This sparkling display of some four score watercolours from the first decade of the last century throw an unfamiliar light on the artistry of John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), the last great swagger portrait painter in the western tradition. None here is a portrait in the conventional sense: rather Sargent is, so to speak, off duty, painting for himself with a glorious spontaneity, a professional on holiday.

Portraying a Nation juxtaposes photographs by August Sander with paintings by Otto Dix. It's an inspired idea as both artists wanted to hold up a mirror to German society during a time of extreme change. Dix described his lucid form of critical realism as “life undiluted”,  while Sander wrote “We must be able to bear seeing the truth.” “Photography”, he observed, “can depict things in magnificent beauty, but also in terrible truth.” 

The marvellous National Gallery of Ireland, founded in the 1860s, has opened its doors to its brilliantly revamped, updated and expanded galleries. As a spectacular bonus in its opening summer, Vermeer and Masters of Genre Painting reposes in the enfilade of the newly re-done permanent galleries for temporary exhibitions.

I can’t pretend to like the work of Fahrelnissa Zeid, but she was clearly an exceptional woman and deserves to be honoured with a retrospective. She led a privileged life that spanned most of the 20th century; born in Istanbul in 1901 into a prominent Ottoman family, many of whom were involved in the arts, she died in 1991.

Why is dust so fascinating yet, at the same time, so repellent? Maybe the fear of choking to death in a dust storm or being buried alive in fine sand provokes a visceral response to it. My current obsession with dust comes from having builders in my home over the last seven months.

As perhaps the greatest artist there has ever been – and as one of the most fascinating and complex personalities of his era – Michelangelo should be a thrilling subject for serious as well as dramatic cinematic documentary treatment. Michelangelo – Love and Death, directed and edited by David Bickerstaff, which is timed to coincide with the National Gallery’s Michelangelo/Sebastiano exhibition (just!

The most popular exhibition of a living artist ever held at the Tate was David Hockney’s recent retrospective, which attracted 478,082 visitors.

Standing inside the Gemeentemuseum’s life-size reconstruction of Mondrian’s Paris studio, the painter’s reputation as an austere recluse seems well-deserved.

This summer the wonderful Kröller-Möller museum in Otterlo hosts the first major Dutch retrospective of the works of Hans (Jean) Arp since 1960 – an exhibition that will travel in a marginally smaller version to Margate’s Turner Contemporary later this year.

With its striking design, characteristically restricted palette and fluent use of line, Hokusai’s The Great Wave, 1831, is one of the world’s most recognisable images, encapsulating western ideas about Japanese art. First seen outside Japan in the 1880s, Van Gogh was one of the first Europeans to really engage with the print, and he was one of a number of 19^th-century artists who tried to incorporate aspects of Japanese style into their work.