A Long Shadow: Postwar Japan Through the Lens will be the first show of Japanese photography in more than three decades at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibit brings together 15 intergenerational artists as well as photographic prints, including more than 25 books and magazines and a video installation, all combining to show how photographers in Japan documented the country in the decades after the second world war. The exhibition runs until 2 May 2027

Her witty photos served as a rebuttal to 80s misogyny and Thatcherite conservatism. Now 50 years on, the photographer is receiving an overdue retrospective. ‘I loved that we could respond with humour,’ she says.

If it were a lady it would get its bottom pinched. If this lady was a car she’d run you down.” These are the words that Jill Posener immortalised in November 1979, when she picked her way through traffic on London’s Farringdon Road to photograph something most would have overlooked: a graffitied billboard. The first sentence was there by design – a sexist attempt at wit intended to promote a new Fiat. The second she has since been repeatedly accused of adding herself.

In reality, the image-maker, playwright and nonprofit founder explains from her home in California, the now infamous phrase had been daubed by two women working at the nearby offices of the socialist newspaper Morning Star. “They had seen the billboard go up and were so incensed that they came up with this solution,” Posener recalls. “They didn’t think anything of it until they saw the postcard. I sent them a whole bunch and we all had a good laugh.”

Once thought to have been looted by Scottish tribes, the gilded limb is the centrepiece of a new exhibition on Roman Scotland in Edinburgh

A large bronze leg found in a bog in rural Scotland more than 200 years ago and then hidden away in a duke’s storeroom is helping to rewrite the history of the Roman empire.

Antiquarians argued that the so-called Milsington leg had been looted, perhaps from York, hacked off by marauding Scottish tribes and carried north over Hadrian’s Wall. “We cannot visualise the conditions which would have led to its erection anywhere north of the Great Wall,” said one scholar, James Curle, in 1932.

A new book, With Wittgenstein in a Gay Sauna, reveals the deep-rooted queer subcultures in cities from Budapest to Prague – defying regional stereotypes and inspiring an art exhibition on masculinity

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that our understanding of reality is fundamentally bound by and shaped by the language we use to talk about it. But there is one place where the Vienna-born thinker’s argument ceases to make sense. “Gay saunas are spaces where language dies,” says Vratislav Maňák, a Czech writer and literary scholar.

With Wittgenstein in a Gay Sauna, a book that made a major splash when it was published in Czech and German earlier this year, Maňák fictionalises Wittgenstein, who had romantic relations with both men and women, entering a Viennese Herrensauna called Kaiserbründl, hailed in newspapers at the time as “the most stylish bathing establishment in the world”.

Günther Kieser is behind some of the most singular music poster designs of the 20th century. Inspired by sculpture, the free-form nature of jazz and psychedelic art, the German artist created works for David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix and Diana Ross and the Supremes, as well as mind-expanding designs for leading brands and art institutions. The exhibition Sculpting Sound: Günther Kieser’s Music Posters at New York’s Poster House museum showcases his decades-spanning work and runs from 12 November to 11 April 2027. The show is accompanied by the first-ever English-language book on Kieser

Tate Britain, London
Trying to present these two as pioneers of British art is fruitless: their lives, sexualities and the Picasso and Cézanne paintings in their home were more exciting than what’s here

The Bloomsbury Group once induced yawns as the smug epitome of a snobbish high culture but they’re now admired for their feminism and queer abandon. There’s a West End play about the loves of the Bloomsbury economist John Maynard Keynes and if you visit the National Trust’s Sissinghurst, its flowerbeds are set alight by Vita Sackville-West’s affair with Virginia Woolf.

But biography can’t set art alight, as Tate Britain’s epic yet flaccid roam through the complicated lives and desperately mediocre paintings of the co-habiting Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant proves. While Keynes was quite the economist and Woolf a literary genius, I honestly can’t see enough interest in the visual art of Bloomsbury to detain anyone for long. That was true when their sex lives were spoken of in a more muted way (I read a biography of Keynes as a student and don’t remember any hanky-panky at all) and it’s true now, even as we trawl their paintings for gay and feminist meanings.

From the Specials and the Beat to Paul Weller and Sade, Janette Beckman’s glorious black and white photographs perfectly captured British music in the late 1970s and early 1980s

He thinks painting is futile, the YBAs were an embarrassment, and most artists today might as well be working in carpet shops. So why is his new show full of, er, paintings? We meet the confounding British artist

‘This is so bad isn’t it?” says Ryan Gander, grinning like a naughty schoolboy. “People are going to hate me when you write this up.” The 50-year-old conceptual artist has just finished telling me why, not only does he dislike drawing or painting, he finds the very act “futile and dumb”. He explains: “Copying reality with a pencil and paper just seems completely mad to me. It’s such a weird act. Why would I draw you when I could just take a photograph?”

Gander has many such opinions, from how we measure the value of work to why 90s Brit art was a load of nonsense (more on that later). He also has a superb way of communicating that makes whatever he says seem like the most obvious thing in the world. After an entertaining couple of hours in his company, I leave thinking: “It’s not Gander who’s mad – it’s everyone else.”

