Sickert at Tate Britain

'Taste is the death of a painter' - Walter Richard Sickert, 1908


This week Tate Britain officially reopened its doors after a two-year renovation; it celebrates this weekend with a 'house-warming party'. The new rehang, sponsored by BP, arranges 500 years of British art chronologically, throwing up a number of juxtapositions and surprises.

If you want to trace the work of one artist through the BP Walk through British Art, you could do worse than follow the career of Walter Sickert. The German-born artist first appears halfway round Tate Britain's west wing in the room dedicated to the 1840s - Café des Tribunaux, Dieppe (c1890) - and continues to the front of the east wing: Miss Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies as Isabella of France (1932).

The theatre crops up in early, Impressionistic, Minnie Cunningham at the Old Bedford (1892), though his fascination is given an unsettling, haunting twist in Brighton Pierrots (1915). In between, La Hollandaise (c1906) perhaps represents the peak of his Camden Town nudes.

Unfortunately, there's no room for Ennui (c1914), and I'd love to see his 1935 portraits of the Martin family, but on the way are Sickert's contemporaries: the Camden Town and Bloomsbury groups, Augustus John and his associates, and the Vorticists. Following Dulwich Picture Gallery's recent exhibition, 'A Crisis of Brilliance', the work of a group of Slade artists from a century ago shines especially brightly: David Bomberg (The Mud Bath, 1914), Stanley Spencer (Swan Upping at Cookham, 1915-19), CRW Nevinson (La Mitrailleuse, 1915), Paul Nash (Dead Sea, 1940-1) and Mark Gertler's wonderful Merry-Go-Round (1916).

Milady at the National Portrait Gallery

Last summer, London's National Portrait Gallery bought its first painting of a man in women's clothes. The painting shows Chevalier d'Eon, Louis XV's secret envoy to Russia and England, dressed as a woman. Accused by his enemies of being a hermaphrodite, he may have served as inspiration for the character of Lady de Winter in The Three Musketeers.

In his coy introduction to his translation of Alexandre Dumas' classic, Lord Sudley tackles the mystery of Milady, "who is referred to by all the men as 'the vampire', the 'creature from Hell', the 'monster', the 'woman who is not a woman'..." It is perhaps this last nomenclature that is the most telling.

"All men who come her way are first fascinated and then repelled by her, and in the end the terror she inspires in them is, as it were, the terror of the supernatural." Branded with the fleur-de-lis for a youthful crime, "Only her husbands (she had two) and her lovers find out her 'secret', and for that, she declares they must die... Might not Dumas, in creating such a character, have intended to convey that Milady had that particular form of physical malformation which was regarded even in the 16th and 17th centuries as a terrifying token of divine displeasure, punishable by death - a malformation of which the fleur-de-lis was merely a symbol?"

Outsiders' London

Tate Britain's 'Another London' comes to an end this weekend. Subtitled 'International photographers capture city life 1930-1980', the show is a roll call of refugees fleeing the Nazis pre-World War II: Ellen Auerbach, Dorothy Bohm, Hans Casparius, Herbert List, Felix H Man...

Prime among them is Bill Brandt, born in Munich, and moved to London in 1933. The handful of his works chosen here, from the Eric and Louise Franck London Collection, are symptomatic of the exhibition as a whole: they're all exterior shots.

As if to underline the outsider status of these emigrés and visitors, the vast majority of the photos show familiar landmarks and everyday characters but rarely scratch beneath the city's surface. James Barnor's 'Mike Eghan at Piccadilly Circus, London' (c1967) is typical, and full of incidental information (posters in the background advertise Doctor Zhivago, Michael Caine in Funeral in Berlin and Lionel Bart's Oliver!, 'London's longest running musical'), although there is no explanation of who Mike Eghan is, unless I missed it.

