Monumental works by the likes of Alexander Calder and Andy Goldsworthy draw huge crowds to the verdant landmark in New York’s Hudson Valley. Now these visitors can have a ‘restroom experience’ on a par with its spectacular sculptures

Unless they have been signed by a mischievous surrealist, it is not often that toilets qualify as works of art. But at the Storm King Art Center, an outdoor sculpture park that rolls across 200 edenic hectares of New York’s Hudson Valley, visitors are now treated to a sublime restroom experience worthy of the spectacular sculptures on show.

“It’s quite an upgrade from our porta-potties,” says Nora Lawrence, director of the centre, which has just reopened after a $53m (£39.7m) expansion. She is standing outside the new loos, housed in a sleek wooden pavilion that opens out on to the woodland landscape, framing views of the red maple swamp beyond. A new ticket office stands across a tree-lined “outdoor lobby”, while elegant lampposts line the route to an open-air welcome pavilion, sheltering lockers and phone charging points.

Storm King had none of these things before. Founded in 1960, on a ravaged landscape of gravel pits left by neighbouring highway construction, the sculpture park never had the facilities you would expect from such a popular visitor attraction, which draws crowds of 200,000 each year. Named after a local mountain, the art centre began as a small museum of local landscape paintings, housed in a 1930s Normandy-style chateau on a hill here in Mountainville, surrounded by 23 acres. Its founders, Ralph E Ogden, and his son-in-law, H Peter Stern, who co-ran the family business manufacturing steel bolts, soon acquired a taste for outsized sculpture, and, as a consequence, an appetite for more land. Their holdings eventually grew to include 800 hectares of the adjacent Schunnemunk mountain – which Ogden bought to preserve the woodland backdrop, then donated to become a state park.

Storm King now boasts one of the world’s greatest collections of outdoor sculpture, with more than 100 works by 20th-century greats, but it has always lacked electricity, piped water, and most of the other hallmarks of civilisation. Alexander Calder’s 17-metre tall The Arch stands in the middle of a meadow like some prized fowl, flaring out its curved black limbs with haughty pride. Mark di Suvero’s trio of colossal steel structures march across the hills, rising on the horizon like abandoned oil derricks, mineshaft headframes or rusting contraptions once used to sculpt the land. Isamu Noguchi’s 40-tonne granite peach nestles in a woodland clearing nearby, looking positively modest in comparison, while Andy Goldsworthy’s drystone wall winds its way for 700 metres between the trees. But in between admiring these wonders, visitors were treated to the delights of portable plastic toilets and crowded parking lots.

In true North American fashion, Storm King had a lot of asphalt. Swathes of parking and access roads sliced across the pristine meadows, and muscled into the foreground of the striking steel sculptures, undermining the intention of experiencing art against a backdrop of pure nature.

The Guardian’s picture editors select photographs from around the world

Exhibition will showcase her entire career, from French surrealism to fashion and war photography

The UK’s largest retrospective of the American photographer and photojournalist Lee Miller, who produced some of the most renowned images of the modern era, will take place at Tate Britain this autumn.

The exhibition will showcase the entirety of Miller’s career, from her participation in French surrealism to her fashion and war photography.

Show re-enacting ancient and unashamedly sexual rituals is most ambitious to date, says artist

Marina Abramović is an art world superstar well known for challenging visitors’ awkwardness at sex and nudity by, for example, asking them to squeeze through a doorway between a naked couple.

This year, she will take it to a new level in what she is calling the most ambitious work of her long career – an immersive erotic epic featuring performers re-enacting ancient and unashamedly sexual rituals.

Post on the pair’s Instagram page says ‘Eva returned to the future today’, having died at their home in Berlin after surgery on her spine

Eva, one half of the pioneering German performance art duo Eva & Adele, has died, her partner has announced.

“Eva returned to the future today,” a post on the pair’s Instagram page said on Wednesday. “She has left this world and stepped on to the eternal stage. Her faith in the power of art was never-ending.”

Hambling says she has been able to adapt to injury – and saw funny side when her plumber asked if her work was now half-price

Maggi Hambling’s morning routine involves making one drawing with her non-dominant left hand as soon as she gets up – a practice that has come in particularly useful lately, after having her little finger on her right hand amputated.

“On November the 17th, I fell down the stairs, and I had a glass in my hand. And it’s cut through the hand and cut through the little finger,” she told the audience at Charleston festival in East Sussex, holding up her four-fingered hand.

Before Blur became superstars, drummer Dave Rowntree was busy photographing them – on the tube, in Japanese taxis … and even on a big dipper

Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, London
Before he made a bigger splash, David Hockney was an angry, tempestuous student mashing together the styles of the big artists of his time

Years before he was a modern art megastar, long before the cool pop perfection that would make him one of the most popular painters of the past century, David Hockney was a student. Some of his early works from this period have been brought together at a small but perfectly formed exhibition, curated by Louis Kasmin, grandson of John Kasmin, the dealer who first spotted Hockney.

