Speak and Bacon To Doig: this week’s best UK exhibitions

The Serpentine celebrates conceptual artist John Latham, while the panache of modern British art is revealed through the likes of Freud and Hockney

The Wall Street crash cast a long shadow on the American imagination. In the 1930s, Walker Evans photographed the faces of poverty and Grant Wood painted images of a spartan American identity. Younger artists were saved from starvation by Roosevelt’s ambitious social programme and widespread commissioning of public art. Jackson Pollock and his generation would be inspired by these public murals to paint abstractions on a grand scale. This should be a fascinating insight into the difficult birth of modern American art.
Royal Academy, W1, 25 February to 4 June

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