Ghanaian Barnor (Eghan is a compatriot broadcaster) has one of the few indoor shots on show - 'Flamingo cover girl Sarah with friend, London' (c1965) - and how atmospheric it is: we all know these stairwells of shared accommodation. Eve Arnold goes one step further and invades the bathroom for 'One of four girls who share a flat in Knightsbridge' (1961). Along with Willy Ronis' 1955 interior of a barely changed French House, these are the exhibition's best images.

I've always been troubled by Bill Brandt's latent sadism, but how I longed for one of his nudes - 'The Policeman's Daughter, Hampstead' (1945), say, or 'Eaton Place Nude' (1951). The Eaton Place images are unforgettable to anyone who has ever visited any of the central London townhouses, while the former hints at the perversions perpetrated behind our close doors.

And if not these, why not his 'Late night coffee stall' (1939), 'Alice at the Crooked Billet' (1939), 'Young woman at Charlie Brown's' (1946) or Brandt's 1941 portrait of Dylan Thomas in the Salisbury pub. In his work, perhaps more than in any of the images on show, the German was someone who never lost his outsider's eye, but was part of British life, exactly as he wanted.

Snapping up the Munch bunch

Almost 20 years after the last major Edvard Munch retrospective in London - at the National Gallery - the Norwegian artist is being celebrated at Tate Modern until 14 October. The National Gallery show was based on the Frieze of Life series and the Tate exhibition also emphasises the cycles in Munch's work, more successfully than for Gerhard Richter in its recent blockbuster.

The emphasis does shift between the National Gallery and Tate shows, and not just because the former included a version of The Scream - notably from the figure of Tulla Larsen, with whom Munch had a relationship from 1899 to 1902, to Rosa Meissner, a model who came from Berlin in 1907, along with her sister, Olga. And while the exhibition at the National Gallery was preoccupied with an incident in which Munch accidentally shot himself after an argument with Tulla (presumably the source of the X-ray of a bullet in Munch's hand, which goes unexplained at the Tate), the Tate survey concentrates on an incident at a party when the artist threatened to shoot a younger artist, Ludvig Karsten.

While the National Gallery catalogue contains contemporary photographs of Munch's exhibitions, the Tate makes much more of the artist's photographs, in line with the current vogue. The main exhibit could be said to be a photograph of Rosa Meissner naked in a room, which inspired the series Weeping Woman. (Interested in auras and spiritualism - as well as blurs and odd angles - Munch creates a spooky shadow in the photo, reminiscent of Francesca Woodman's self-portraits, although the spectre is Rosa's sister, Olga.)

'Edvard Munch belongs to a generation of artists - that of Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Félix Vallotton... and others - all born around 1860, who achieved their first stylistic maturity in the final two decades of the nineteenth century, at the time of the great boom in amateur photography,' writes Clément Chéroux in the Tate catalogue. This overlaps with a recent exhibition, 'Snapshot: Painters and Photography, Bonnard to Vuillard', whose companion published by Easton is well worth snapping up, however: 'What fundamentally distinguishes Munch from the other painters who practised photography at the same time is the quantity of self-portraits he produced.'

Many of them are included in this exhibition; they form a sort of autobiography. While he painted himself with deliberation in such wonderful works as Between the Clock and the Bed (1940-3) - one of my favourite self-portraits of any artist - in these snaps he seems to have been looking for answers to questions he didn't know how to pose.

Though the National Gallery may have presented visitors with the broader survey of Munch's work, this great show at Tate Modern has touches of Paul Gauguin, 'who Munch considered to be the greatest artist of his time' (Arne Eggum in the Tate catalogue) - see Red Virginia Creeper (1898-1900) - and Vallotton (check out the shapes in The Kiss, 1897, or the figures in the doorway of Jealousy, 1907, inspired by Munch's unhappy relationship with Tulla Larsen). His influence can even be found, more recently, in the work of another wonderful storyteller: Peter Doig - compare Ashes and Summer Night's Dream: The Voice with Doig's Echo Lake (1998) and 100 Years Ago (Carrera), 2001.

