Palette cleansers: our photography, art and architecture picks for 2020

Warhol is revealed as a prophet, London goes down the rabbit hole and Don McCullin takes his masterworks to Merseyside

by Adrian Searle, Jonathan Jones, Oliver Wainwright and Sean O’Hagan

Picasso and Paper

Paper wasn’t just something to draw on for Picasso – it was yet another material he could manipulate. That effortless creativity started with sticking newspapers on to early cubist canvases to invent collage and evolved into his own style of playful origami sculpture – yet he also found time to create some of the greatest etchings ever, including the wondrous Vollard Suite, with its minotaurs, bullfights and voluptuous lovers.

Royal Academy, London, 25 January to 13 April

Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution

Jan van Eyck. Photograph: Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna

Ghent honours the greatest painter of the early northern Renaissance with numerous exhibitions and side-events, from the scholarly to the daft – including floral displays, themed food events, a Van Eyck shop, and even the Jan van Eyck Marathon. The main event however is Van Eyck: An Optical Revolution, featuring at least half of the known works by the artist and including the outer panels of Hubert and Van Eyck’s astonishing Ghent Altarpiece, following six years of restoration, and also including more than 100 works by Van Eyck’s contemporaries from across Europe.

Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent, 1 February to 30 April

Radical Figures

By the end of the last century, painting had been buried but it turns out the funeral was premature. The young 21st-century artists exhuming its oily corpse in this survey include Michael Armitage, whose subtle, complex paintings draw on memories of Kenya, and Ryan Mosley, whose art is a grotesque Dada carnival of bulbous humanoid forms. This is figurative painting, but not as we know it.

Whitechapel Gallery, London, 6 February to 10 May

We Will Walk – Art and Resistance from the American South

An ongoing story … Ralph Griffin’s Eagle, part of the We Will Walk exhibition. Photograph: © Estate of Ralph Griffin/ Artists Rights Society/ New York

Bringing together artists, civil rights photographers, makers of quilts, guitars (one fashioned with wood from a hanging tree), assemblages, expansive archive material, music and much more besides, We Will Walk focuses on African-American artists from Alabama and the surrounding states. The work dates from the civil rights period and its aftermath to the present day and also features the work of contemporary artists and thinkers, including Kerry James Marshall and Angela Davis, who both migrated from Alabama. It is a story that isn’t over, and not told enough.

Turner Contemporary, Margate, 7 February to 3 May

Steve McQueen

In his film Hunger, perhaps his finest work, McQueen homes in on the dying, emaciated body of the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands in a way that evokes both Christian paintings of the passion and Sands’s identification with them. It’s typical of the way he brings high art into cinemas as well as film-making into the gallery. How will this retrospective capture the unique achievement of the only person to win both an Oscar and a Turner prize?

Tate Modern, London, 13 February to 11 May

Linderism

Performance artist, zine maker, musician, documentary-photographer, Linder is known primarily for her post-punk Dadaist photomontages. This extensive show gives full reign to Linder’s expanded practice. Using the Kettle’s Yard Archive she will also evoke the elusive presence of Helen Ede, wife of Jim Ede, founder of Kettles’s Yard. Staging interventions throughout Kettle’s Yard and a new performance, at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, Linder will shake things up.

Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, 15 February to 16 April

Aubrey Beardsley

Beautiful yet utterly sordid … The Yellow Book by Audrey Beardsley. Photograph: © Tate

Victorian Britain’s kinkiest reprobate gets a well-deserved airing of his refined and beautiful yet utterly sordid prints. Beardsley portrayed himself as a self-confessed “monster” hiding in his four-poster bed and illustrated Lysistrata by Aristophanes with sumptuously pornographic images of bottoms. He also created a darkly beautiful illustrated edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. This will be wicked.

Tate Britain, London, 4 March to 25 May

Among the Trees

Tacita Dean’s portraits of ancient yew trees in English churchyards, their branches propped up with crutches as their gnarled trunks send roots down the centuries, are among the most moving art works of our time. Her arboreal meditations are among the many reveries in this survey of contemporary art’s relationship with trees. It starts with the arte povera movement that brought the forest into the gallery in the 1960s and brings us to the present with Peter Doig’s painted firs and Anya Gallaccio’s pastoral installations.

