Miami billionaire couple part with triptych by late abstract expressionist that previously hung in their bedroom

Tate Modern has announced its most significant single donation in more than 50 years, a monumental triptych by the American abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell that she named after her German shepherd dog, Iva.

The huge 6-metre work, painted by Mitchell in 1973, was given to Britain’s national art collection by the billionaire Miami real estate magnate Jorge M Pérez and his wife, Darlene.

Serpentine, London
From the moment we inhale the scent of this remarkable show – in which trees blast open and boulders perch on branches – the Italian artist intoxicates us like a shaman communing with wood sprites

It’s the aroma that lures you in. Deep and difficult to place, it comes from the thousands of laurel leaves that pad the walls of the Serpentine’s high central space. Laurel is the sharp-leaved evergreen tree sacred to the god Apollo and through him associated with victory and the arts. Poets are crowned with it. In Botticelli’s Primavera, a nymph is chased through laurel trees. A marble sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini depicts Daphne transforming into a laurel to escape Apollo’s unwanted lust – a reason this tree is sacred to him.

So much cultural baggage. It can’t be easy to be a modern Italian artist with ancient Rome, the Renaissance and the baroque on your back. One of the captivating things about Giuseppe Penone’s meditative selection of his works is how easily this artist has cast off that weight of tradition ever since he started his life in art in 1968.

Inspired by the landscapes of the French masters, Elger Esser captures the brooding seascapes and bucolic country scenes of his beloved countryside – with timeless results

‘Japan is the mecca of cosplay. Monaka runs a cafe in Tokyo called Monster Party, where people go dressed as characters from a subculture known as tanganmen. Her brother is holding a picture of their mum’

My personal projects have often focused on the topic of identity, so the world of cosplay immediately appealed to me. I knew nothing about it until I saw some photographs on Instagram and became interested in these people who spend their free time turning themselves into characters from manga, anime, movies and video games – or even into creations they’ve come up with by themselves.

Italy’s biggest annual cosplay event is held in the region where I live, Tuscany. I started going and taking pictures, just on my phone at first, and that’s where I first approached cosplayers to ask if they’d like to help me with a project I had in mind. In the 1970s, John Olson took some portraits for Life magazine of musicians such as Frank Zappa and Elton John at home with their parents. They contrasted the individual identity of the rock stars and the social identity represented by their parents, and that seemed the right way to photograph cosplayers, too. I thought it was far more interesting to show them in a domestic setting, alongside people in everyday clothes, than in the environment of a fantasy-themed event.

The vast show at the Pompidou highlights how the French capital became a haven for creatives from across the diaspora

Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. I was in France at the weekend to check out the Paris Noir exhibition at the Pompidou Centre, an odyssey through the generations of Black artists from across the world who found a complicated sanctuary in the city. This was supplemented with a walking tour on the life of the artist Beauford Delaney, guided by the company Entrée to Black Paris, and finished off with a mind-blowingly delicious Senegalese dinner. Yes, I’m trying to make you jealous.

The artist and musician is a brilliant subject for an epic, in-depth biography, but this is merely hagiography

In 1966 a woman sat down at the Destruction in Art Symposium at London’s Africa Centre and invited people to cut off her clothes. It was an era when Yves Klein used naked women as paintbrushes and Allen Jones made sculptures of fetishistically dressed women posed as furniture. But Yoko Ono was in control of her own self-sacrifice. It was the third time she’d performed this paradoxically passive action, and each time it was the audience who exposed themselves as they took scissors to her clothing.

This was also the beginning of a sojourn in London for the Japanese-born New York artist that would catapult her from avant garde obscurity to global fame. Her exhibition at the Indica Gallery that same year was visited by John Lennon, who climbed one of her artworks, a ladder to the ceiling. At the top he used a magnifying glass to read the tiny word “YES”. The love kindled that day would be blamed for breaking up the Beatles.

One of a series of photographs taken across India in which women, many of them abuse survivors, use traditional needlework to embellish portraits of themselves

This is a portrait of Praween Devi, a woman I met in 2019 through a local organisation while working on my project Nā́rī. I met her alongside other women who gather in their back yards to embroider together, sharing stories over cups of chai.

