How Frank Auerbach remade London

Plus: The wizard who painted the world of Oz

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Digby Warde-Aldam on Frank Auerbach's visions of London

'[There is] a sort of magic in conjuring up a real place,' Auerbach told Richard Cork in 1983. 'A record of it that is somewhere between one's feeling about the facts and the appearance. Well, more than appearance – substance.' Take any suite of his views of a particular location, from any decade, and you start to see how masterfully he navigated these straits and the tension between 'objective' record and subjective perception. His Primrose Hill pictures, for instance, are recognisable as such solely on account of the spindly, twig-like stroke he deployed as a stand-in for the distant Post Office Tower. Yet a random selection, swayed by personal preference, might take in Primrose Hill: Spring Sunshine (1961–64); Primrose Hill (1967–68), a late summer storm of a painting carved up by jagged bolts of blue, red and black; and the Barber Institute's impressionistic Primrose Hill – Winter (1981–82) – the last perhaps my own favourite. Having looked at any of these, a visit to the park will never again be just a simple stroll with a nice view.

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Lucy Ellmann on an eerily realistic painting of a cat behind bars

One of our species' happier traits is that some of us can paint, and occasionally we're even funny. The exactitude of American artist De Scott Evans's tongue-in-cheek portrait of an imprisoned cat matches the style he used in many playful trompe l'oeil still lifes. He liked to paint apples, pears or potatoes hanging on strings, but it's his life-size offerings of almonds or peanuts that are most endearing. In one painting, casually held in place between a cracked pane of dusty glass and the back of a beat-up old picture frame, a handful of nuts entreats the passerby. These neighbourly freebies are so realistic, the temptation is great to obey the little note, written in a refined hand and tucked under the edge of the fictitious glass: 'A New Variety Try One'. It looks like something you might have found a hundred years ago, nailed to a post outside a large Midwestern house. It's always nice to be offered free stuff.

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Pamela Hutchinson on the Scottish artist who brought Oz to life

If you're watching Wicked this weekend, starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo as student witches Glinda and Elphaba, you'll be stepping into a familiar, if fantastic, scene. The movie adaptation of the hit stage musical is a prequel of sorts to The Wizard of Oz (1939), drawing on that movie's Technicolour world to tell a story that unfolded long before Dorothy set her ruby-clad foot on the Yellow Brick Road. This is hallowed cinematic ground. The classic film was no picnic to make: there was a revolving door of writers and directors, a giant cast – including scores of actors dressed as Munchkins – and a budget approaching $3m (around $68m today). But once seen, the gleaming heights of the Emerald City – the sheer scale and intense hues of Oz – are never forgotten. Watching the film is like walking into a work of art. The man who painted Oz was a Scottish artist named George Gibson (1904–2001). At the time, he received no credit for his work on the film, but his designs define some of Hollywood's most beautiful movies.

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Apollo's round-up of the most important recent museum acquisitions

In a transformative donation, the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, has received a gift from the Aso O. Tavitian Foundation of 331 works of art, as well as more than $45m to fund the construction of a new museum wing and a new curator in early modern European painting and sculpture. The art comes from the personal collection of Aso Tavitian (1940–2020), a Bulgarian-born businessman and philanthropist who made his fortune in the software industry and was an avid art collector, amassing some 1,200 works. The donation includes an exceptional collection of Old Master paintings by artists including Watteau, Rubens, Van Eyck, Angelica Kauffman and Jacques-Louis David, as well as sculptures by Bernini, François Du Quesnoy and others.

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Mary Wellesley on the intensely felt art of Elisabeth Frink

Elisabeth Frink said that her sculptures are 'about what a human being or animal feels like, not what they necessarily look like'. This quotation appears on the wall of a new exhibition of her work in the Weston Gallery of Yorkshire Sculpture Park. In the centre of the room are four monumental heads that dominate the space, but when I visited my eye was drawn to a small cluster of her earlier works from the 1950s and '60s. These are tortured, desiccated forms, seemingly in a state of decay. They have an anthropomorphic quality – Vulture (c. 1952), for instance, is hunched and human-like, while Cat (1953) is an unsettling work; the body of the cat is contorted as if in pain, its face is arrestingly half-human, with enlarged, open eyes and an unfeline mouth like a letterbox. If Frink's work is about what it feels like to be one of these creatures, we can only wonder what torment they have suffered.

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Jonathan Griffin on the fantastic light machines of Thomas Wilfred

Between 1964 and 1981, visitors to New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) could sit in a darkened room and contemplate opalescent wisps of colour drifting slowly across a screen. The installation, tucked in the museum's basement, was a favourite among regulars. At times, the screen – eight feet wide and six high – was filled with diaphanous skeins of pale yellow, green, blue or pink, while at other times the light dwindled, letting most of the picture fall into darkness. It was mesmeric, unlike anything else in the museum. Unlike, probably, anything yet made in the history of humankind. The installation was by a little-known artist called Thomas Wilfred, and had been commissioned by MoMA to inaugurate Philip Johnson's newly designed east wing – a considerable honour.

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