Don’t tell granny but lace is for more than doilies and curtains. Try it on lamps, linens and even ceramics, says Trish Lorenz

Things are looking up – the first Chagall UK show in 15 years

Celia Paul is the least noisy portrait painter in oils imaginable. Her subjects - which usually tend to be relatives, close friends or herself - exist within a kind of religiose hush of rapt self-absorption.

Cosmetics heir and heavy-weight philanthropist Leonard A Lauder has donated 78 pieces to the museum

In one year, Picasso staged his first show, lost his soulmate, and forged the giddying range of styles that revealed his pedigree and future

A study of a single year in early Modernism is more insightful than a century of drawing

Other nations may have made abstract art famous, but the work from Italy reached new heights of excitement and passion. By Adrian Hamilton

Russian Museum, St Petersburg

In Patagonia made Bruce Chatwin famous overnight. On the book's publication in 1977, reviewers rightly compared it to Mandeville's Travels, to Alexander Kinglake's Eothen and Robert Byron's The Road To Oxiana.

Doctor L's production on Tony Allen's Black Voices made it one of the most innovative albums of 2000.

The friendship between Piet Mondrian and Ben Nicholson inspired masterly art as the Courtauld's small but perfectly formed show proves

Two shows demonstrate the irreversible if brief impact on these shores of Picasso's journey to London and Ben Nicholson's pilgrimage to Paris

Winston Churchill and Evelyn Waugh hated his work, but Picasso provided inspiration for a whole generation of UK artists, as Arifa Akbar discovers at Tate Britain's new exhibition

Every night, after the last visitor to Madrid's Reina Sofia Museum has left, the prestigious art gallery's newest curator flickers into life. The expert is a robot, which has begun the most exhaustive research ever performed on Picasso's renowned masterpiece, Guernica. The mission: to establish the extent of the damage the 75-year-old painting has sustained during its turbulent life.