Billed as “a journey through painting and photography”, Capturing the Moment reveals many ways in which artists have responded to photography – either by taking up the camera themselves, as did Candida Höffer, Andreas Gursky, Louise Lawler and Thomas Struth, or by making some superb paintings.

What a feast! Congratulations are due to the National Gallery for its latest blockbuster After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art. Such a superb collection of modern masters is unlikely to be assembled again under one roof, so this is a once-in-a-lifetime, must-see exhibition.

The night after visiting Tate Modern’s Surrealism Beyond Borders I dreamt that a swarm of wasps had taken refuge inside my skull and I feared it would hurt when they nibbled their way out again.

The Whitechapel Gallery's exhibition opens with Cell IX, 1999 (pictured below) one of the wire cages that Louise Bourgeois filled with memories of her dysfunctional family. This one contains a block of marble carved into hands. A tender portrayal of the mother-daughter bond, it is under scrutiny via three circular mirrors.

Eileen Agar was the only woman included in the International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, which introduced London to artists like Salvador Dali and Max Ernst. The Surrealists were exploring the creative potential of chance, chaos and the irrational which they saw as the feminine principle, yet they didn’t welcome women artists into their group.

What are we to make of the two circles dustily inscribed in the background of Rembrandt’s c.1665 self-portrait? In a painting that bears the fruits of a life’s experience, drawn freehand, they might be a display of artistic virtuosity, or – more convincing were they unbroken – symbolise eternity. For an artist so very conscious of his own mortality, his 80 or so self-portraits a relentless record of the passage of time, this last reading seems most unlikely.

When I interviewed John Richardson, who has died at the age of 95, he was edging through his definitive four-tome life of the minuscule giant of Cubism. Of the various breaks he took from the business of research and writing, one yielded The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a gossipy, elegant account of his own friendship with Picasso in the 1950s, when he lived in Provençal splendour with Douglas Cooper, then the owner of the finest collection of Cubist art in the world.

What an ambitious project! Modern Couples: Art, Intimacy and the Avant-garde looks at over 40 couples or, in some cases, trios whose love galvanised them into creative activity either individually or in collaboration.

Painted in ice-cream shades punctuated with vivid red, the series of portraits made by Picasso in the early weeks of 1932 are as dreamy as love letters. His mistress Marie-Thérèse Walther – we assume it is she – lies adrift in post-coital languor, her body spread before us as a delicious and endlessly fascinating confection.

What a gallimaufry! The polymath Picasso (1881-1973) was one of the most prolific, obsessed and best-known artists in the history; in fact, without qualification, he remains the best-known, for his genius, his mastery of so many media, his public personal life.