

The artist has been collaborating with the rock group’s frontman Thom Yorke on their distinctive visuals since the mid-90s. As a retrospective opens in Oxford, he looks back on three decades with the band

In the early 90s, Stanley Donwood was “at a loose end after university”, hitching around Britain and making a little money as a busking fire-breather. Fetching up in Oxford, he spotted a poster for a gig by a band called On a Friday. He recognised the name: a friend he’d met while studying at Exeter University’s fine art department called Thom Yorke was the lead singer.

So he called Yorke up. An initial plan for Donwood to do his fire-breathing routine as the band’s support act was scuppered by the venue’s nervous manager, but the pair kept in touch. Some time later, after On a Friday had changed their name to Radiohead, Yorke called with a proposition. “They’d done really well with Creep, which I hadn’t heard, it wasn’t my thing at all; I liked bleepy-bleepy, thumpy-thump music,” says Donwood. “But he said: ‘Our record sleeves are shit, do you want to come and have a go?’”

Aya Fujioka set out to shake the weight of history from her home city and capture her own relationship with it. But she couldn’t help picking up echoes from the past …

Allotments | YouTube at primary school | Universities and ‘racist science’ | Millet’s potato fork | Gaza and Hiroshima

“Is this government going to put the nail in the coffin of the joy of digging ground for potatoes on a cold, wet February Sunday afternoon?” Jeremy Corbyn wrote in the Daily Telegraph (Jeremy Corbyn warns rules on council asset sales threaten allotments, 5 August). Never trust a man who can’t tell his parsnips from his potatoes: leaving spuds in the ground till February means they’ll have been spoiled by frost or rot. And I say this as a lifelong Labour voter.
Dariel Francis
Tunbridge Wells, Kent

• A key point not covered in your article (YouTube most popular first TV destination for children, Ofcom finds, 30 July) is the extent to which schools, particularly primaries, use YouTube, from movement breaks to educational programmes and quiet-time cartoons before home time.
Cat Mehta
Weybridge, Surrey

National Gallery, London
There’s a undeniably erotic charge to Millet’s paintings of gloomy hard work – reminding us that, behind the hoes, these are real people with real desires

The figures in Jean-François Millet’s 1859 painting The Angelus, a French icon that’s come to the UK on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, seem extremely odd on close inspection. Their faces are obscure, their bodies intriguing under their shapeless work clothes. What age are they? How are they related? The man is quite young, his top shirt button loose, although his legs are as stiff as a doll’s, inside thick, rough-cut trousers. It’s harder to tell the woman’s age because she stands in profile, a breeze pressing her heavy skirt against her legs, as she clasps her hands. They might be a married couple or, as this painting’s unlikely fan Salvador Dalí claimed, mother and son. Their physicality is intense. The phallic prongs of a thick wooden potato fork and wheelbarrow shafts add to the feeling that, now the working day is done and they’re saying their prayers, they can finally get to bed. But if they’re mother and son? I refer you to Dr Dalí.

I think there’s a reason Millet makes The Angelus not so much a religious as an erotic landscape. It was the climax of his love affair with the French peasantry. Millet made it his life’s work to portray the rural poor – a class that had been denied full humanity. He depicts lives of backbreaking toil but wants you to see that, behind the hoe, is a human being with a mind, a body, desires.

Heide Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne is showing its first joint exhibition exploring the surrealist photography of Man Ray and Max Dupain. Heide’s director and curator Lesley Harding has written captions explaining the works. It’s on show until 9 November

• Max Dupain’s Sunbaker: Australian artists respond to celebrated photograph – in pictures

A new exhibition at the Whitney looks back at a varied selection of works that tell the story of America across eight tumultuous decades

With “Untitled” (America), The Whitney celebrates 10 years in its new space and offers visitors a statement on what the museum is all about. Combing the institution’s archives, it brings together 80 years of American art, from the turn of the century up through the 1980s.

As art historian and Whitney chief curator, Kim Conaty, was hard at work curating “Untitled” (America), she envisioned the Whitney as a place of refuge and nourishment for artists who have furnished new ways of seeing and new historical narratives. “When I think of the very brave work of artists over decades,” she said via video interview. “I’m excited by how it’s possible for us now through their work to see the questions they have put forth, the histories they have made visible. We need to give our support to those artists who have done that hard thinking and helped reveal or made visible our history and helped us see new futures.”

An exhibition of graphic work by Peter Kennard is opening at Palestine Museum Scotland to run daily from 9 to 31 August, concurrent with the Edinburgh festival. ‘Gaza’ showcases prints made using a variety of media including photomontage, double-exposed photographs, drawing and paint, in response to the daily reports and footage of the near-erasure of Gaza and the thousands of Palestinians killed. The exhibition also includes earlier work repurposed for the show

• Gaza is at Palestine Museum Scotland, 13A Dundas Street, 9-31 August

Linder headlines the UK’s largest festival of visual art, Jeremy Deller delves into Welsh history and graffiti queen Lady Pink scares Keith Haring – all in your weekly dispatch

Edinburgh art festival
Artists from Linder to Mike Nelson provide the fun in this hugely varied city-wide extravaganza.
• Various Edinburgh venues, 7-24 August

The palatial edifice, believed to have stood where God created Adam, has fired imaginations for two millennia. Now artist Pablo Bronstein has created wild mashups, complete with blue-bearded gargoyles, suggesting how it looked

No legendary building has ever inspired more conjecture about what it might have looked like than Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. It is said to have been built in c.950BC, on the mound where God created Adam, and was destroyed 400 years later by marauding Babylonians. But, beyond some inconsistent descriptions in the Bible written centuries after the temple was razed, there is no archaeological evidence that this palatial edifice ever existed.