Portraits of the artists

Michel Houellebecq's latest novel, The Map and the Territory - recently out in paperback - is a neat spin on that favourite of novelists, filmmakers and, indeed, artists: a portrait of the artist. Houellebecq's work, which varies wildly in tone (translator Gavin Boyd is masochistically faithful to the original French), has an artist invade the life of a reclusive writer - Houellebecq himself.

The author is gloriously unflattering about his subject. The 'author of Platform' - the book apes the language of Wikipedia or even technical manuals - is discovered as a reticent recluse, gasping for a drink, spouting non-sequiturs. 'He stank a little, but less than a corpse...' '"I've relapsed,"' he tells his visitor, '"I've completely relapsed into charcuterie."'

It made me return to one of my favourite pen portraits of an artist: W Somerset Maugham's fictional take on the life of Paul Gauguin, The Moon and Sixpence (1919). Maugham's novel is just as reflexive as The Map... as it is told by another writer, an acquaintance of the subject, Charles Strickland (the fictive Gauguin).

Maugham reflects on the narrator's early days as a writer in a manner that seems little changed: 'Then it was a distinction to be under forty, but now to be more than twenty-five is absurd.' Although the venues may have returned to type: 'Chelsea and Bloomsbury have taken the place of Hampstead, Notting Hill Gate, and High Street, Kensington.'

Nor is Maugham any less sharp than Houellebecq: 'Mrs Strickland had the gift of sympathy. It is a charming faculty, but one often abused by those who are conscious of its possession: for there is something ghoulish in the avidity with which they will pounce upon the misfortune of their friends so that they may exercise their dexterity. It gushes forth like an oil-well... There are bosoms on which so many tears have been shed that I cannot bedew them with mine.'

And, later: 'I had not yet learnt how contradictory human nature is; I did not know how much pose there is in the sincere, how much baseness in the noble, or how much goodness in the reprobate.'

W Somerset Maugham's 1928 play The Sacred Flame is at the Rose Theatre in Kingston, 13-22 September.

Miroslav Tichy and the ongoing impulse

There's a section towards the end of Jonathan Dee's 2010 novel The Privileges that reads like a bad Paul Auster extract (and there's enough of that about). A character, Jonas, goes on the hunt for outsider art: 'The rule of thumb seemed to be that the further a particular artist's own mind had pushed him toward society's border, the more you could charge for his work. It was revolting and thrilling at the same time.'

With the help of an expert, Jonas tries to separate the real deal from fraudsters: '...outsider art is overrun by thieves and hacks and opportunists and corrupters... The difference here is that the artists themselves can't be corrupted by it.' He's advised a good test is to meet the artist and, in this case, the artist turns out to be a true wacko, someone with a 'total absence of self-consciousness'.

It's a definition that could apply to Czech photographer Miroslav Tichy, who died last year aged 85. A student of the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague he suffered first when the communists came to power in 1948 and then, in 1957, when he had a mental breakdown.

He moved back to his hometown, Kyjov, and began taking pictures using homemade cameras. I'll leave it to a biography for the Wilkinson gallery, which hosted an exhibition of his work soon after his death, to take up the story: 'He mainly photographed the local women; the curvaceous contours of a body in motion, captured moments of sartorial revelation, smooth calves truncating from underneath full skirts... He worked with a homemade camera that he fashioned from used materials, such as shoeboxes, rubber bands and tin cans, complete with makeshift telephoto lenses, polished with toothpaste and ashes.'

'He honoured women in bikinis' according to the gallery or, as writer Geoff Dyer has it: 'he spent the 1960s and '70s perving around Kyjov.' The local swimming pool was a favourite haunt - from the outside of the mesh fence - or, if not that, a line of bras hanging to dry would do.

There's something of Victorian artist Edward Linley Sambourne here, who would hang around in Kensington taking pictures of schoolgirls using a camera that took pictures at a right angle to the direction in which it was pointed. Dyer links Tichy's pictures with an unrequited summer of longing in Paris, images that are no doubt conjured again in these hot days. The oddest part of Tichy's pictures is that there's something nostalgic about his unguarded moments, of unlikely hairstyles and retro costumes.

