What do museums think about climate protests?

Plus: The ghoulish genius of James Ensor

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Conrad Landin on how museums are dealing with climate protests

Visit a major gallery these days, and there may be more than meets the eye to some of your fellow spectators. In response to the climate protests that have rocked galleries and museums across the world, institutions have re-evaluated their security regimes – and the deployment of their staff. 'Most rooms in museums are invigilated by people who are concentrated on looking at the work,' says Robert Read, head of art and private clients at insurance provider Hiscox. 'But what museums are doing now is realising that they have to hire plain-clothes people who are wandering round galleries who are socially profiling those attending these exhibitions. [They're] looking at the people rather than at the work, to see who's walking in, how they're acting – does it look as though they're about to do something, can they prevent it?'

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Susan Moore on what makes James Ensor so modern

James Ensor has long been regarded as a maverick. Most celebrated – and rightly so – for his fantastical, often satirical images of the ghoulish and the grotesque, this 'master of the mask' has been cast as the consummate outsider. The notion was that this painter, draughtsman and etcher worked away alone and misunderstood in the garret above the family curiosity shop in Ostend, haunted by its contents. However, 'In Your Wildest Dreams: Ensor Beyond Impressionism' at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp (KMSKA) – resoundingly knocks the final nail into this coffin. Moreover, the diversity of the artist's work – once considered the reason for the difficulty in placing him within a movement or historical continuum – is revealed here to set him firmly in the context of the European avant-garde. Ensor, we learn, is less a slippery fish than a red herring.

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Nicola Beauman on Tirzah Garwood's quest to find time

Garwood's autobiography is important not just as a portrait of a group of artists in the interwar years, but also because it expresses her individuality and humanity as she chronicles the life of a woman struggling to lead an artistic life amid the constraints of childcare and housework. 'Before I had my children,' she writes, 'I tried as best I could to express my appreciation [for life] by pictures or marbling […] now I haven't time to do anything except look after the children, I can only scribble this.' In the words of Virginia Woolf, 'How any woman with a family ever put pen to paper I cannot fathom. Always the bell rings and the baker calls.'

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Imogen Tedbury on the animal instincts of Jacopo Bassano

In the state room of the Louvre hangs one of the most sensitive portraits painted in the Renaissance (and, no, I'm not talking about the Mona Lisa). Two Dogs Tied to a Tree Trunk (c. 1548–49) is the masterpiece of Jacopo Bassano, the least well known of the great 16th-century Venetian painters. Famed in his day for animal paintings and pastoral scenes, Bassano was credited with inventing the nocturne, decades before Caravaggio's tenebrism. After training in Venice with Bonifazio de' Pitati, he returned to his father's workshop in his hometown of Bassano (now Bassano del Grappa) on the mainland. Jacopo's four sons became painters; Francesco, Leandro and Gerolamo opened independent workshops in Venice while Giambattista took over the family business.

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Stephen Patience regrets the loss of London's finest interiors

London is all very well, as the old joke has it, but it will be nicer when they've finished building it. The capital is subject to a continual process of revision, towered over by cranes and echoing to the chatter of pneumatic drills and the inscrutable yells of builders as they put up office blocks and much-needed luxury flats. All of this, naturally, means there is much that has been lost along the way. And that is where Steven Brindle and the archivists of Historic England step in, with this sumptuously illustrated retrospective of interiors that, for various reasons, no longer exist.

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Matthew Kerr on the Maori artist remapping New Zealand's landscape

'Encountering Aotearoa' collects works made or begun during artist Cora-Allan's two-week journey by ship from the southern to the northern tip of Aotearoa (the Māori name for New Zealand, used by Cora-Allan, an artist of Māori and Niue descent). Focused on coastal sites visited by James Cook on HMS Endeavour in 1769, the exhibition invites visitors to rethink the relationship between Aotearoa and the sea, and between the landscape and the people who inhabit it. Yet rather than offering a settled or resolved vision, Cora-Allan's work dwells suggestively on the shifting, contested nature of that relationship.

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In the current issue…

Jeff Wall talks Craig Burnett through the complex process of making his large, tableau-like photographs

'I've always said that my aim was to make beautiful pictures. I hope it's clear that that means making them with the formal and technical qualities I've admired in the work of all the best artists I've admired and studied most of my life. I admit to having made quite a number of "downbeat" subjects. I can't really explain that aside from saying that many of those pictures, particularly in the 1980s and '90s, were set off by things I was seeing almost daily in the neighbourhood of my studio in Vancouver. It was – and still is – in a troubled area of the city and, since I simply await the accidental appearance of whatever theme or subject that might strike me, I found quite a lot to do in that vein for a while. There has to be some aspect of my personality that wanted to do that sort of thing, but I can't define it.'

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