When I asked to take her photograph, she suggested the main hall of her home, mentioning its lack of decoration and how the walls were bare except for a framed image of flowers and, notably, a photograph of all the men in the house. Before we began, she brought in a rug from another room, subtly curating the space. As I composed the shot, I included the photograph of the men, wondering how she would choose to alter the image through embroidery.

Photographer Sarah Mei Herman was 20 when her half-brother Jonathan was born – she spent the next two decades capturing intimate moments between him and their father

A chubby, rhubarb and custard-coloured tower bedecked with anteaters and moles make a fun neighbour to the city’s dreaming spires. It’s left some locals lost for words

A carved stone pangolin clings to the top of the tower, its scaly tail curled into the crevice of a cornice, as if holding on for dear life. It crowns an arresting arrival to Oxford, the city of dreaming spires, the anteater taking its place on this skyline of slender steeples and gurning gargoyles, up there at the summit of the newest – and strangest – spire of them all.

“I was thinking, ‘How do you mark Covid in a building?’” says David Kohn, architect of this curious addition to the campus of New College. “We were developing the designs in the middle of the pandemic, when pangolins had been in the limelight for all the wrong reasons.”

She dressed up as a bullfighter, sat in a window with two magpies and flew colossal flags of warning. We go inside a fascinating new exhibition of photographs by multimedia artist Rose Finn-Kelcey

She was the overshadowed member of the iconic group. But now, with a major exhibition not far from the house she turned into a work of art, Bell is finally getting her due. And she’s not the only one

When you think of the Bloomsbury Group – the writers, artists and intellectuals who congregated at 46 Gordon Square in London in the early 20th century – you might think of Virginia Woolf; the Omega Workshops, which brought fine art to modernist designs; Charleston, a farmhouse in Sussex, frequented by core members who painted every available surface in blazing hues; or the famous phrase about their unorthodox sex lives – they “painted in circles and loved in triangles”.

But do you ever think – or know much – about a woman at the heart of the group, Vanessa Bell, sister of Virginia and co-director of the Omega Workshops? If Bloomsbury member John Maynard Keynes was the economics pioneer, and Woolf its literary star, then Bell was the painter equivalent. Yet it seems Bell has too often been overshadowed by her contemporaries, or pigeonholed by her domestically scaled work. No longer. A new exhibition at Charleston’s gallery spaces in nearby Lewes brings together the largest number of Bell works in history, 136 in total.

Research backs schemes that encourage doctors to prescribe time in cultural institutions to boost mental health and reduce loneliness

It was about six years ago that Nathalie Bondil heard of doctors prescribing outside the boundaries of traditional medicine, scribbling out orders to walk, cycle or swim, or sending their patients into nature.

As she made her way through the halls of Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, however, she was certain that its collection of Inuit art or paintings by Claude Monet or Camille Pissarro, could also be just what the doctor ordered.

He was a digital art pioneer, making himself an avatar in disturbing films. Now Ed Atkins has a new medium: the pandemic Post-it note. Ahead of a major Tate show, we meet the shapeshifting artist

When he was younger and his parents were out of the house, Ed Atkins used to sit on the landing and force himself to imagine all the ways they might die. “My thinking was that if I imagined it first, then it would be very unlikely to actually happen,” says the 42-year-old artist.

Atkins’ parents didn’t succumb to any of the ways he had invented. But during the final year of his master’s course, his father, Philip, was diagnosed with cancer and died six months later, during Atkins’ degree show, in 2009. “It’s a huge thing, obviously, losing your father,” says the artist. “And it started to feed into what I was reading and was interested in. His death, and death generally, is in all of my work.”

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical concepts

Why are you expected to be quiet in an art gallery? Thierry Dupond, Charente-Maritime, France

Send new questions to nq@theguardian.com.

The city’s tattoo studios are booming while the art world flounders. Under a new initiative, buyers receive exclusive rights to an artist’s new design, and the artist receives 50% of the profit

It may be the oldest art form in the world, practised 5,000 years ago by Ötzi the iceman and his fellow copper age Europeans. But with its more recent associations with red-light entertainment and gangland crime, modern tattooing has long been shunned by the galleries that turn lines on canvas into financial assets.

A new initiative in Berlin concedes that the tables have turned. With tattoo studios in the German capital booming but many artists struggling to make a living, the Works on Skin project specialises in selling works by established and emerging contemporary artists that are not to be hung on a wall but to be etched on the human body.