Like the artist in Dee's book, Tichy was apparently oblivious to his own work: he used a homemade enlarger to print his images, sometimes scribbling in the detail. Then he might use them as beer mats or drop them onto the floor, where they were nibbled by rats.

'I'd had enough of photography'

Earlier this year Dutch publisher Parvenu released an English catalogue of the work of Marianne Breslauer. Originally published in 2009 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the German photographer's birth, Marianne Breslauer - Photographs focuses on nine years of serene work from 1927 to 1936.

At the age of 20, Breslauer went to Paris to study photography under Man Ray who decides she has nothing to learn from him but extends her the use of his studio. In photographing the banks of the Seine and the Jardin du Luxembourg, she inevitably invokes Jacques Henri Lartigue (there's also something of his albums here), Ilse Bing, ubiquitous Atget and, of course, Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Her work tends to series: best of all is a set taken at an art auction, Vente S&S, attended by Pablo Picasso and Ambroise Vollard, among others. The spirit of two shots of Berlin's Lützowbrücke (1930) is revisited from 1932-36 when Breslauer photographs the same Amsterdam canal: two shots have the same laundry hanging on the same boat with the same car parked alongside (there's even a reverse shot from the canal side, though this time it's a different boat decorated with different laundry).

Circus, Berlin 1931 is a series of six pictures of the same androgynous child; a year later, writer and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach is similarly androgynous in two striking portraits. The portraits become increasingly mature, from the cover shot (Ruth von Morgen, Berlin 1934, pictured) to delicate images of Oskar Kokoschka and Albert Barnes, but the key to her oeuvre must be the self-portraits.

In an essay, Marion Beckers and Elisabeth Moortgat make a great deal of a 1929 image the photographer took of herself, looking askance, hair pulled over one eye. In 1933 she is naked in a dressing gown and again not looking at the viewer but into her camera, which looks out at us (and at her). She is the only nude in the book in a manner reminiscent of another young prodigy, Francesca Woodman - in such short careers, the catalogue of both inevitably leans on student work.

The changing situation in Europe notwithstanding, Breslauer seems to have felt she had exhausted all she could achieve as a photographer and laid down her camera some time around 1937. 'If I had worked longer in this area, I would have gone into film,' she said. 'I'd had enough of photography.' The final snaps here date from 1938, and there's Breslauer, again in her housecoat, partially exposed, but bearing her camera.

Get it on, Vallotton

One of the highlights of the €20m refurb to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, which was unveiled late last year, is the space afforded to the Nabis, including such artists as Bonnard, Denis and Vuillard. The collection highlights the work of Félix Vallotton (1865-1925) - this painting was acquired just last year - who seems to be hugely under celebrated in Britain.

Edouard Vuillard was the focus of a show at London's Royal Academy in 2004 - accompanied by one of the largest catalogues ever - but I can't think of a UK exhibition devoted to his Swiss colleague. The artist has always appealed to me for his illustrative style (check out his woodcuts) and interiors, including Sentimental Discussion (1898) and The Visit (1899). As well as the usual femmes à toilette, Vallotton is especially notable for his depictions of department stores, such as tryptique Le bon marché.

The Musée d'Orsay (pictured) is home to one of his most recognisable works, The Ball (1899), as well as Manet's Olympia, upon which Vallotton riffed in The White Woman and the Black Woman (1913). If you happen to visit before 6 May, the gallery is also currently hosting Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela's icy Lake Keitele (1905), which is owned by the National Gallery, London, and broadcaster Jon Snow's favourite painting.

