SISTER BROTHER: GERTRUDE AND LEO STEIN by Brenda Wineapple Bloomsbury pounds 25

Picasso, we all know, was the artist of the century. A dynamic, enigmatic giant of a painter of unquestionable originality and influence. Last year his sculptural work also underwent convincing reappraisal at the Tate Gallery. But what has been said of his skill as a print-maker? Certainly the Vollard suite of the 1930s - with its classical arcadias and unambiguous minotaurs - has been praised as a major achievement. What, though, of his two late series of prints? Suite 347 and Suite 156, respectively dated 1968 and 1970, have traditionally been the poor relation of Picasso's oeuvre. Yet, looking at them reproduced (in Picasso: Inside the Image, recently published by Thames & Hudson, £16.95), one feels that herein may lie the elusive essence of the master's art.

sailing

As a major Willem de Kooning exhibition opens at the Tate, David Sylvester celebrates an artist whose generous sensuality bears comparison with Titian, Monet and Matisse

A MAN in a bowler hat and a brightly striped jumper pushes a shopping trolley onto the stage at the London Comedy Festival. His name is Ken Campbell, and he looks like Pablo Picasso with Denis Healey's eyebrows. Campbell's beguiling and hilarious MysteryBruises begins with a tape recording of some useful advice on using "hub-caps which have disenfranchised themselves from their vehicles" to pick up extra-terrestrial transmissions, and goes on from there. There's a detailed examination of the key role of Angus in Macbeth, an in-depth study of the saucy heretical practices of the Cathar cult, some irresponsible behaviour with pressurised containers, and - oh yes, don't forget this bit - the secrets of the multiverse are unveiled.

ZURICH - Seven paintings by Pablo Picasso, worth about pounds 28m and uninsured, have been stolen from a private Zurich art gallery. They include two taken from the same gallery three years ago.

FOR ME, a successful show not only displays beautiful and intriguing works of art, but also presents them in ways which prompt visual curiosity and intellectual debate. With 'Monet to Matisse' I elected to take landscape as a central theme in a fresh exploration of painting in turn-of-the-century France precisely because - pace Andrew Graham-Dixon in his review ('Making molehills out of mountains') on the Visual Arts page - it was practised by both the most reactionary and the most experimental of artists. Instead of a sequence of rooms based on movements - Impressionists, then Symbolists, Fauves, Cubists - the hang of 'Monet to Matisse' credits the visitor with a little knowledge and, instead, juxtaposes works diverse in style but linked in subject. Such thematic groupings are intended to stimulate the spectators' eyes by challenging their preconceptions. The show is divided into three clearly labelled sections: different sites, the landscape as vehicle for the imagination, and variations on categories such as the panorama and the nocturne. Not 'incoherent' or 'insensitively hung', then,

Three art works by Picasso and a painting by Paul Klee were accepted by the Inland Revenue in settlement of a pounds 325,000 inheritance tax bill.

TUESDAY: It is imperative that I come to a decision. Di has been on the phone almost continually. Have I had a relapse? Have I resigned from Ars Longa yet? Am I genuinely interested in coming with her? Who am I working for? Can I please make up my mind and let her know?

I WAS wrongly quoted in my recollection of Picasso, which appeared in your Review ('Brushes with genius', 6 February). Picasso did obviously not say that sculpture gave him 'a pain in the arse'. The exhibition of his sculptures at the Tate will prove the contrary.

PENNY HACKING, a technician at the Tate Gallery in London, positioning The Woman with a Vase, a bronze sculpture by Picasso that has never been seen before in Britain, writes David Lister.

FORTY YEARS ON and there are a few more lines around the eyes, but the inspiration behind some of Picasso's most tender and naturalistic paintings is unmistakable.

THE SALE of 88 Picasso paintings, drawings and sculptures by Sotheby's in New York on Thursday night proved a spectacular reminder that art is about taste. They had been collected by Stanley J Seeger, the grandson of an oil tycoon who has devoted his life to art and music and become, in recent years, a recluse. He listened to the sale over the telephone from Europe.

KAZIMIR MALEVICH'S The Reaper is a disconcerting painting that once seemed invested with the power of prophecy. Painted in the year before the outbreak of the First World War, it radically transformed an old Russian tradition of paintings of the peasant scene. Seen through Malevich's eyes, the worker, having been little more than picturesque staffage in earlier Russian painting, suddenly became an image of millenarian threat and promise. Here he stands, sickle in hand, an inscrutable robot: an image, in retrospect, of the working-class hero as both grim reaper and angel of the apocalypse.