Yayoi Kusama, one of Japan’s best-known living artists, has spent the past 34 years as a voluntary in-patient in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo. Now 82, she was part of the New York avant-garde art scene of the Sixties, making work that anticipated both Andy Warhol’s repeated-motif “Cow Wallpaper” and Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures. Her nude happenings included orgies and naked gay weddings, over which she presided fully clothed like a psychedelic high priestess.

Sitting for Lucian Freud was quite a commitment. Unlike Hockney, whom he painted and who painted him, Freud was a very slow painter and he was methodical. Paying close attention to detail and absorbed by different textures, he was intent on building up surfaces meticulously, layer upon layer. This meant that sessions would usually go on for several months, sometimes years.

Turner and the Elements is a visual joy and an intellectual pleasure. The backbone of the selection is Turner’s genuine engagement with the scientists of the day. The argument is that he amalgamated the traditional segregation of the elements – earth, air, fire and water – into a fusion of all four; that technically, instead of schematic compositions divided into discernable sections and monocular viewpoints, he painted, so to speak, from the centre out.

In one small room of the Freud Museum, which was once the home of Sigmund in the last year of his life, are the works Jane McAdam Freud made in the final months of her father’s life. Below an imposing photograph of Freud the elder, the progenitor of the clan, are two detailed, tender sketches of Lucian in profile. In the right sketch the dying artist stares resolutely ahead, his gaze, coupled with the firm set of his jaw, capturing a sense of absolute stillness. The left sketch shows the artist now more gaunt, eyes closed, in death, we imagine, or possibly just asleep.  

Featuring over 100 galleries specialising in modern and contemporary British art, the London Art Fair is a January highlight for those who prefer a more relaxed atmosphere to that offered by the international VIP frenzy of Frieze. From the great names of the 20th century to leading contemporary artists and emerging talent, the fair offers a tantalising showcase on a huge variety of British art.

Last year, like every year, is a bit of a blur. I saw a lot, but all the good stuff seems to have clustered near the end. Maybe an end-of-year cultural bloat has finally settled. Anyway, to help jog the memory, I think I should start bottom-up. 

Graham Sutherland and George Shaw have two things in common. They are both painters and both are associated with Coventry: Sutherland made his famous altarpiece work – a tapestry –  for the city’s rebuilt cathedral, while Shaw grew up in Coventry’s Tile Hill, a housing estate that’s become familiar to us through Shaw’s beautiful and melancholy Humbrol enamel oil paintings.

Here be wonderful images, in an anthology of two score of paintings and drawings from the 1950s through the mid-Nineties by 10 artists whose shared interests only sharpen their individuality. Francis Bacon is the autodidact in the group, which includes two Berliners – Frank Auerbach and Lucian Freud – who came to England as children. David Hockney is the witty, adventurous northerner who has now returned, mostly, to Yorkshire from a life lived between London and Los Angeles.

In the 1450s in Florence, Alberti was working on the facade of Santa Maria Novella, Donatello and Fra Filippo Lippi were active, while Leonardo was born in nearby village of Vinci. And the English established a diplomatic presence. It has continued almost uninterrupted, pausing only in times of direct conflict. This month, it ends as the British consulate closes its doors for the last time. Cuts to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office budget and global geopolitical shifts mean that the United Kingdom no longer needs a man in Florence to tend to the needs of tourists and expats.

How can you review LS Lowry? The Salford rent-collector-cum-painter simply did what he did: sending his bendy, pipe-cleaner people through white-floored industrial streets, in scenes that seemed hardly to change in decades. While Lowry fully qualifies for that currently fashionable status "outsider artist", there’s nothing remotely edgy about him. He’s as cuddly and quintessentially English as Thora Hird. Anyone likely to have an opinion on him will long since have formed it. Everyone else will simply be indifferent.