- Masterpieces from the Louvre: The Collection of Louis La Caze - This exhibition is the first collaboration between the Wallace Collection and the Musée du Louvre, and will contain one of the masterpieces of seventeenth-century Spanish painting, Ribera’s Le Pied-Bot (The Boy with the Club Foot) of 1642, which will make a fascinating comparison with the Spanish paintings in the Wallace Collection by Velázquez, Murillo and Alonso Cano. Also there will be a splendid array of eighteenth-century French paintings (La Caze’s favourite school) by, among others, Watteau, Pater, Lancret, Rigaud, Chardin, Nattier, Boucher and Fragonard. Until 18 May. www.wallacecollection.org
- Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art - Mission: to interpret and understand contemporary art - Anthropologists from outer space set out on a mission to understand life on earth. Imagine that they begin their mission by examining the curious phenomenon that human beings call ‘contemporary art’. What does Art tell them about human life and culture? Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art presents contemporary art works under the fictional guise of a museum collection conceived by and designed for extraterrestrials. Playful and irreverent, the museum’s collection features some 150 works by over 100 artists, from modern masters to bright new stars. Until 18 May. www.barbican.org.uk
- Pompeo Batoni 1708 - 1787 - In his day, Pompeo Batoni was the most celebrated painter in Rome. For nearly half a century, Batoni recorded international travellers' visits to Italy on the Grand Tour in portraits that remain among the most memorable artistic accomplishments of the period. Equally gifted as a history painter, his religious and mythological works were eagerly acquired by the greatest patrons and collectors in Britain and mainland Europe. Until 18 May. www.nationalgallery.org.uk
- Catherine Yass - High Wire - High Wire draws on Yass' filmed footage of acclaimed high wire walker Didier Pasquette at Red Road in Glasgow in 2007, and is as much concerned with the isolated physical space inhabited by the walker — in a landscape dominated by the brutalism of the tower blocks — as with the remarkable mental and physical transformation during the course of the attempted walk. Until 24 May. www.artangel.org.uk
- Paul Morrison - Paul Morrison shows a 21 foot long site-specific wall painting entitled Raphe, a term used to describe the longitudinal ridges that represent the part of the plant stem that is fused to the seed. Botanical subject matter such as modified primroses, pine trees and other plants in the foreground contrast in style and scale with one another and with the moonlit architecture in the background which appears to be enlarged from an Old Master woodcut. Until 24 May. www.alisonjacquesgallery.com
- Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008 - The first exhibition to bring together rare vintage prints with contemporary classics from Vanity Fair and the legendary Condé Nast Archive. A photographic history of celebrity portraiture including the works of master photographers, from Edward Steichen and Cecil Beaton to Annie Leibovitz and Mario Testino. Some of the greatest portrait photographs of the twentieth century were taken for, or published in, Vanity Fair. This remarkable selection of 150 classic images features works from the magazine's first period (1913-1936), displayed for the first time with works from the contemporary Vanity Fair (1983-present). Until 26 May. www.npg.org.uk
- Renoir at the Theatre: Looking at La Loge - Pierre-Auguste Renoir's La Loge (The Theatre Box), 1874, is one of the masterpieces of Impressionism and a major highlight of The Courtauld Gallery's collection. Its depiction of an elegant couple on display in a box at the theatre epitomises the Impressionists' interest in the spectacle of modern life. The exhibition unites La Loge for the first time with Renoir’s other treatments of the subject and loge paintings by his contemporaries, including Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas. Concentrating on the early years of Impressionism during the 1870s, the exhibition explores how these artists used the loge to capture the excitement and changing nature of fashionable Parisian society. Until 26 May. www.somersethouse.org.uk
- Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia - This exhibition aims to chart the artistic and personal relationships of three of the great figures in early twentieth-century art, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Francis Picabia. Together they created the Dada movement in New York during the First World War, and, unusually within the history of modern art, they remained friends, with periods of varying intensity, throughout their lives.At the heart of the friendships lay a shared outlook on life, manifested in their works through jokes and a sense of irony, iconoclastic gestures, and a pronounced, if often coded, interest in sexual relations and eroticism. Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia aims to explore the various affinities and parallels between the work of these three, showing how they responded to each others’ ideas and innovations. Until 26 May. www.tate.org.uk/modern
- Marc Newson - Following his acclaimed exhibition in New York, Newson has created three new variations on established themes. As before, each work is conceived and meticulously crafted in a seamless piece of material. Extruded Table 3 is a startling evolution from the preceding Extruded Tables, where the open-ribbon form becomes an unbroken line with no beginning and no end. The dynamics of its streamlined silhouette are further emphasized by the natural grey/white striations of the marble. Low Voronoi Shelf is directly inspired by its more monumental forbear Voronoi Shelf, but reconceived as a useful surface rather than a purely sculptural object. With Carbon Fibre Chair, Newson explores an existing model in terms of a radically different material. In doing so, the highly reflective, "liquid" yet weighty Nickel Chair morphs into its polar opposite, a darkly absorptive, light-weight form. Until 31 May. www.gagosian.com
