From Shaolin wall-runners to caged birds and S&M clubs, these images have all inspired their own Granta magazine stories – and now is your chance to buy one

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British Museum, London
Michelangelo’s drawings were anything but dull, but this exhibition sucks out all the drama by focusing on his spirituality at the expense of his sexuality

Lord Elgin, you let us down. With all the masterpieces of world art that Britain’s rapacious collectors grabbed from hither and yon, couldn’t they have got their hands on a single statue by Michelangelo? No, the only original work in marble by the great sculptor, painter, architect and poet in a British collection is a circular relief owned by the Royal Academy. What we have instead are extensive holdings of his drawings in the British Museum and Royal Collection. Unfortunately, the BM’s hushed use of these works on paper to try to illuminate his later life shows what poor recompense they are.

The problem is disappointingly obvious from the start. After being moved by a portrait of the elderly, bearded, introspective Michelangelo by his most talented pupil, Daniele da Volterra, you’re plunged into his designs for The Last Judgment, painted on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel from 1536 to 41. Michelangelo was in his early 60s when he returned to the scene of his earlier triumph on its ceiling to create his cascading, tumbling vision of bodies rising to heaven and falling to hell against a deep blue. Here are his sketches of swarming muscular nudes, struggling and fighting – or embracing? – all desperate to join the ranks of blessed. Yet I couldn’t tear my eyes from a projection of the actual fresco, or stop wishing I was there with the real thing, in the Sistine Chapel.

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Michelangelo announced his love for a young upper-class gentleman in verse and prose, but he also gave Tommaso de’ Cavalieri some of the greatest homoerotic drawings ever created – now taking centre stage at the British Museum

Tommaso de’ Cavalieri was the light of the age, unique in the world – at least in the eyes of the man who loved him. That ardent lover was Michelangelo, who described Cavalieri in these glowing words in a letter from 1532. If only a portrait of Tommaso survived we could have seen his face, which the fiftysomething artist claimed in a poem was so beautiful it gave him a glimpse of paradise itself.

Michelangelo did not just announce his love for this young upper-class citizen of Rome – who knew the pope and prominent cardinals socially – in verse and prose. He also gave Cavalieri some of the greatest drawings ever created. Up until this time, the mighty sculptor, painter and architect had used drawing as a tool to develop ideas: but the so-called “Presentation Drawings” he did for Tommaso aspire to be completed works of art. They star in the British Museum’s new exhibition of Michelangelo’s later graphic works , and demand a close look, for these are perhaps the most sublime declarations of gay love in art.

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Taken over several years, the British photographer’s latest series shows her world narrowing as loss, and lockdown, strike

Lydia Goldblatt describes her book Fugue as a “story about mothering and losing a mother, intimacy and distance, told through photographs and writing”. It is a companion volume, in some ways, to an earlier project, Still Here , about the unsettled, intense landscape of love and loss generated by her father’s death. “The cultural silence around these emotions,” Goldblatt writes, by way of introduction, “the difficulty of navigating and giving voice to them, has made me want to suffuse them with colour and light.”

The pictures in Fugue were made over four years, beginning in 2020. The world of some of them is circumscribed by lockdown, life narrowing to the bubble of family. The photographer’s young daughters are insistently present in the pictures, climbing and clinging and needing notice. “Abundant” is her word for them. Her mother is already an absence; the words in the book chart not only her loss but also the responsibility of clearing and decanting her London home.

Fugue is published by Gost (£45) in June. An exhibition of the photographs, with Robert Morat Galerie, will be on display at Photo London 2024 , Somerset House, 16-19 May

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From a young Paul Kelly and bop dancing in the streets to legends like Ray Charles, music fan and photographer Brian Carr has spent 50 years documenting the notable and not so well-known musos who make up Melbourne’s vibrant live music scene. He has now published a book, Music City , from his extensive archive

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The celebrated US photographer’s haunting new series, documenting the locations where people have died in encounters with police, is a quietly devastating commemoration and a critique of modern American culture

In their monochrome starkness, Diana Matar’s images of modern America possess a melancholic undertow that is both familiar and unsettling. Whether a deserted backroad fringed with sun-burnished grass in rural Texas or a single-storey liquor store in a sprawling Californian suburb, there is the sense that these often nondescript places are not where locals tend to linger, never mind gather to mourn and to remember.

And yet the 110 photographs in her new book, My America , are of sites where civilians were killed by law enforcement officers across Texas, California, Oklahoma and New Mexico in 2015 and 2016. “I chose those four states because Texas and California are where most people die in encounters with law enforcement,” she says, “while Oklahoma and New Mexico have the highest per capita deaths. I would have liked to have photographed in other places like Chicago and Georgia, but I simply ran out of money.”

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“The act of hand weaving and dyeing cloth is extremely labour intensive – it can take months to make one piece,” says British artist Ptolemy Mann, who has been creating textile works of extraordinary colour and vibrancy for nearly 30 years. In 2021, after a period of experimenting with painting on paper, she turned her brush to her painstakingly dyed and handwoven cloths – the striking results can be seen in Mann’s first monograph, Thread Painting (published 9 May, Hurtwood Press) , and a solo show at Cromwell Place, London (15-19 May) . “There’s something radical about taking a precious handwoven cloth and applying a wet, loaded paint brush to its surface,” she says, noting that most traditional paintings are done on woven (albeit plain) canvases. “People are astounded that I am willing to take the risk. They love the madness of them.”

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Suggestion would give thousands of daily visitors a better experience if enacted, Laurence des Cars tells broadcaster

The Mona Lisa, the world’s most famous portrait, could get a room of its own in the Louvre, the museum’s president said.

Such a move would give visitors, many of whom visit the Louvre for the famous painting alone, a better experience, Laurence des Cars told the broadcaster France Inter.

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