After leaving the Bradford School of Art, Hockney showed up at the RCA in 1959 ready to kick the art world’s doors in. But this is not the Hockney the world knows now. There is no simplicity, no calm. There are no cool, flat planes of bright colour. Rather, young Hockney was a frantic, angry, tempestuous thing.

Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton
The married sculptors made very different art – hers curvy and colourful, his rickety and angular – but it all hums with life when brought together

It is a bright and sunny day in Somerset, and out on the neatly mown lawn at Hauser & Wirth, Niki de Saint Phalle’s voluptuous Nanas (“girls”) are positively sparkling. There are three of them (a nod to Botticelli’s three graces): one silver, one black, one white, all made from polyester jazzed up with colourful mosaic and shimmering mirrors. She has captured them mid-twirl, arms tossed in the air like they just don’t care, legs kicked out at jaunty angles. They are joyful and radiant, monumental and robust, dancers and warriors.

Saint Phalle, a French American artist, began creating her abstract sculptures of women in the mid-60s, a decade after she first met the Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely in Paris. He was married and so was she but five years later, both divorced, they got together; by the time they were married in 1971 both were seeing other people. It was a complicated, sometimes competitive relationship – romantically and artistically – that saw them collaborate and support each other creatively until Tinguely’s death in 1991. Saint Phalle looked after his legacy until her own death in 2002. Now, on the centenary of his birth, a new exhibition is presenting their work side by side – at least once we get off the grass and into the gallery.

British Museum, London
A lovable elephant deity and a floating serpent goddess are just two of the highlights in this sensual show about three of the country’s great religions

About 2,000 years ago, Indian art went through a stunning transformation led, initially, by Buddhists. From being enigmatically abstract it became incredibly accomplished at portraying the human body – and soul.

You can see this happen in the bustling yet harmonious crowd of pilgrims and gift-givers you meet about a third of the way through this ethereal and sensual show. Two horses bearing courtiers or merchants are portrayed in perfect perspective, their rounded chests billowing, their bodies receding. Around them a crowd of travelling companions, on horseback and foot, are depicted with the same depth. Their bodies and faces are full of life, in a frenetic pageant, a bustling carnival, yet this human hubbub is composed with order and calm.

★★★★☆ / ★★★★★
The Hepworth Wakefield
Chadwick’s work ranges across media, from molten chocolate to tonsils and intestines, while Walker’s attentive paintings depict maternal pleasure and pain. Both offer startling insight into women’s lives

You’d be hard pressed to find a more alluring opening to a show than this: a bubbling pool consisting of 800kg of molten milk chocolate oozing seductively, filling the gallery with a sweet aroma and a soft, steady gurgling. On the walls brightly coloured, circular photographs of orchids, gerberas, sweet peas and chrysanthemums repeat the circular shape of the chocolate pool.

But for artist Helen Chadwick – whose Life Pleasures show at the Hepworth Wakefield is the largest retrospective of her work – pleasure is never that far from pain. It is not long before that thick, gloopy chocolate starts to smell sickly, the scent overwhelming the senses; the mechanism inside making the liquid bubble artificially. On closer inspection, the petals in the photographs are suspended in a variety of less pleasant liquids – industrial hand cleaner, window spray, washing up liquid – and the suggestive shapes of tonsils, testes and vaginas begin to emerge.

‘I spotted them in a town called Elkhart, jumped out of the car and ran towards them. If you didn’t know their story, you might think they were runners or cyclists. Then you see the tattoos’

My first trip photographing Americans was in 2015, when I drove 8,000 miles across the country on a Harley-Davidson. I’d spent too long caught up in assignments and wanted to take some time off from commercial and editorial work to follow my own creative urges. America offered an opportunity to explore a landscape I didn’t know, and was far enough away from my home in the Netherlands to ensure it wouldn’t be easy for me to just go back if things got difficult.

I think Europeans often don’t understand how tough life in America can be. I wanted to show real, underrepresented people who are just trying to survive, while also drawing attention to how rich their lives can be. At a time when people seem increasingly polarised in their views, my images seek to challenge the assumptions that often divide people, and to focus on the common experiences that connect us.

When Katherine Hubbard’s mother started suffering from profound memory loss she used her camera to help transform the pain of loss into an act of love

Ken Grant has photographed the south Wales valleys for three decades – capturing the rugged beauty, painful scars and wild ponies that make up the landscape

Sidewinder Ranch, a 40-acre property built over natural rock formations, comes with desert views and a bulldozer

Want to commune with nature? Bring the outside in? Ditch your white-noise machine for a babbling brook going through your living room?