And yet, for more than two millennia, generations of architects, archaeologists and ideologues have bickered over the building’s appearance. They have debated its exact height and width, speculated on the design of its columns, and battled over the precise nature of its porch. The mythic building, also known as the First Temple, has inspired everything from a Renaissance royal palace in Spain to a recent megachurch in Brazil, to the interiors of masonic lodges around the world – all built on a fantasy.

The artists for the 166th edition of the Royal Photographic Society’s international photography exhibition, the world’s longest-running photography exhibition, have been announced. The works will be on display at London’s Saatchi Gallery from 5 August to 18 September 2025

A treasure trove of flea market photos spotted in 2004 show how some found liberation in the Catskillls at a tough time

A new show at the Met demonstrates the enduring power of photography to affirm trans identities and build trans communities. Titled simply Casa Susanna, it reveals a treasure trove of photographs made by a community of self-identified “cross-dressers” in the 1960s, as they found ways to make precious time to dress as their feminine selves in two resorts offering safe spaces in the Catskill mountains.

According to show curator Mia Fineman, these photos had sat dormant for decades until two antique dealers happened to discover them at a flea market in 2004. “What struck them was that they were men dressed in women’s clothing but not in drag,” said Fineman. “They were not wearing flamboyant clothing, it was a very conservative, midcentury style.”

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
This Is What You Get explores the intense creative partnership behind countless album sleeves from OK Computer to In Rainbows. But is it good art? Absolutely not

For decades, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and the artist Stanley Donwood have been locked in an intense creative partnership. They scribble over each other’s drawings, scrawl in each other’s notebooks, push each other, inspire each other. Their work has been on every Radiohead album cover since 1995’s The Bends, every Yorke solo record, every poster and every T-shirt. Nothing is farmed out to designers or agencies – Radiohead’s visual identity has been fully overseen by Donwood and Yorke.

And now, in a homecoming of sorts for local hero Yorke, their artistic output is being celebrated at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. There’s no doubt that Donwood and Yorke, who met while studying at the University of Exeter, have created some of the most recognisable, ubiquitous and maybe even iconic album covers of their generation. But do they make sense in a huge, historic gallery such as the Ashmolean? Does any of it make for good art? Does it stand up to scrutiny when removed from the context of the records and merchandise it was designed for? It’s a nice dream, but nope.

This public collection supports living artists while bringing their work into the homes and workplaces of Australians

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We’re familiar with borrowing books from a library or renting a car, a carpet cleaner or a suit, but have you ever considered loaning an artwork? A Sidney Nolan, perhaps? An Emily Kam Kngwarray or Patricia Piccinini? Or maybe something from an up-and-coming video artist or photographer? A neon text-based work? Or something more hard-hitting, such as a series of paintings on discarded aerial maps that symbolically reclaims country from mining companies?

Should any of these pique your interest, Artbank has you covered. The government-owned collection is composed of more than 11,000 works of art available for loan by individuals and businesses, starting from as little as $165 for a year and capping at $11,000.

From Mitch Epstein’s early colour experiments to Ori Gersht smashing glass prints of iconic paintings, these images celebrate three decades of the New York gallery

A countryside conceptualist takes root in Edinburgh, digital artists explore beauty in the age of AI and Monster Chetwynd takes on this summer’s Tate Play installation – all in your weekly dispatch

Andy Goldsworthy
Captivating retrospective of this countryside conceptualist who makes art with substances including sheep fleece, fern leaves, barbed wire and hare’s blood. Read the review.
• Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 26 July to 2 November

National Galleries of Scotland, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh
Using barbed wire, graveyard pebbles and prickly thorns, this retrospective plunges viewers into the raw sadness and beauty of rural life

Rural life hits you in the face like the stink of cow dung as soon as you step into the Royal Scottish Academy. Andy Goldsworthy has laid a sheepskin rug up the classical gallery’s grand staircase – very luxurious, except it’s made from the scraps thrown away after shearing, stained blue or red with farmers’ marks, all painstakingly stitched together with thorns.

This is the Clarkson’s Farm of art retrospectives, plunging today’s urbanites into the raw sadness and beauty, the violence and slow natural cycles of the British countryside. Goldsworthy may love nature but he doesn’t sentimentalise it. At the top of the stairs there’s a screen and through its gaps you glimpse the galleries beyond. It feels mystical and calming, until you realise it’s made of rusty barbed wire strung between two of the building’s columns that serve as tightly-wound wire rollers. It made me think of Magnus Mills’ darkly hilarious rural novel about hapless fencers, The Restraint of Beasts.

Georgia O’Keeffe and David Hockney enjoy the air, the British Museum looks to the far north, and the Folkestone Triennial gets under way – all in your weekly dispatch

Folkestone Triennial: How Lies the Land?
Dorothy Cross, Katie Paterson, Cooking Sections and many more take part in a sprawling seaside summer art special.
• Various venues, Folkestone, Kent, from 19 July until 19 October