- Juan Cossio - Juan Cossio uses an airbrush as his principal working tool to build up these beautifully detailed paintings. In doing so, he has taken an instrument originally designed to simply retouch photographs and instead utilises it in order to recreate a photographic image in its entirety. Cossio masterfully arranges each of his compositions in order to poetically communicate a visual message to the viewer. The characters in his works are often dressed in white robes and placed in functional, minimalistic interiors. This leaves each of Cossio’s paintings devoid of a context in time or place and means that it is the women’s facial expressions and the placement of their bodies which primarily do the talking in these pieces, rather than the clothes they wear or the spaces they inhabit. Until 31 May. www.albemarlegallery.com
- Adam Hinton, Lovin' It - Hinton’s new work from Shanghai documents the emergence of an aggressive consumer society in which the new proletariat of “communist” China comes to terms with living under the surreal haze of fluorescent lights and the constant gaze of advertising images. The vivid colour photographs echo the nascent metropolis’ energy and explore the subtle interchange between the city framework and people who populate it. From commodity fetishism to impressions of personal nostalgia, Hinton’s work has dramatically drawn out the personal hope, dreams and struggles of the people of a 21st century metropolis. Until 7 June. www.hostgallery.co.uk
- Cranach - In March 2008 
the Royal Academy of Arts will present the first major exhibition in Britain devoted to Lucas Cranach the Elder (c. 1472–1553). A collaboration between the Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main and the Royal Academy, the exhibition will bring together some 70 works chosen to represent the quality and range of this important master of the German Renaissance. The Städel has generously made available to the Academy major works from its collection of paintings, drawings and prints by Cranach; foremost among them is The Altarpiece of the Holy Kinship, dated 1509. Until 8 June. www.royalacademy.org.uk
- Coming of Age - Abstract art by Jackson Pollock, landscapes by John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler, genre paintings by Eastman Johnson, portraits by Thomas Eakins and Marine paintings by Winslow Homer will be among the famous works in this exhibition about American art. Over the course of the one hundred years from the 1850s to the 1950s, American art and culture came of age, evolving from the provincial to the international. Until 8 June. www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk
- Maria Lassnig - Maria Lassnig is a significant avant-garde pioneer, whose work, over a career lasting 60 years, appears remarkably fresh and vibrant, consistently engaging with successive generations of contemporary artists. Lassnig creates images of the body that, while figurative, reject the static tendencies of traditional portraiture. This exhibition, the first public solo presentation of her work in the UK, will include a selection of recent paintings, drawings and her work in film. Until 8 June. www.serpentinegallery.org
- Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings - From Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Germaine Greer, influential women and early feminists have lamented their lack of foremothers. A major new exhibition Brilliant Women: 18th Century Bluestockings at the National Portrait Gallery, London, aims to show how a remarkable group of creative and intellectual women in eighteenth-century Britain were celebrated as icons of patriotic pride and came to symbolise the progress of a civilised and commercial nation. Publicly celebrated in their time, these women, who met together in salons and were known as 'bluestockings', invented a new kind of informal sociability and nurtured a sense of intellectual community among the writers, artists and thinkers who attended their 'conversation parties'. Active in art, literature and even political thought, the bluestockings were not just brilliant - they were exceptional, both for their individual accomplishments and for collectively pushing the boundaries of what women could undertake or achieve. Until 15 June. www.npg.org.uk
- Paper Trail: Prints from the Merlini Collection - Over a period of sixty years following the Second World War, Vito Merlini (1923-2007) amassed an extraordinary collection of prints whilst working as a doctor in his Tuscan home town of Peccioli. Following his first acquisition – a lithograph by Ardengo Soffici – the collection grew until by the turn of the century it numbered around 1,000 works, comprising prints by both Italian and international artists from de Chirico to Mirò, Guttuso to Sutherland. Towards the end of his life, 279 works from the collection were presented by Merlini to Peccioli, and it is from this donation that the present exhibition is drawn. Until 15 June. www.estorickcollection.com
- MASSIMO BARTOLINI - Bartolini's practice embraces various materials and techniques, from sculpture and performance to photography and video. His works have included an elevated floor that created the impression of distorted space; an installation in which a device on the heel of a visitor's shoes altered the light in the exhibition space; and rooms suffused with perfume and the sound of leaking water. These often sensual artworks induce in the viewer a meditative state that is still highly experiential, making us reflect on the relativity of what is solid and what is fluid. Until 21 June. www.frithstreetgallery.com
- Whitechapel Laboratory - Nathalie Djurberg/Diego Perrone - Launching the programme, Nathalie Djurberg and Diego Perrone examine the darker aspects of human psychology. Djurberg’s deceptively charming stop-motion clay animations are contemporary fairytales in which adults and children engage in violence and misadventure. Perrone’s surreal animations and digital video works explore a poetic but detached preoccupation with death, the passage of time and both banal and extreme aspects of human behaviour. From 14 May until 22 June.
www.whitechapel.org