In your ninth decade it may not come as a surprise to find death staring you in the face. But it might be unnerving if you’re an artist and a menacing “death's head” skull emerges, quite unexpectedly, in an image you’ve been staring at and working from with close scrutiny for weeks and months. You might even take it, if so inclined, as a sign – if only as a sign that chance works in mysterious ways. 

Francesca Woodman killed herself at the age of 22, the biographical fact that colours her work and which it is de riguer to mention. She left behind paintings, it is said, as yet publicly unseen, and literally hundreds upon hundreds of negatives and 800 proofs of black and white pre-digital photography. And since that very early death – and early death, whether suicide, accident, disease or murder has been sometimes seen with rabid cynicism as an outstanding career move – she has, over the past two decades, become something of a cult figure.

At the end of this absorbing documentary about the art – and life – of Paul Nash we visited his tombstone in a Buckinghamshire churchyard, accompanying writer and presenter Andrew Graham-Dixon as he laid sunflowers on the grave. He reminded us that Nash saw the sunflower as a symbol for the soul, turning to the sun; indeed one of his last paintings was “Solstice of the Sunflower”.

There is early Turner; there is late Turner. Early Turner is very much of his time: a history and landscape painter in the first half of the 19^th century, looking back to the classicism of Claude and the Dutch Golden Age tradition of sombre marine painting; late Turner is outside time, or at least outside his own time. In his final decade, Turner paints his way to the future, gravitating towards formlessness and abstraction.

Artist and critic Matthew Collings purported to set out the rules of abstraction through taking the viewer on a very bumpy ride through 20^th century painting, with a nod to Cézanne to get us started. He set the scene by telling us that abstraction as a concept in art has been around for 100 years and early on we were presented with a genuine surprise: the large canvases, in relatively soothing colours, of freehand geometric forms that appeared wholly abstract by the almost totally unknown female – yes, female – Swedish artist Hilma Af Klint, from 1907.

Presenter Alastair Sooke looked alarmingly fit, careering round the British countryside and the streets of Paris on his bicycle, talking all the while (and never out of breath) as he described the artistic trajectory of John Constable. In the opening sequence he set the scene, biking straight across – and not at the traffic lights, either – the Cromwell Road to get to the main entrance of the Victoria and Albert Museum; the film is timed to preview the major show “Constable: The Making of a Master” that there opens on September 20.

If events in the Middle East, the prospect of the school run or the onset of autumn are conspiring to lower your spirits, then escape to the V&A and immerse yourself in the dreamy elegance of Horst P. Horst’s magical fashion photographs spanning a career that lasted 60 years.

The crusty old Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay died in 2006, but there’s a new art work by him at this year’s Folkestone Triennial. You won’t be able to see it with the naked eye, but you can through a pair of binoculars. If you peer through a viewing tower from Folkestone’s disused Harbour Pier you’ll see one of Finlay’s enigmatic phrases come into focus: “WEATHER IS A THIRD TO PLACE AND TIME”. The words are written on the grey façade of a lighthouse in that gorgeous shade of midnight blue the artist favoured. 

The audience comment I most want to hear during next week's Unlimited Festival is: this show has transformed my perception of disability. We got that over and over and over during the first Unlimited Festival, which ran as part of the Cultural Olympiad in 2012. And I want that again. It’s all about making people understand that disability isn’t a negative, awful experience, just a facet of life that can give you as much as it apparently appears to take away. In fact, it just gives you more.

Eight seconds in and my toes were already curling. Perhaps it was the authority with which the voiceover delivered some juicy clunkers. “If you wanted to be an artist in 1908, Vienna is where you’d come to make your name,” it intoned. Wow, who’d bother with Paris, eh? Picasso, you idiot, messing about with Cubism in a Montmartre hovel when you could have been sticking gold leaf on your decorative canvases, à la Klimt.