Dotty for Yayoi

Yayoi Kusama has been in town to launch a major retrospective at Tate Modern. In the summer of 2009 the Japanese artist - who famously is said to have chosen to reside in a mental hospital - decorated South Bank trees as part of the Hayward Gallery's Walking in My Mind (pictured above). This time round there is new work at Victoria Miro reminiscent of Austrialian aboriginal art, with touches of Cocteau and Niki de Saint Phalle, plus this version of outdoor installation Narcissus Garden (1966), which looked great locked in the ice on launch night:

Outdoor art 2012

Theatre and music names garnered the headlines at the recent launch of the London 2012 Festival, which will loosely coincide with next year's Olympic and Paralympic Games. The Games will be rung in with a new piece from Martin Creed, Work No.1197: All the Bells in a Country Rung as Quickly and as Loudly as Possible for Three Minutes.

Participatory art makes up a large part of the programme and some outdoor events across the UK have already caught my imagination, starting with Forest Pitch. Craig Coulthard intends to create a full-size football pitch in the middle of a Scottish forest - goalposts and shelters will be made from the cleared trees. Two matches will then be played on the site (the artist slightly overeggs his project by choosing his teams from amateurs who have taken on British citizenship), before the spot is left to return to nature, rather like the scenes in my favourite Asterix book, The Mansions of the Gods.

Another artist interacting with nature and the elements is German Hans Peter Kuhn, who intends to pitch a series of Flags - red on one side, yellow the other - along the Giant's Causeway coastline in Northern Ireland. According to the pitch: 'Depending on the strength and direction of the wind the viewer will see a flickering pattern of red and yellow against the backdrop of this spectacular landscape, generating a strange form of binary code transmitting nature's message.'

More genteel is The English Flower Garden, 'a series of six installations with a total of 15,000 individually hand-thrown ceramic blooms mounted on metal rods'. I'm increasingly interested in ceramics and can't wait for Paul Cumming's beautiful-sounding event, part of which blossoms at London's South Bank early September 2012.

If you want to catch a preview of what's to come, check out Alex Hartley's show, which opened last night at Victoria Miro (where he will live in an outdoor installation, pictured, for the duration). Next summer, the artist will float his Arctic island nation around south-west England but, until 21 January at the gallery, you can visit his adapted photographs, many of which feature architectural additions reminiscent of James Bond baddies' lairs.

Crafty!

London's V&A celebrates craftsmanship in an exhibition that runs until 2 January 2012. Power of Making is great fun and includes a cake in the shape of a baby, a shark sculpture made from recycled tyres and a 'crochetdermy' bear.

Produced with the Crafts Council, the show highlights the skills of gunsmiths or the beauty of ceramics, often creating contrasts by updating traditional vocations. For example, when the market for ecclesiastical wear began to dry up, Poland's Koniakow Cooperative turned its talents instead to making lingerie, including the handmade lace G-string on display (pictured).

There's a strand where these developments achieve the absurd: take Dave Bradbury's Bill Bailey book, which is carved from stone. Australian artist Patricia Piccinini imagines safety wear for genetically engineered creatures - her double-headed 'hornet' crash helmet could be a wholly impractical device for an adult and child to cram into together, for instance.

Jeremy Hutchison took this approach to everyday objects to its extreme in the recent Saatchi New Sensations exhibition. The artist contacted factories around the world and asked them to provide him with an example of their work that was altered in such a way as to make it unusable. (It's important to state he was not after a product rejected because it was faulty.)

As part of the project, he presents the pieces with the correspondence built up over the process (pictured), which shows many factories were understandably puzzled by his intentions - endearingly, some were unwilling to compromise their hard-won reputations by making something that didn't work. (An example of this approach in the news around the same time as the show is the story of the man who ordered two differently sized slippers but, when they arrived, one was a size 1,450 rather than 14.5, though this may have been a PR stunt.) Other responses reference the joy people experienced at giving their creative input while being relieved of routine constraints.

One of my favourite pieces is a pair of sunglasses with multiple bridges, making it unwearable; elsewhere pencils lack lead or a hat is sealed so it cannot be worn. The results are suitably surrealistic - there is a solid pipe, after Magritte, which cannot be smoked. The master of the found object is referenced, too: Duchamp's snow shovel became art by being displayed in a gallery but could still function in the manner for which it was designed; Hutchison, or his craftsmen, render it unusable by inverting the shovel on the handle.

