Art World Explodes: From Political Murals to Feminist Rebels – This Week's Must-See Exhibitions

Exhibition of the Week

Wilhelm Sasnal: family/history The domestic meets the political in these unsettling new paintings of family life and global current affairs (including some greyed-out visions of the Oval Office) by Poland’s leading figurative artist.

Sadie Coles HQ, London, until 23 May

Also Showing

Joan Eardley: The Nature of Painting Scotland’s favourite rough, ultra-expressive mid-century painter gets paired with the likes of John Constable, Claude Monet and contemporaries such as Jean Dubuffet.

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, until 28 June

Tizta Berhanu: Love Is a Practice Soft, gentle, subtle group portraits all about interconnectedness and social closeness by this young Ethiopian painter.

Tiwani Contemporary, London, until 16 May

Guerrilla Girls The infamously rebellious feminist art collective bring their hypercritical takedowns of art world inequality to this modernist home in the East Sussex countryside.

Charleston, Lewes, until 6 September

Shane Keisuke Berkery: Shane, Come Back The debut London exhibition for this young Irish-Japanese painter is full of complex explorations of the slippery nature of identity.

Carl Kostyál, London, until 3 May

Image of the Week

Photograph: Rogue Oner/Gordon Baird/Art UK

Lola the Barras Pirate in Glasgow is just one of 6,700 street murals digitised by Art UK for its incredible digitised catalogue, including everything from medieval church wall paintings to photorealistic portraits of local heroes and a high-rise-stretching decorative motif by Poole Pottery. Katey Goodwin, Art UK’s deputy chief executive, said the charity far exceeded its target of finding 5,000 works, reflecting the explosion of murals in the UK. “It has gone from seeing a few murals here and there to them being everywhere,” she said.

What We Learned

• Adrian Searle stepped down after 30 years as the Guardian’s chief art critic
• Italian conceptual prankster Maurizio Cattelan wants you to confess all your sins.
• A priceless, stolen 2,500-year-old Romanian gold helmet has been found
• Generations of gay artists found themselves on Fire Island
• Thieves stole Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse paintings worth millions from an Italian museum
• Denby Pottery is calling in the administrators
• Dean Sameshima’s photos of ordinary buildings hide incredible tales of queer bacchanalia
• Veronica Ryan filled Whitechapel Gallery with sensational seeds and loads of old rubbish
• The National Museum of American History is telling stories of Filipino heritage
• We remembered church architect Desmond Williams

Masterpiece of the Week

Au Café, c1875-77, by Edgar Degas

Photograph: Andrew Norman/© The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.

The rose-tinted view of 19th-century Paris is that it was a place of energy and hope; a proto-modernist tech-topia where countless artistic and industrial revolutions were happening at once; a city lit by new electric streetlamps in a country bathing in the glow of a sun so bright and beautiful that artists flocked there just to try and capture its light. And then there’s impressionist Edgar Degas and this brutally miserable painting of the sickest looking woman in all of French art history. It’s called Au Café, but there are no signs of cutlery or tableware here, just a woman of the palest, greyest green, trying to make it through another day. Is it alcohol or disease? Are they working or recovering? Is that her friend or are they strangers? Just like in his other sickly cafe painting, L’Absinthe, Degas offers no answers here. This is a blurry, almost monochrome painting, and is probably unfinished, but it’s still amazing. It’s as if Degas spotted the truth of everyday Parisian existence through a window as he walked past, and knew that this was what life was really like. Not sunshine and industrial ambition, just the grim, grey plod of the daily grind.

Fitzwilliam museum, Cambridge

Jonathan Jones is away