UK: Miró, Van Gogh and Tate St Ives – the week in art

From The Guardian: Miró, Van Gogh and Tate St Ives – the week in art
Joan Miró
The art of Joan Miró is part of the history of abstraction, as well as a highlight of the surrealist movement to which he belonged. His early dream paintings have much in common with the contemporary abstract works of Arp, while late works offer a European answer to the freedom of Pollock and the American abstract expressionists. A truly important modern painter.
• At Tate Modern, London SE1, until 11 September

Ron Arad's Curtain Call
Artists including Mat Collishaw and Christian Marclay project films on a giant silicone curtain created by designer Arad in a multimedia summer spectacle at the venue legendary for its association with 1960s psychedelic lightshows.
• At Roundhouse, London NW1, until 29 August

Tate St Ives Summer Exhibition
There is a minimalist tone to some of the art in this year's eclectic summer show at the Cornish Tate by the sea, as the restrained and passionate works of Agnes Martin are juxtaposed with Martin Creed's gallery half-filled with balloons. Two excellent reasons to include modern art in your British beach holiday, and the surf is amazing, too.
• At Tate St Ives until 25 September

Twombly and Poussin
You can get a very good notion of why the late American painter mattered so much in this excellent selection of mostly smaller works by him. It also features Poussin's majestic Arcadian Shepherds. Eerily, some of Twombly's works are funereally displayed in the mausoleum built into this gallery, while a film by Tacita Dean offers a portrait of the artist near the end of his life.
• At Dulwich Picture Gallery, London SE21, until 25 September

Thomas Struth
Panoramic photographs of resonant, spectacular places, and unsettling juxapositions of modern people with historical cultural landmarks, make Struth a distinctly thought-provoking artist.
• At Whitechapel Gallery, London E1, until 16 September

Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers, 1888
Sometimes this painting fills you with happiness. At other times, if the light on it is a little less bright, it can appear desperately melancholy. It is a modern version of religious art: where a medieval street corner might display a statue of the Virgin Mary to console people in their everyday lives, Vincent's flowers, in a faithless age, find hints of spiritual meaning in nature and offers evidence of earth's beauty to strengthen the soul. And yet the unease shows through.
• At National Gallery, London WC2

Giovanni Bellini, The Agony in the Garden, c1465
Bellini's rosy-fingered dawn creeping over a north Italian hillside, brightly illuminating a little town whose people are still asleep, is one of the most beautiful homages to the sun ever painted. Earth's star has not yet appeared in the sky, but the pink fiery promise of its coming that spreads through sharp blue is a miracle of natural observation.
• At National Gallery, London WC2

John Michael Rysbrack, Sunna, about 1728 -1730
Statues of Greek and Roman gods and heroes were the convention in 18th-century landscaped gardens, but Lord Cobham decided to be different in his garden at Stowe. He commissioned Rysbrack to carve marble figures of the pagan Saxon gods, a savage English pantheon. This deity with flaming hair hewn from stone is Sunna, the Saxon god of the sun, as imagined by 18th-century antiquarians.
• At V&A, London SW7

Sculptures from east pediment of the Parthenon, about 438-432BC
The wine god Dionysus reclines to watch the rising of the sun's chariot in the mythological representation of day and night that ancient Athenian sculptors carved on their city's greatest temple. Colossal marble figures of gods, fragmentary but overwhelmingly powerful, convey the titanic authority of Greek myth. While the sun chariot rises on the left side of the group, at the right of the scene one of the horses of the moon goddess rolls its eye.
• At British Museum, London WC1

Maeshowe, about 2700BC
Visitors to the Orkneys in summer are there at the wrong time of the year to see the winter solstice light penetrate this cairned chamber. But at any time of the year it is a fascinating testimony to ancient humanity's adoration of the sun. Just like ancient Egyptians and Aztecs, the neolithic builders of this camera-like stone structure aligned their architecture, and presumably their lives, to the cycles of the sun.
• At Stenness, Orkney Mainland