Sculpture is as much a part of Yorkshire as cricket and a decent cup of tea, with the “sculpture triangle”, comprising four prestigious museums and galleries, feeling almost as well-established as the county’s famed rhubarb triangle.

At their best, Olafur Eliasson’s installations change the way you see, think and feel. Who would have guessed, for instance, that Londoners would take off their togs to bask in the glow of an artificial sun at Tate Modern. That was in 2003, when The weather project transformed the Turbine Hall into an indoor park suffused with yellow light.

Half organic, half high-tech, a bank of magnet-flowers sways not in response to a breeze, but to a magnetic field. Their uncannily naturalistic movements are coupled with a form that is blatantly functional: an unseen, elemental force masquerades as nature at its most benignly pastoral (Pictured below right: Magnetic Fields, l969).

With 50 curated exhibitions spread across the town, there is much to see at Arles. In an effort to whittle it down I asked the man in the press office what was hot. "The weather," he replied deadpan.

Once a year, the National Portrait Gallery gives us a slice of immediate social history presented in an array of contemporary painted portraits of the young, the old, and the inbetween.

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who made his reputation as a leading German film-maker with The Lives of Others (2006), told the New Yorker that his latest film sprang out of a desire to explore the relationship between making art and healing.

Félix Vallotton is best known for his satirical woodcuts, printed in the radical newspapers and journals of turn-of-the-century Paris. He earned a steady income, for instance, as chief illustrator for La Revue blanche, which carried articles and reviews by leading lights such as Marcel Proust, Alfred Jarry and Erik Satie. You can see the influence of Japanese prints in the flattened spaces, simplified shapes and unusual viewpoints that give a comic slant to scenes of Parisian life.

Under a turbulent sky racked with jagged clouds suggesting bolts of lightning, pale figures hurl themselves into a spitting expanse of water. Swathed in white towels, other figures mingle with the pink bodies, seeming to process along the pier as if towards a baptism. Swimmers’ vigorous arms overtop their submerged heads; on land, no individual face is distinguished. As if exuberance could tip at any time into anarchy, a sense of threat pervades the depiction of communal leisure.