Hayward Gallery, London, 4 March to 17 May

Andy Warhol

 ‘Radically popular’ … Andy Warhol’s image of Debbie Harry (1980). Photograph: © Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc / Artists Right Society, New York and DACS, London

In his lifetime Warhol was dismissed as shallow but the further we get into a century he never lived to see, the more uncanny his insights into modern life appear. There are so many sides to his apparently simple pop art. The last Tate retrospective emphasised his dark view of America – this one discovers him as the forerunner of identity politics. He is our mirror, to quote his protege Lou Reed.

Tate Modern, London, 12 March to 6 September

Titian: Love, Desire, Death

This once-in-a-lifetime exhibition reunites the greatest mythological paintings ever created – a cycle Titian called his “poesie” in which the loves and transformations of the gods become subtle feasts of sensual paint and rich emotion. Venus begs Adonis to stay, Jupiter as a bull carries off Europa and Perseus rescues Andromeda in canvases that match the dramatic heights of Shakespeare (and that Shakespeare may have been influenced by).

National Gallery, London, 16 March to 14 June

Toyin Ojih Odutola

The gallery becomes an outsized graphic novel in this Nigerian-American artist’s first British show – but the story is far from straightforward. Powerfully delineated figures are lost in contemplative stillness. Line-drawn landscapes enfold their inaction in a mysterious limbo that could be a park or alien planet. These intense drawings illustrate a myth invented by Odutola herself. She believes drawing and writing have the same root. This is art as inspired daydream.

Barbican Curve, London, 26 March to 26 July

Artemisia Gentileschi

Blockbuster … Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as a Lute Player. Photograph: © Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

The first feminist artist ever, born in Rome in 1593, gets her long-awaited due. Raped as a teenager by the painter Agostino Tassi, Gentileschi spent a lifetime fighting back. In her great canvas Judith Slaying Holofernes, two women hold a man down on his bed so they can cut his head off – he is her rapist. This and just about all her other paintings will be in this raw and bloody blockbuster.

National Gallery, London, 4 April to 26 July

Back to Earth

To mark its 50th anniversary, the Serpentine Galleries have invited more than 50 leading artists, musicians, architects, poets, film-makers, scientists, thinkers and designers to propose artworks and projects in response to the climate emergency. Participants and collaborators include Brian Eno, Black Quantum Futurism collective, Judy Chicago, Olafur Eliasson, actor and activist Jane Fonda, indigenous Australian film collective Karrabing, Ed Ruscha, Tomas Sarraceno and many others. Imagining the future, the unthinkable and the possible, this promises to be a daunting, necessary show.

Serpentine Galleries, London. Dates to be confirmed.

Candice Breitz: Love Story

Giving migrants a voice … Stills from Love Story. Photograph: Candice Breitz

Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore bring a Hollywood touch to the plight of refugees by reading out their words. Wait – it’s not as glib as it sounds. This installation by South African artist Breitz questions why we take celebrities more seriously than the suffering millions. Moore and Baldwin’s polished performances are meant to send you to the second part of the show that gives migrants a direct voice.

Tate Liverpool, 9 April to 7 June

Ray Harryhausen

 Harryhausen’s Medusa from Clash of the Titans. Photograph: © Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation

No one forgets the myths and monsters this genius of art and cinema created. Harryhausen’s animated masterpieces, from the army of skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts to Sinbad’s swordfight with a Hindu goddess, have an imaginative power that lodges in your mind. He was equally at home creating flying saucers, giant crabs and Harpies. This blockbuster survey of his stop-motion menagerie should be a delight.

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 23 May to 25 October

Arctic: Culture and Climate

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The Arctic is not just a natural wonder but a human home. Peoples including the Sámi of Scandinavia’s far north and the Inuit in Canada, Alaska and Greenland preserve ways of life superbly adapted to ice and cold. Their cultural creations include ingenious hunting and fishing gear, icebound legends and works of art. Their achievement has been to live in harmony with nature at its most extreme – but as climate change destabilises the Arctic, what will become of this extraordinary heritage?

British Museum, London, from 28 May

Heather Phillipson: The End

The maquette for The End, Phillipson’s forthcoming commission for Trafalgar Square’s fourth plinth, shows a gigantic ice-cream cone with a cherry on top. A fly climbs the swirl of ice-cream and there’s a drone, ready for take off. It’s a tawdry monument to national hubris, the feelgood factor turning sickly before our eyes. Phillipson’s work churns with humour, autobiography, knockabout asides and a poet’s sense of the unlikely and surprising conjunction. Then in June, the artist fills Tate Britain’s Duveen galleries with the next Tate Britain commission. What will she do?

