There’s a giant spider in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s new exhibition of Louise Bourgeois. Her trademark spider and the fact that she lived to 98 – working into her final days – are probably two of the best-known things about her. The story spun by the spider and the other exhibits, in an exhibition entitled A Woman Without Secrets, makes a fascinating walk through the final years and lifelong obsessions of the French-born artist who did not come to real prominence until her early 70s in her adopted USA.

This year, if you don’t live in Ireland, you’ll have to take a plane or a boat to see the Turner Prize exhibition. But the effort will be nicely rewarded, for Derry (or Londonderry/Doire – wherever your affiliations take you) is a beautiful city, and it’s also the first UK City of Culture, so there’s plenty going on. And aside from the tempting premise of the exhibition, the building that’s been specially converted to house it is an inspired choice, not only because it makes for a very good exhibition space, but because it carries such symbolic weight.

It is amazing how perceptions and attitudes change. Think of a nude and the chances are you will imagine a naked woman since, nowadays, the female body virtually monopolises the genre; naked men scarcely make an appearance in mainstream culture. This changed briefly in the 1970s, when American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe brought the male nude into focus with countless images celebrating masculine beauty. After his death in 1989, though, the naked male returned to the closet, relegated to porn movies and gay magazines.

From Hogarth through to Gillray and Cruikshank, it was Georgian England that gave rise to a graphic tradition of satire. The powerful were lampooned and the pretensions and avarice of the upper and aspiring classes duly ridiculed. But the poor did not escape moral censure. Far from it. Then as now we had the virtuous and the feckless poor, and it was the love of gin that often bought the latter down.

Dulwich Picture Gallery, the oldest publicly accessible painting collection in England, is hardly on the bank of the Thames, but its compilation of prints, drawings, watercolours and paintings by James McNeill Whistler (1834-1902) concentrates on his absorption with London’s river. The shifting light of sky and water, not to mention working dockside life, which obsessed him during his lifelong residence in the city provides not only an overview of Whistler’s evolution as an artist but an evocation of the working life of the river which is long gone.

It surely takes courage to conceive an exhibition around a single, slightly obscure work by an artist whose oeuvre boasts an array of crowd-pleasers. Rather than gathering together the greatest hits, the Courtauld Gallery’s new exhibition takes as its starting point a single sheet of paper; on one side is a finely wrought figure from the parable of the Wise and the Foolish Virgins, while on the verso are studies of Dürer’s left leg.

At the beginning of the 17^th century an anonymous Anglo-Netherlandish artist produced an elaborate procession portrait of the septuagenarian Virgin Queen, tactfully portrayed as though several decades younger, when she had succeeded to the throne in her mid-twenties. Elizabeth I is  held aloft under an embroidered canopy and surrounded by Knights of the Garter, courtiers, members of the royal household, and aristocrats.

Seeing the statue of Saddam Hussein toppled in Baghdad in April 2003, I felt a rush of euphoria despite deep reservations about the American invasion. My (misplaced) optimism was shared by the Iraqi student, Ayass Mohammed. ’“Suddenly I felt freedom,” he told reporters; for him the fall of the statue symbolised the end of tyranny and the arrival of hope. 

"The objects in pictures look out at us serene or severe, tense or relaxed, comforting or forbidding, suffering or smiling." Thus said Paul Klee (1879-1940) in a lecture on modern art in 1924. It is an entirely accurate description of his own work, drawing as it does on dream and nightmare, fairytales and apocalyptic visions, not to mention landscape, portrait, architecture, aquatic scenes, the world around him and abstract imaginings: the whole gamut.

American ladies, in the 18th and 19th centuries, passed their time in fashionable pursuits such as embroidering samplers and cutting out portraits of family and friends. Harking back to those days, Kara Walker has covered three walls of the Camden Arts Centre with a panoramic installation of cut-paper silhouettes, which she calls Auntie Walker’s Wall Samplers (main picture and below right: Auntie Walker’s Wall Sampler for Savages).