The great Oxford clean-up

Plus: Peter Doig takes to the street

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Will Wiles looks for the ghosts of his past in Oxford

A few years ago, a series of ill omens emerged from my childhood home of Oxford. In 2019, the ancient and beautiful blossoming almond tree outside the University Church was felled when it became unsafe. The same year, the radio presenter, entrepreneur and local personality Bill Heine died. Heine's most remarkable contribution to the city was the 25-foot fibreglass shark, designed by sculptor John Buckley, that he inserted head-first into the roof of his Headington home; after his death, the shark was protected by the council, an uncomfortable fate for something erected in defiance of petty officialdom. And in 2020, Boswell's, the city's venerable department store, closed for the last time.

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Helen Stoilas on a new look for Japanese art at the MFA Boston

There are only a handful of museum spaces that can be truly described as meditative, offering visitors a quiet respite from the hustle of a busy institution, among historically important and aesthetically impressive objects. The Japanese Buddhist Temple Room at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is not only one of the best loved in the United States, it is one of the oldest, built as part of the museum's original Beaux Arts home on Huntington Avenue, which opened in 1909. Based on the designs of an 8th-century monastic complex in Hōryūji, the room's dark wooden columns and coffered ceiling create a warm but secluded surrounding, while open-work lanterns cast a hypnotic flicker above. You can sit in a thinly padded niche along one wall to take in the seven large-scale Buddhist sculptures installed on the opposite side and on either end of the room – or just be alone with your thoughts for a minute.

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Zachary Ginsberg on Peter Doig's pick of paintings with street cred

For an artist interested in capturing life 'hot off the griddle' (as the painter Alice Neel once put it), there are only so many places one can seek inspiration. Once friends and family have posed for you, you've used up your photos, and your imagination is failing, one of the only remaining reliable sources of raw spirit is the street. Sure, you can hire a model or draw on pictures from popular culture, but there's often something a bit contrived about the relationship between such subjects and the artist. To depict life as it comes naturally, unpasteurised, one must turn to the public domain. And now, to curate an exhibition on the subject, Gagosian Gallery in New York has handed over the reins to Peter Doig. The Scottish artist is best known for cinematic paintings of disquieting imaginary scenes, often set in remote, public places such as the forest or at sea, recalling his childhood in Canada. Still, he is no stranger to urban living, splitting his time between London and Port of Spain in Trinidad.

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Catherine Bennett on Corita Kent, the Pop art nun

Corita Kent may have lived a somewhat segregated life as a nun, but she was alert to the power and mass appeal of popular culture, cloaking her Christianity in the bold colours and flashy advertising style of the time. Her screenprint fish (1964) exemplifies this, juxtaposing the titular word with a scrawled, casual retelling of the biblical story of the miraculous catch of fish: 'Jesus was knee deep in fish/fish squished against his feet […] but I think jesus was too busy helping pull the nets on board to notice.' Religion is deformalised, made bright and happy. That's also why the setting of the exhibition, a former Cistercian college, works so well. The prints are a dense burst of neon and colour against the beige stone of the college's former sacristy – as incongruous as a nun making Pop art.

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Corinna Lotz on the art nouveau offshoot that transformed Munich

At one point in Frank Wedekind's play The Marquis of Keith (1901), set in 1899, the eponymous swindler describes Munich as 'an Arcadia and at the same time a Babylon'. His words sum up the contradictory nature of Jugendstil, the art movement that bloomed in the city and in Weimar and Darmstadt at the turn of the 20th century. Jugendstil was a variant of art nouveau, which was sweeping Europe and North America at the time; it took root in Munich in 1893 and lasted around 15 years, ushered in by a group of artists who sought to escape the constraints imposed by fusty professors in the state academies.

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In the current issue…

When it comes to dessert, asks Pen Vogler, what's in a name?

I am intrigued by the international appetite of the curators of the Kunstmuseum Den Haag's new exhibition. 'Grand Dessert – The History of the Dessert' (to give it its English title) promises gastronomy from around the world: Dutch vlaflip, baklava, charlotte russe, alongside a tour, 'from custard and ice-cream to delicious gateaux', of the globally familiar. Twenty years ago, I might have had a legitimate grumble that, although Britain has a world-beating record in this very subject, food history wasn't considered serious enough to bother a museum with. Today, however, many historic kitchens and dining rooms conjure the cook's world. But an imagined exhibition about the sweet end to dinner in Britain has another stumbling block: what would we even call it? In the very first meeting, marketing and outreach staff would insist on the internationally comprehensible 'dessert'; the curators might reply that a history of British puddings should use that uniquely British name.

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