Swap doomscrolling for treasured scrolls, human bodies in all their variety and love triangles in Bloomsbury squares – all in your weekly dispatch

Constantinople to Istanbul: One City, Two Empires
From the tulips and silks of the Ottoman court, back in time to the Emperor Constantine’s palace, this is a sumptuous and haunting mystery tour.
• V&A South Kensington, London, 7 November to 9 May

A new Washington DC exhibition aims to show how African Americans have used portrait photography to depict themselves, their communities, their aspirations and their identities. Titled Remember Me: Picturing African Americans in Early Photography, the exhibit at the National Gallery of Art features 70 works from the museum’s archives by African American photographers and portrait subjects, tracing the evolution of photography in Black communities. The show opens on 7 November and runs until 14 March 2027

From women floating across the shore to magical patches of Irish land, this year’s exhibitions are full of fantastic yet confounding photography

From steamy bathhouses to altars to Sol the sun god and leather shoes that still survive to this day, an eye-opening new exhibition chronicles Scotland under the Romans (before they fled)

Inveresk is a handsome village near Edinburgh that sits above a curve of the little river Esk, not far from the mighty Firth of Forth. It is full of elegant 18th-century houses and an attractive kirk, dated 1805. To the casual observer, there is absolutely nothing Roman about it.

And yet, in 2010, when the local cricket pavilion was being rebuilt, an extraordinary find was made – two altars made of local sandstone, lying on their sides, evidently deliberately buried in the Roman era, dedicated to the gods Mithras and Sol. They had been made in the 140s CE as part of a mithraeum, a temple devoted to the worship of Mithras, a cult dependent on secret ritual and complex initiation ceremonies, much beloved by the Roman military. Carved from sandstone quarried nearby, the altars were impressive in scale and finely made, although terribly fragile.

A show of smart forgeries by Sturtevant will test your critical eye. Elsewhere, there’s a chance to dissect America’s cultural corpse and enter a terrifying immersive painting of Mexico

Cady Noland’s US is a violent, celebrity obsessed, consumerist police state. In this small show of big, stark, awkwardly cropped and blurry black and white images and minimal sculptures, the influential American iconoclast is dissecting her country’s cultural detritus, and leaving its splayed corpse on display.

Dreyfus affair has echoes of how anti-Jewish hatred manifests itself today, say curators at Wiener Library

It was the world’s first experience of antisemitism “gone viral”, said Barbara Warnock, a co-director of the oldest Holocaust archive, the Wiener Holocaust Library in London.

It was 1894 and printing presses were faster than ever before. France’s prohibitive censorship laws had been lifted, and then along came the Dreyfus affair: a public shouting match that followed the wrongful conviction for treason of Alfred Dreyfus, a 36-year-old French army captain.

Dashing cowboys, a transgender storm chaser and a fetching mullet are among the subjects of these acclaimed photographs for the Winston Taylor Photo Portrait Prize 2026

V&A, London
Treasures from the two world-defining cultures that somehow coexisted in one mighty city keep on dazzling in this gorgeous, unmissable show

Two empires compete to bewitch you in this exhibition that offers a double bubble of beauty. It collides the Byzantine empire, whose capital Constantinople was officially inaugurated on 11 May AD330, with the Ottoman Turks who conquered this great city in 1453 and turned it into Istanbul. The combined glories of two lost worlds – the Ottoman empire was dissolved in 1922 – beget an utterly enrapturing blockbuster. I lost all track of time in this dream city of gold and ivory.

Even the human form is magically transfigured here into mineral and metal. The martyred abbess St Eudokia becomes a Byzantine icon of marble inlaid with coloured glass, wearing a crown of precious stones and an exquisite dress patterned with diamonds and decorated with pearls and emeralds. It is a masterpiece of abstract splendour that looks like a Klimt painting, but this icon can’t have influenced him because it wasn’t excavated until 1929.

From Virginia Woolf’s horrifying views on eugenics to James Strachey’s seminal translations of Freud, the Bloomsbury set didn’t only experience mental illness, they shaped how society thinks about it

‘As an experience,” Virginia Woolf wrote in 1930, “madness is terrific and not to be sniffed at … In its lava, I still find most of the things I write about.”

Woolf’s 1941 suicide by drowning in the River Ouse, her pockets weighted with stones, is usually framed as evidence of her tortured genius. But a new exhibition at Charleston in Lewes radically excavates this narrative while challenging ideas about mental illness.

Nicolas Rachline’s stunning book Elsebound is full of painterly photographs inspired by Edward Hopper and Blade Runner. He explains his uniquely haunting style

William Morris and the gang collaborate in Cambridge, artists celebrate at Stromness harbour and Halloween haunts Derry – all in your weekly dispatch

A Call to Art
If you feel you need to see another exhibition about William Morris and the pre-Raphaelites, get yourself to Cambridge for this exploration of late Victorian art and politics.
• Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, until 3 May

Exhibition at the Cameron Art Museum in North Carolina centers the work of artist Jonathan Green, tying together contemporary art and Gullah heritage

In Time to Rejoice, a 2005 oil on canvas painting by artist Jonathan Green, nine women, each dressed in vibrantly colored shirts and skirts, with wide-brimmed hats obscuring their faces, gather in a clearing. They’re facing one woman who dances in the center, her arms outstretched, seemingly in ecstasy, a leg towards the sky. Her hat hovers off her head; only her face is visible, though, with her eyes closed, she doesn’t gaze at the viewer. It is an intimate scene, perhaps of sisters, friends or comrades.

The painting evokes a moment from Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, in which Baby Suggs offers freedom and peace to formerly enslaved people who are gathered with her in a clearing: “In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it … And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them … and all your inside parts that they’d just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver – love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too.”