I can’t pretend to like the work of Fahrelnissa Zeid, but she was clearly an exceptional woman and deserves to be honoured with a retrospective. She led a privileged life that spanned most of the 20th century; born in Istanbul in 1901 into a prominent Ottoman family, many of whom were involved in the arts, she died in 1991.

With its striking design, characteristically restricted palette and fluent use of line, Hokusai’s The Great Wave, 1831, is one of the world’s most recognisable images, encapsulating western ideas about Japanese art. First seen outside Japan in the 1880s, Van Gogh was one of the first Europeans to really engage with the print, and he was one of a number of 19^th-century artists who tried to incorporate aspects of Japanese style into their work.

Revolution - New Art for a New World film starts well: the opening shot (main picture) is of young women painting white letters onto a red banner. “We all knew what to paint,” says the voice-over. “Bread, Work, Vote, but the message was ‘Women of the World Unite!’” 

The art dealers of today must be thanking their lucky stars that Philip Hook’s remarkable history of their trade stops where it does. For while it serves as an eminently useful if rather specialised reference book, it’s a history pushed along by a ferocious analysis of the art dealing fraternity, the general thrust of which is encapsulated in its no-nonsense title. From unsophisticated third party to plutocrats’ lifestyle consultant, the evolving persona of the art dealer has taken guises ranging from merchant, scholar, connoisseur and ultimately, "purveyor of fantasy".

It’s hardly the lot of an art critic to be loved and admired, still less to speak to an audience that might reasonably be called “the public”. And how many will find their ideas still current 40 years on? All of these things can be said for John Berger, who has died aged 90, a man whose radical approach to looking at art was an absolute inspiration, and whose ideas were a solid presence in my childhood, woven into my early memories as surely as the pages of a photo album.

China’s tumultuous recent past attempted to selectively obliterate the history of one of the world’s great and ancient civilisations, with the neatly complementary result in the past several decades of a huge upsurge in Chinese studies, East and West, from publications to exhibitions to enormous advances in archaeology.  At the same time, a sense of preserving the material past has been threatened by urban development, a habit copied perhaps from the West.

For his latest journey Michael Palin, actor, writer, novelist, comedian, Python, traveller, has gone beyond geography in search of the visual arts with his characteristic enthusiasm, eclectic curiosity, and sense of discovery.

The New Yorker Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) was the classic poor little rich girl: insecure, a woman with scores, perhaps hundreds of lovers, longing for love, the writer of tell-all memoirs. What sets her apart is that she was also the creator of one of the world’s greatest collections of modern and contemporary western art. 

"Exhibition on Screen" is a logical extension of the recent phenomenon of screenings of live performances of opera and theatre. Initiated with the Leonardo exhibition of 2012 at London’s National Gallery, this is its third season, and the format remains unchanged: a specific show provides the pretext for a bespoke film that goes beyond the gallery walls.

The real achievement of this remarkable DVD release from the BFI is the fact that it brings the name of George Hoellering back to our attention as a director. His 1951 adaption of TS Eliot’s verse play Murder in the Cathedral has been virtually unavailable for years, and is the centrepiece of his career, while the accompanying documentaries here reveal a fascinating and diverse talent.