Detail from Frida Kahlo's self-portrait with an image of Rivera on her forehead

1. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera | Pallant House Gallery, until October 2

The show is about the turbulent union of Kahlo and Rivera, whose lives were intimately bound together by marriage, divorce and remarriage, and by their shared devotion to Mexico, to making art and to the politics of liberation. Biographical detail is kept to a minimum, though Kahlo’s mesmerising portraits of the hideous, elephantine Rivera and his of her are so tender that they are all a visitor needs to know about their love for each other.

2. Devotion by Design | National Gallery, until Oct 2

Selected entirely from pictures in the permanent collection, the National Gallery’s exhibition of Italian 14th- and 15th-century altarpieces is so beautiful that it would be easy to miss the breathtaking audacity of the installation. Even if you feel you know these images well, to see them dramatically lit against dark walls and at the height they would have been hung in their original architectural setting is to see them as though for the first time.

3. Michelangelo Pistoletto: The Mirror of Judgement | Serpentine Gallery, until 17 September

Two years ago, the name Michelangelo Pistoletto was barely known in this country. But since rolling a huge ball of newspaper over London’s Millennium Bridge during Tate Modern’s Long Weekend mini-festival in 2009, this septuagenarian Italian conceptualist has become established as a modern master.

The Mirror of Judgement, his cardboard labrynth at the Serpentine, is a richly symbolic spiritual journey.

4. Thomas Struth: Photographs 1978-2010

Thomas Struth's subject matter is diverse, but the photographer seems to be searching for the source of the sublime in a contemporary godless world.

5. Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century | Royal Academy (020 7300 8000), until Oct 2

A surprisingly large number of Hungarians transformed photography during the 20th century. No less than five major émigré Hungarian photographers, including Robert Capa, Brassaï and László Moholy-Nagy, command centre stage in this exhibition of more than 200 photographs.

6. Dutch Landscapes | Queen's Gallery until 9 October

The Royal Collection’s new exhibition offers a reminder that art from the Netherlands hasn’t always found favour in Britain. Horace Walpole, the 18th-century antiquarian and man of letters, deplored Dutch artists as “drudging Mimics of Nature’s most uncomely coarsenesses”.

One of the chief pleasures of this exhibition is the close observation of everyday life by masters such as Philips Wouwermans and Aelbert Cuyp. There are several scenes of merrymaking, replete with people boozing, smoking, swaggering and dancing. There are country fairs abuzz with activity, as well as busy vistas of agricultural labour.

7 Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril, Courtauld Gallery | Courtauld Gallery (020 7848 2526), until Sept 18

Mouth-watering exhibition of posters and paintings by the diminutive fin-de-siècle French artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec of Jane Avril, one of the stars of the Moulin Rouge during the 1890s, who was nicknamed “La Mélinite” after a powerful form of explosive.

8. René Magritte: The Pleasure Principle | Tate Liverpool

No painter has had a bigger impact on the advertising industry than the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte (1898-1967). His poetical pictures, with their signature motifs of flaming tubas and men in bowler hats, have had a powerful influence.

9. The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World | Tate Britain, (020 7887 8888), until Sept 4

Strong and striking works by artists associated with the London-based avant-garde Vorticist movement that sparked into life in 1914, but had fizzled out by the end of the First World War. Look out, especially, for the gifted young French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s monumental head of Ezra Pound, and the futuristic sculptures of Jacob Epstein, which wouldn’t look out of place in a sci-fi horror film.

10. Jaume Plensa at Yorkshire Sculpture Park | until 25 September

Jaume Plensa may not be a household name, but the image of his work ‘Breathing’ is familiar to many from its daily appearance on the 10 O’clock news bulletin. The Catalan sculptor designed the white column of words which rises above the BBC Broadcasting House.

The grounds of Yorkshire Sculpture Park will by dwarfed by the giant heads of the artist, as the first major UK exhibition of his works opens. The eerily lit polyester and marble heads of ‘Dialogue, 2009’ (pictured above) are among his works installed in the Gardens, where their vast, ghostly presence is at odds with the promise of the Spring blossoms.

11. The Shape of Things To Come | Saatchi Gallery, until 16 October

Showcasing the exciting, invigorating work of 20 contemporary scultpors, including established artists such Rebecca Warren and Roger Hiorns, and newcomers Kris Martin and David Altmejd. From unsettling stuffed animals to burlesque mutants engaged in a joyless sexual orgy, the shape of things to come appears to be mishapen and amorphous – Saatchi’s sculptors seem ashamed to make anything that could be described as heroic.