A home that went on the market last month in Arizona offers all this and more. Sidewinder Ranch is a 40-acre hillside property built over natural rock formations. Every room is of geological interest, with a TV shelf perched on rock and boulders creeping to the foot of the bed. A fountain built inside has the feel of a mountain stream, and the property has stunning desert views. “Buy 40 acres but it might as well be 400,” read the listing.

Clichy-Batignolles, in the city’s north-west, is emblematic of the ‘15-minute’ city approach to urban planning

Cash-strapped council may seek to raise funds from ratepayers, state and federal governments, or road users to fix 85-year-old Story Bridge

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When the ribbon was cut on Brisbane’s Story Bridge on 6 July 1940, it was not an auspicious time to open a new bridge. Five days earlier, the infamous Tacoma Narrows Bridge had opened in Washington State.

In just four months that structure would make engineering history by dramatically swinging itself apart, a result of forces the engineering profession, at that time, did not understand.

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Graham Cook points to shared styles of thatching across England and Wales, and John Dilworth highlights two recent setbacks for violin-making

Your article on the sad decline in some British crafts
(Welsh thatching and ship figurehead carving added to UK crafts red list, 13 May) noted that “thatched roofs in Wales are becoming ‘more similar to English styles of thatch’. The Welsh style is different, with a rounder outside appearance.” There is in fact no such thing as “Welsh” thatching, or “English” come to that. In both the north and south of Wales, the craft has long shared styles with its English neighbours. Angular work in the north is also found in Lancashire and Cheshire, while rounded thatch in combed cereal straw in the very south is identical to that found in Somerset, Devon and Cornwall. This has been the case for at least two centuries.

The type of thatch seen in the photo published online with your article was common in south-west Wales, but the “rolled gable” feature can be still found from Northamptonshire to Dumfries. The original straw roping on these Welsh roofs was also seen in Ireland, along with the decorative “rope top” ridging, once widespread throughout Wales. In doing research for my website, thatchinginfo.com, I realised that the craft follows no political boundaries. The various traditional styles are essentially a combination of climate and material supply, perhaps combined with some very early folk movements.
Graham Cook
Milborne Port, Somerset

What is art? | Wordsearch | Labour membership | Dark matter | Change for the worse

Re your letters on art, or the question of what is art (19 March), I am reminded of two gallery visits. In one, a friend and I were looking at an “installation” in the foyer, involving canvas and a brush and pan, to discover they were workmen’s tools awaiting some repair work. In another gallery, in a large bare room with a stepladder at one end, my husband asked when the exhibition would be put up, only to be told that this was it.
Susan Treagus
Manchester

• Regarding the Wordsearch in Friday’s paper (14 March), did no one else notice “colors”? Has the Guardian been Trumped?
Christine Crawshaw
London

Down with expensive trophies at art fairs: it’s time to reclaim a more radical vision of creativity

Some of us will go to an art gallery this weekend. Maybe it will help us reflect or inspire us. Isn’t that part of a life well lived? And if you don’t go to a gallery, maybe you’ll find yourself lingering on a picture at home, reading a novel, going to the theatre or listening to music. But what if you didn’t? What if there were no galleries, theatres, publishers or concert halls? What if we got rid of art?

The impulse seems philistine at best, authoritarian at worst, yet a remarkable number of modern artists were seduced by it. André Breton, the leader of the surrealists, repeatedly called for the end of literature. Theo van Doesburg, the founder of the De Stijl movement, proclaimed that “art has poisoned our life”, while his friend and compatriot, Piet Mondrian, believed that if we did abolish art, no one would miss it. In December 1914, as the first world war entered its first winter, the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky declared that art was already dead. “It found itself in the backwater of life,” he wrote. “It was soft and could not defend itself.”

How to Be Avant-Garde by Morgan Falconer (Sotheby’s Institute of Art) (WW Norton & Co, £25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

He donned a skirt to shock his conservative countrymen – and got bundled into a police station for his own protection. As his work appears in the Royal Academy’s Brasil! Brasil! show, we celebrate a luminary of modernism

In 1931, as the Corpus Christi parade made its way through central São Paulo, the Catholic faithful found a tall man walking in the opposite direction. As he went, Flávio de Carvalho flirted with the men, and refused all calls for him to cease his disruption.

The Dada-inspired Experience N. 2, which ended with De Carvalho bundled into a police station for his own protection, was the first example of performance art in Brazil. Yet its instigator never achieved the international fame his artist peers did, perhaps because of his refusal to make work that chimed with trends. “The performances were very provocative and raised a lot of eyebrows in what was a very conservative Catholic country; he was also so restless, moving from art to architecture, to journalism. It was hard to place him,” says Adrian Locke, chief curator at the Royal Academy. “Abnormal art is the only good art,” De Carvalho himself countered.