Related: the art of Mark I'Anson

Deserted villages

On one of the hottest days Turkey had experienced in 60 years, I visited one of the country's literally deserted places. Kaya Köyü is reached via the Mediterranean resort town of Fethiye and is described in my Rough Guide book as 'the largest late-medieval ghost town in Asia Minor'.

In 1923, following three years of war, Kaya Köyü's Greek Christian residents were exiled and the village has been uninhabited ever since. The Muslims who were supposed to replace them apparently found the land far inferior to what they were used to and refused to move in.

The roofs of the village's 400 homes have long caved in, exposing the interiors to the elements. Kaya Köyü's three churches are in a similar state: the Panayia Pyrgiotissa basilica dates from 1888 and is notable for its mosaic floor, as well as a charnel house full of human bones (the departing Greeks are said to have taken the skulls with them).

While other villages have been turned into holiday homes and short-let accommodation - this is a particularly beautiful part of the coast, boasting one of the world's most stunning beaches nearby - Kaya Köyü has been left untouched. There was hardly anyone else in sight and, with the sun beating down, it made a particularly desolate scene.

In France, the village of Oradour-sur-Glane has been left as a monument ever since 10 June 1944 when the SS killed more than 640 residents and refugees either as a form of reprisal or warning. The men were separated into five groups and killed with machine-gun fire, while women and children were corralled in the church, which was set ablaze.

In 1994, Geoff Dyer visited the site for an article in Esquire, collected in Anglo-English Attitudes (1999). 'The sign at the gate admonishes SOUVIENS-TOI: REMEMBER. Beyond the gate you see the ruined walls of a few houses,' he writes. 'Propped against one of these, a large sign admonishes SILENCE... One kind of time stopped here on an afternoon in 1944 but a different, slower kind - that sculpts hills and silts rivers - has taken over.'

You can create deserted villages, too, as Anselm Kiefer did in Barjac, southern France, where, for more than 15 years, he established a studio and outdoor exhibition space for his work, a sort of city of art. Director Sophie Fiennes captured the climax of his project, before the German artist struck camp and moved to Paris. The title of her 2010 film came from the Book of Isaiah, echoing Dyer: Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow.

Related: WG Sebald and why we memorialise sites

Exclude, excise, erase: the paintings of Mark I'Anson

I think Kensington's Thackeray Gallery is hosting a couple of paintings by Mark I'Anson for the next two weeks, between exhibitions. The Scottish artist is probably best known for the distinctive paintings of ships central to his 2006 exhibition Drifter, which was supported by the Scottish Fisheries Museum and the Highland Council.

In acrylic on pencil he concentrates on the boats, to the literal exclusion of all else. The harbourside in a painting of a ship in port is ignored to create a sharp excision through the hull (Drifter XVI); elsewhere, Drifter XV sits on the bottom of the frame. I'Anson doesn't paint the thrashing waves in a picture of a storm-tossed boat at sea (Drifter XVII), so it looks as if the ship has been torn out of page or a giant rubber has deleted all else: a violent erasure.

These are big paintings, too - some are 2m by 1m - so the images are as much about the fine detail as the enormous silent space that makes up the rest. For an exhibition at the Thackeray Gallery three years later, Dividing Lines, the artist included smaller portraits, using the same techniques. North Berwick's Greens and Blues has a nice little gallery of some recent work, including a beautiful portrait inspired by the character in a book (Wee heid).

I was reminded of I'Anson's work by the Vintage book cover to Vasily Grossman's seemingly ubiquitous Life and Fate (detail, pictured). The image is by Dmitri Baltermants and is strikingly similar to the Russian photographer's classic Attack (1941), though I can't work out if has been manipulated somehow or is another from the same sequence. Snow in another picture from the same year, Behind Enemy Lines, First Guards Cavalry Corps creates a similar effect as in I'Anson's paintings, as if the horsemen emerge from the print - unsettling and beautiful.

