ART: THE FIVE BEST SHOWS IN LONDON
Rembrandt by Himself National Gallery
The self-portraits. The first and most searching autobiography in paint. The great pictorial statements of honesty and mortality, of the human depths. To 5 Sept
Disasters of War Imperial War Museum
Three ages of European war through the etchings of Jaques Callot, Goya and Otto Dix. Black-and-white flashes of horror, mass-executions, madness and blood everywhere. To 26 Sept
Bridget Riley Serpentine Gallery
The classic Op period: paintings from the 1960s and 70s, blazing and shifting in black, white and magically elusive and illusive shades of grey. To 30 Aug
Joseph Beuys Royal Academy
Beautiful and mysterious: 456 drawings using blood, fat, pencil and gold leaf, offer clues to Beuys's mythology. To 16 Sept
Visions of Ruin Sir John Soane's Museum
Follies, fragments and fantasy buildings, detailing the 18th- and 19th-century cult of ruins, in the heart of Soane's house of curiosities. To 28 Aug
THE FIVE BEST SHOWS AROUND THE COUNTRY
Notorious MoMA, Oxford
One hundred years after his birth, Alfred Hitchcock lives. Group show looks at his legacy in art, most cunningly in the "Phoenix Tapes". To 3 Oct
W Eugene Smith Dundee Contemporary Arts
Retrospective of an American photojournalist with a campaigning eye: see the terrible images of industrial poisoning victims in Japan. To 27 Aug
As Dark as Light in Cornwall
A county-wide contemporary art festival, focusing on the solar eclipse. James Turrell's open-air sky-dome, "The Elliptic Ecliptic", is the sight to see. To 20 Nov
Dutch Paintings Leeds City Art Gallery
Twenty masterpieces of the Golden Age, on loan from the National Gallery, begin a tour of the country here. Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, Ruisdale and Hobbema star. To 29 Aug
Helen Chadwick Graves Gallery, Sheffield
Photographic pieces on nature, death and pleasure from her short career - animal skins, flowers, embryos, chocolate and Windolene. To 28 Aug
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