ART: THE FIVE BEST SHOWS IN LONDON

Rembrandt by Himself National Gallery

The self-portraits. The first and most searching autobiography in paint. The great pictorial statements of honesty and mortality, of the human depths. To 5 Sept

Disasters of War Imperial War Museum

Three ages of European war through the etchings of Jaques Callot, Goya and Otto Dix. Black-and-white flashes of horror, mass-executions, madness and blood everywhere. To 26 Sept

Bridget Riley Serpentine Gallery

The classic Op period: paintings from the 1960s and 70s, blazing and shifting in black, white and magically elusive and illusive shades of grey. To 30 Aug

Joseph Beuys Royal Academy

Beautiful and mysterious: 456 drawings using blood, fat, pencil and gold leaf, offer clues to Beuys's mythology. To 16 Sept

Visions of Ruin Sir John Soane's Museum

Follies, fragments and fantasy buildings, detailing the 18th- and 19th-century cult of ruins, in the heart of Soane's house of curiosities. To 28 Aug

THE FIVE BEST SHOWS AROUND THE COUNTRY

Notorious MoMA, Oxford

One hundred years after his birth, Alfred Hitchcock lives. Group show looks at his legacy in art, most cunningly in the "Phoenix Tapes". To 3 Oct

W Eugene Smith Dundee Contemporary Arts

Retrospective of an American photojournalist with a campaigning eye: see the terrible images of industrial poisoning victims in Japan. To 27 Aug

As Dark as Light in Cornwall

A county-wide contemporary art festival, focusing on the solar eclipse. James Turrell's open-air sky-dome, "The Elliptic Ecliptic", is the sight to see. To 20 Nov

Dutch Paintings Leeds City Art Gallery

Twenty masterpieces of the Golden Age, on loan from the National Gallery, begin a tour of the country here. Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, Ruisdale and Hobbema star. To 29 Aug

Helen Chadwick Graves Gallery, Sheffield

Photographic pieces on nature, death and pleasure from her short career - animal skins, flowers, embryos, chocolate and Windolene. To 28 Aug