Last chance to see...

Three highly recommended art exhibitions come to an end this weekend (or nearly) - do catch them if you can:

1. Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century, is at the Royal Academy until Sunday - I wrote about it here.

2. Also closing Sunday is Richard Dadd at Orleans House Gallery (pictured), Twickenham, a fascinating little show of the patricidal Victorian artist's work from the Bethlem Royal Hospital Collection.

3. Due to end 2 October but extended for one more week is another small exhibition: Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera at Chichester's Pallant House Gallery. It features a few of her most iconic self-portraits and some beautiful colour photographs of Kahlo by Hungarian Nickolas Muray.

'You have to be Hungarian'

I've always had a certain fascination for the exposed insides of demolished buildings (pictured below). This is due to the revelation of secret spaces, as well as the abstract patterns they create (above). It took a photograph by André Kertész, however, to show me how to capture these sites properly. In Landing Pigeon (New York, 1960), which features in Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the Twentieth Century, he sets off the angles of vanished stairways with a bird in flight.

The Royal Academy's show concentrates on five big names: Brassaï, Robert Capa, Kertész, Lászlo Moholy-Nagy and Martin Munkácsi. You sense the curators have tried their damnedest to draw themes from the displayed work, though they struggle to explain Capa's joshing maxim, 'It's not enough to have talent, you also have to be Hungarian.' This is especially so when for much of the period under review, photography was severely restricted in Hungary, leading most of the names here to practise their art abroad - how to separate Brassaï from his views of Paris or vice versa?

Opening with a folkloric vision, notably espoused by Rudolf Balogh, the exhibition comes full circle in Miklós Rév's Straight Road (Inota, c1955), which pitches a rural idyll against industrial reality. (Tibor Schoen's Ravens - Az Erdekes Ujság, 1915 - is another picture of two halves: a dead soldier in a Christmas card scene.) There's a predictable cavil: the most recent work here is from 1992 - a shame the Royal Academy didn't throw open one of its free rooms to bring the story up to date.

Eyewitness runs until 2 October and the bumper catalogue is now only £14.95.

Five things I'm looking forward to this autumn

ART

Tate Modern's Gerhard Richter: Panorama promises to be a major retrospective of the 80-year-old German artist, to rival MoMA's 40-year survey in New York one decade ago. From 6 Oct 2011-8 Jan 2012.

Look out also for Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement, at the Royal Academy 17 Sept-11 Dec, the V&A's latest blockbuster, Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990, which opens 24 Sept to 25 Jan, plus Tacita Dean takes over Tate Modern's Turbine Hall from 11 Oct.

BOOKS
Haruki Murakami's last big novel, Kafka on the Shore, disappointed despite its heft. Seven years on, the cult author's latest, 1Q84, was so well-received in Japan, he added a third volume to the work's original two parts. They're released here in two books on 18 & 25 Oct respectively.

FILM
Swedish director Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In) tackles John Le Carré's classic novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy with a rattling cast, which includes John Hurt, Tom Hardy and Benedict Cumberbatch, headed up by Gary Oldman (released 16 Sept).

Hurt also stars in the latest from Danish provocateur Lars von Trier, Melancholia, alongside Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Rampling, in cinemas from 30 Sept. Other stand-outs this month include Nicolas Winding Refn's James Sallis adaptation, Drive (23 Sept), and Mademoiselle Chambon (same date), with Sandrine Kimberlain and Vincent Lindon as a couple suddenly drawn to each other. Lynne Ramsay's take on the Lionel Shriver novel We Need to Talk About Kevin opens 21 Oct, boasting a stand-out performance from Tilda Swinton.

MUSIC
I haven't been excited about a new album by Björk for some time, but Biophilia sees the Icelandic pop pixie embracing nature, and technology. Out 10 Oct.

One year after Dust Lane, it looks as if Yann Tiersen is back with a new album, Skyline (pictured), out second half of October. Then there's Erasure entering Tomorrow's World, from 3 Oct.

