The Independent Recommends: The Five Best Shows

Jackson Pollock (Tate Gallery)

Retrospective (right) for the wild hero of Abstract Expressionism (going on Old Master). The build-up is slow and the end sorry, but the brief "drip" period deserves every superlative. To 6 Jun

Portraits by Ingres (National Gallery)

Some of the most intense portraiture ever. Exquisite melanges of flesh and fabric, dreams of sex and money. To 25 Apr

Patrick Caulfield (Hayward Gallery)

The modern object-world made luminous. Caulfield is a virtuoso of many styles, and this retrospective offers the range - notably those fat, laconic outlines flooded with translucent colour. To 11 Apr

Andreas Gursky (Dean Gallery, Edinburgh)

Photographs 1994-98: huge, panoramic, high-finish, micro-detailed, digitally- manipulated images of our world - stock-exchange floor, cityscape, hotel foyer. Vistas of more than the eye can see. To 16 May

Aubrey Beardsley (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool)

The short and brilliant career of the 1890s aesthete and illustrator, with his masterful blacks and whites and his uniquely sinuous, florid line. To 11 Apr