Ono was blamed for splitting the Beatles and taking John Lennon from his true calling. Let’s hope things are getting easier for women who date famous musicians

More than 50 years after John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1969 bed-in, protesting against war, Ono finally gets her love-in. David Sheff’s biography Yoko, published last week, seeks to put the record straight about her stellar achievements as an internationally renowned conceptual artist.

In recent years there have been retrospectives, including one at London’s Tate Modern. Kevin Macdonald’s docufilm, One To One: John And Yoko, is released in the UK next month. Ono, 92, is seeing reputational rehabilitation on a global scale, and all a long time coming.

After a $220m five-year renovation, the New York museum is set to showcase a trove of European masterpieces

Can masterpieces of European art help smooth over the fissures between the old world and the new? It’s a hope, say officials at the Frick Collection in New York, which reopens next month after a five-year, $220m (£170m) renovation.

Axel Rüger, the director of the museum, which began with a trove of European masterpieces including Rembrandt and Vermeer, hopes that its art could be a reminder of US-European ties in these turbulent political times.

Behind Antonio López Díaz’s image of the inspirational Achta Derib is a story of how small changes can transform lives

The wall behind her is pockmarked and worn. She’s barefoot against a hard, cracked floor. And yet Achta Derib’s pose in this photograph by Antonio López Díaz, a finalist in the professional sports category at the Sony world photography awards, suggests reserves of determination that will carry her across continents to perform at the highest levels of her sport.

For Díaz, who has been documenting her journey since 2019, Derib’s story “stands as a symbol of resilience”. She was one of hundreds of girls from Chad who joined a pioneering gymnastics class at a school outside the capital, N’Djamena. Set up in 2016 by a Chadian Jesuit priest and a Spanish club president, with support from Spain’s Ramón Grosso Foundation, the class was the first of its kind in the central African country, where nearly half the population lives below the poverty line. Chad lacked gymnastics facilities, and the idea of a girl becoming a professional athlete in a country where female social mobility is extremely limited – three in five women are married before the age of 18 – seemed fanciful.

The 2025 Sony world photography awards exhibition is at Somerset House, London from 17 April to 5 May

In his designs, William Morris combined his two greatest passions: the wonder of nature and a socialist belief that everyone should have access to art and beauty. His work has become almost too successful, reproduced on iPhone cases, shopping trolleys and AI-fabricated posters. A new exhibition at the William Morris Gallery brings together everyday items decorated with his patterns, including many featured in photographs sent to the gallery by members of the public. “We’ve been overwhelmed with the response and have everything from collapsible walking sticks to chopsticks, and all manner of mugs and crockery,” says the gallery’s director, Hadrian Garrard. “The sheer brilliance of his designs and the fact that he wanted people to observe and appreciate a perfect expression of nature is something that endures.”

• Morris Mania will be at the William Morris Gallery, London E17, from 5 April to 21 September

From Heston Blumenthal on the bipolar diagnosis that saved his life to FKA twigs and Charlotte Church on her retreat space in Wales: the best original photographs from the Observer commissioned in March 2025

The British photographer saw an echo of a famous painting when he shot three strangers in a Toronto gallery

While in Toronto on a work shoot, Martin James Burton decided to take the opportunity to visit the Art Gallery of Ontario. The photojournalist, who is based in Lewes, East Sussex, England, had some lunch before heading in to see the art. While there he happened upon these three strangers. “The people in the picture are sitting waiting either for nothing to happen or for something to happen. There is a feeling of the surreal to it and an odd sense of anticipation,” Burton says. “The man with his head turned towards you draws you in, and the huge bright, blank screen is like a giant softbox lighting the subjects perfectly.”

Burton remembers his excitement at taking the shot: he immediately knew that he had captured something unusual. He also saw a resemblance to the painting Nighthawks, by American artist Edward Hopper, which portrays four people in a downtown diner at night. “I’ve always thought that photography has its own individual place in art, but when a photograph resembles a particular painting or style, it may give it an extra kudos – particularly if it’s not preconceived,” he says.

Protests in Istanbul, Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, a devastating earthquake in Myanmar and wild horses in Galicia: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

• Warning: this gallery contains images that some readers may find distressing