In the summer of 1944, a camera was smuggled out of Auschwitz. Inside it was a roll of film with four images from the gas chambers at Birkenau, taken by members of the Jewish Sonderkommando. These photos were distributed worldwide by the Polish resistance. Two of them appear to have been taken in quick succession, discreetly, from within a shadowed doorframe. The other pair, one of which is blurred, appear to have been shot at the hip from a distance. The photos show Jewish women stripping before the gas chamber, and dead bodies waiting to be incinerated. White smoke billows as other bodies burn.

The main story everywhere this year was the coronavirus: how it disrupted or reshaped specific spheres of activity, or left parts of them largely unscathed. The art world witnessed dizzying combinations of these outcomes, which are still unfolding. One surprise was the almost instantaneous financial fragility of museums and the stalwartness of art galleries of all shapes and sizes. When the virus arrived, an especially strong art season had been underway.

An innovative selling exhibition explores the dialogue between a group of selected paintings by Claude Monet and Gerhard Richter. Working a century apart, Claude Monet and Gerhard Richter both redefined painting for their respective eras. The great French Impressionist, rejected by the conservative Académie des Beaux-Arts in the 1860s, sought to express his perceptions before nature as truly and immediately as possible. Thinking in terms of light, colour and shape rather than figurative form, he said, ‘I like to paint as a bird sings.’