TV
Danish crime drama The Killing was the cult hit of the winter, and I can't wait for the arrival of follow-up The Killing II on BBC4. Star Sofie Gråbøl promises the 10-episode series is even darker than the first.

Three great European artist's museums

1. Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris

Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) converted this space - pictured - to show off his fantastic work, an example of which was used recently on the cover of Roberto Bolaño's gargantuan novel 2666. The artist's apartment and Grand Tour souvenirs are preserved as he wanted, while paintings fold out of wall-mounted holders.

14 rue de la Rochefoucauld, 9th; closed Tuesdays. €5.

2. Sir John Soane Museum, London

On a grander yet not less intimate scale, architect Soane (1753-1837) modelled this incredible venue to house his collection of books, sculpture and drawings for 'amateurs and students'. An act of parliament preserved the space after his death as close as possible to his intentions.

13 Lincoln's Inn Fields, WC2; open Tuesday-Saturday. Free.

3. Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen

The name Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844) may not ring any bells but his grand sculptures can be found in many of Europe's major cities. Denmark's oldest gallery, above, was specifically designed to house the oeuvre he bequeathed to the state - the sculptor's grave is in the central courtyard.

2 Bertel Thordvaldsens Plads, Slotsholmen; closed Mondays. 40kr.

If you happen to read this and can recommend other great artist's museums around the world in the comments below, please do!

Louisiana, Denmark

Apologies for the relative silence here, I went to Denmark where I visited this beautiful, coastal gallery (among other things, which I'll come back to). A 40-minute train ride from Copenhagen, Louisiana's collection includes work by Frank Auerbach, Per Kirkeby and Peter Doig, with a special emphasis on Alberto Giacometti. Outdoors sculpture is from Alexander Calder (pictured above), Jean Arp, Max Ernst and Henry Moore (below), and there are temporary exhibitions, too: architecture show Living and David Hockney's iPad drawings run until autumn.

Hidden London: naked ladies in Twickenham

When Mohamed al-Fayed unveiled his kitsch tribute to Michael Jackson at Craven Cottage, Peter Watts posted on London's worst statues. I forgot to suggest this extraordinary collection installed in York House Gardens, Twickenham, by the building's last private owner, Parsee prince Sir Ratan Tata, who paid £600 for them in 1909. The statuary is said to have been brought to Britain from Italy by financier Whitaker Wright, who killed himself using cyanide - in court - on being found guilty of fraud in 1904.

Following Tata's death, the main building was acquired in 1924 by the London Borough of Richmond and Twickenham for its council offices but the statues were left to fend for themselves, covered with obscene graffiti and apparently painted over in the Second World War so German bombers couldn't use moonlight reflected off the white Carrara marble to guide them up the Thames. The figures were restored in the late 1980s - this lady seems unperturbed by the plight of her friend:

Feels like the Richter groove

'You need more than/ the Gerhard Richter hanging on your wall' - Pet Shop Boys, Love etc

The first time I knowingly saw work by German artist Gerhard Richter was MoMA's major retrospective in New York in 2002. It was a special trip: I think it was the first time my then girlfriend had been to the United States, and we saw this. As writer Geoff Dyer says elsewhere, and slightly differently, it was as if these paintings had always been waiting for me.

I love Richter's early paintings from photographs, and even his painted photographs, though equivocate on his bright lines and the like (adapted by designer Farrow for the cover of Pet Shop Boys' last album, Yes, which includes the line quoted top). In the last few years there have been a couple of major exhibitions of Richter's work in this country, including Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Whitechapel Gallery's Atlas and his Paintings from Private Collections at the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Gerhard Richter: Panorama promises to be the first major retrospective of the artist in London for 20 years; let's hope its power hasn't been dissipated by these other recent displays. Before then - arriving 19 January 2011 - Tate Modern hosts Gabriel Orozco. I've seen the show in Paris and it's a zinger, up there with the venue's Cildo Meireles exhibition in winter 2008/9, and Francis Alys this past summer.