The Independent Recommends: The Five Best Shows

Jackson Pollock (Tate Gallery)

Big, revelatory retrospective for the wild hero of Abstract Expressionism (going on Old Master), legendary for his great drip paintings, but virtually unshown here for 40 years. To 6 Jun

Portraits by Ingres (National Gallery)

Some of the smartest, most intense portraiture ever. Men as icons of power; women as exquisite melanges of flesh and fabric. To 25 Apr

Henri Michaux (Whitechapel Gallery)

He travelled. He wrote. He took drugs. And, inspired by grief and mescalin, he created amazing, wobbly bobbly wibbly scribbly fine-grain line drawings. To 25 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 (right). To 11 Apr