Whether you’re interested in buying, just looking or attending one of the many talks and events, the London Art Fair is the place to be over the next few days if you’re keen on modern and contemporary British art. 

From an apparently simple idea stems a very confusing exhibition. Here’s the idea: taking the seminal black square painted by Russian artist Kazimir Malevich as its starting point – in fact, a rectangle, with the small and undated Black Quadrilateral the first of three Malevich paintings – we are invited, over the span of a century and across a number of continents, to explore the evolution of geometric abstraction and its relation to “ideas of utopia”.  

The octogenarian Frederick Wiseman is a cult documentary film maker, with his own idiosyncratic and recognisable idiom. He has both vast experience and extraordinary independence. Characteristically, he makes long, prize-winning, fly-on-the-wall inside-the-institution films: reportorial, non-judgemental, loosely narrative, and wide in subject – from a hospital for the criminally insane, to a high school, the largest university in California (Berkeley), or the Paris Opera Ballet.

The ebullient presenter, writer and director Waldemar Januszczak opens his enthusiastic and proselytising hour-long film on Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) by reading out a series of disparaging quotes from other artists.

We commemorated the centenary of the start of the First World War and we celebrated the 25^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The year also marked a 70^th anniversary for the D-Day landings. So it was oddly fitting that the London art calendar was most notable for the invasion of heavyweight Germans; namely, four postwar artists whose sense of the weight of German history is writ large in their work.

Since David Hockney entered his eighth decade (he is now 77), we seem to have witnessed an accelerated output of major exhibitions, biographies and documentaries. The public appetite has never tired of this most tireless of artists, but it’s an interest that’s been given fresh impetus by the exuberance and vivacity of his epic series of paintings of the Yorkshire Wolds.

I don’t think any of us will look at a museum in quite the same way after this dazzling documentary. For several years the Austrian film-maker Johannes Holzhausen and his team followed what seems to be scores of the working staff  inhabiting Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum (KMH), as they physically cared for the remarkable objects in their care, worried about how best to put them on view for the public, and met continually to discuss museum matters.

I must admit to feeling, briefly, just a little disappointed on first sight of Maggi Hambling’s Walls of Water, nine new paintings on show at the National Gallery. Perhaps it was the evocative title, which promises high drama and instant gratification, something obviously and extravagantly impressive. In short, I was expecting something bigger, an absurd statement because eight out of the nine canvases measure more than six by seven feet. And yet, they are small.

This huge exhibition is an awesome and terrifying compilation of photographs of the sites of conflict, and the remnants of wars and conflicts of all kinds – local, civil, short, long, global, technological, industrial and hand-to-hand. Taken from the mid 19^th century to the present, the images – hundreds, perhaps even well over a thousand –  are oblique and often incomprehensible or unidentifiable without the expansive wall captions. This is a show requiring us to read as well as look. 

A sci-fi special would be incomplete without the profoundly influential figure of JG Ballard, a writer who, when he began his career in the late Fifties, fully subscribed to the notion that  “sci-fi is the literature of the 20^th century.” Unlike the “Hampstead novel,” he once said, “the sci-fi novel plays back the century to itself.”