As the Scottish National Gallery hosts the first major exhibition of Peter Doig’s work in the country  of his birth, Adrian Hamilton finds that it is the images of the artist’s adopted homeland of Trinidad  that make for a thrilling show

A trio of big hitters defy a co-operative festival theme with exhibitions that are individual and rewarding

Think of this as a tour of the world's most influential galleries: if it's hot in the art world today, it's in this book.

In a new London show, Jumping for Joyce, contemporary painters and sculptors bring the world of the Ulysses author vividly to life. John Walsh is astonished by the extraordinary variety of the works

Swedish artist's drawings, collages and sculptures are wilfully naive but deceptively sophisticated

Lyons teashops were the Starbucks of their day. In the aftermath of war, the management of the restaurant chain (the last one closed its doors in 1981) was faced with a pressing challenge: how to enliven dingy and often war-scarred interiors up and down the country without spending a fortune.

After the war, two schemes tried to cheer the tea drinkers and children of Britain with art – they were heroic, and doomed

'Modern' is not a word you automatically associate with Dame Laura Knight, but her self-portrait is just that, in some ways at least. Note I say "modern" and not "avant garde": the picture dates from 1913, the year Picasso painted Guitar and Duchamp made his wheel-stool, Roue de Bicyclette.

An exhibition of work from post-revolutionary Mexico is structurally unsound: it lacks murals, the people’s medium

Don’t play with your food! Isn’t that what every child is told when they attempt to mould mashed potato into pea-sized balls, or find the colour result of squashing a strawberry into pistachio icecream? For most budding food lovers that is the beginning and end of experiment. For Ferran Adria, playing with food became a stellar career.

L S Lowry turned the working class into a flat-capped mob, always on the move, never getting anywhere

The actress is playing an executive for the internet search engine in her latest film. But Rose Byrne tells Gill Pringle that she doesn't like all that tech stuff – and she's never been on Facebook and Twitter

His younger friend Monet wrote that he owed "everything" to Eugène Boudin, Degas collected his paintings and Corot called him the "king of skies". But Boudin has been overshadowed by his more-famous contemporaries for too long. Now he is being shown the appreciation he deserves with a stunning exhibition in Paris that does justice to a master of the sea, sky and light.

A free show of throwaway material may sound lightweight, but it's brighter and breezier than the heavy-handed hype

It’s a surreal experience to walk into a solicitors office near Chancery Lane and find a gallery filled with contemporary art trying to provoke, as contemporary art tends to do.