Trafalgar Square, London, March, and Tate Britain, London, 16 June to 18 October

Sheila Hicks

Ravishing … Saffron Sentinel. Photograph: Noam Preisman/© Sheila Hicks/courtesy of Alison Jacques Gallery

The Paris-based American artist has used weaving as the basis of her work for more than 50 years. Drawing on wildly different weaving traditions and indigenous textile practices, and working on both small woven drawings she creates on a hand-held frame and large scale installations that respond to the architecture of the gallery, this show follows major retrospectives in the US and Europe. Including more than 70 works, it promises to be as ravishing as it is overdue. The Hepworth is a perfect venue for her art.

The Hepworth, Wakefield, 24 June to 7 October

Alice: Curiouser and Curiouser

Lewis Carroll’s Victorian masterpiece of surreal nonsense has inspired art and cinema ever since Punch cartoonist Sir John Tenniel created its brilliant original illustrations with their solid renditions of the fantastic. Jan Svankmajer and Tim Burton are among the modern visionaries to have fallen down this rabbit hole. The V&A isn’t just showing the history of Alice, it’s giving Carroll the Bowie or Pink Floyd treatment with an “immersive” spectacular where you can ask Alice what the Dormouse said.

V&A, London, 27 June to 10 January 2021

Liverpool Biennial 2020: The Stomach and the Port

Now in its 11th outing, the Liverpool Biennial thinks about the city and a wide range of interrelated exhibitions as a fluid organism that is continuously shaped by and shaping its environment. The curatorial premise talks about three entry points – the stomach, porosity and kin. Make of this what you can. Many of the art works include sound, shun direct representation, destabilise gender binaries or look at intense forms of contact. There will be dance, music, all kinds of interdisciplinary shenanigans from a roster of international artists. If you have the stomach, pass the port.

Various venues, Liverpool, 11 July to 25 October

Cézanne: The Rock and Quarry Paintings

The craggy hard mind of Paul Cézanne found its mirror in the rugged rock formations of his native Provence. One of his close friends as a boy in Aix grew up to be a geology professor and their conversations about rocks and fossils informed his understanding of landscape. His paintings of lonely sun-bleached stony hillsides and voids cut into the earth are among his most forceful, profound and unforgettable works. This is where modern art begins.

Royal Academy, London, 12 July to 18 October

British Art Show 9

We’ve come a long way from British art’s past. By which I mean the 1990s, when shock and celebrity were everything. Politics, identity and social media matter more than elephant dung these days – or will that cliche about 21st-century British art be disrupted in turn by this latest instalment of the biggest and most ambitious survey of the scene? Kicking off in Manchester before touring, this promises to unveil a new creative generation and state of feeling.

Manchester Art Gallery and the Whitworth, from September

Marina Abramović

 A blazing star … Marina Abramović. Photograph: Marco Anelli

The world’s most charismatic performance artist has become part of 21st-century pop culture but here is a chance to explore the real story of Abramović’s art in a retrospective of her career. Born in communist Yugoslavia in 1946, she insists in her early work on individual experience, including personal endangerment and pain – and this self-exposure is still the essence of her art even if the risk now is emotional rather than physical. A blazing star, and that’s not just a reference to the one she lay in for a death-defying 1974 performance.

Royal Academy, London, 26 September to 8 December

Jean Dubuffet

The first major UK exhibition of the French artist Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) in over 50 years. Provocateur and founder of art brut, or raw art, Dubuffet began to collect what became known as “outsider art” in postwar Paris. One gallery focuses on Dubuffet’s extensive collection of this. Immersed in French intellectual and artistic life, and in the waning idea of an avant garde, Dubuffet embraced the arbitrary and irrational. Using crude materials and working with an ironic rejection of skill and finesse belied his sophistication. A complex, fascinating man.

Barbican, London, 30 September to 17 January 2021

Ann Veronica Janssens: Hot Pink Turquoise

Visitors will be able to ride reflective-wheeled bikes round the main gallery of this extensive exhibition by the Folkestone-born artist, who works in Brussels. Janssens’ immersive installations bathe viewers in light. Her ephemeral, perceptually arresting works often feature tinted fogs and densely coloured smoke. But there’s more to her work than smoke and mirrors. Janssens can make light appear solid and make solids melt into air. This will be the first opportunity to experience the full range of her compelling and often joyous art. She tunes our eyes.

South London Gallery, September.

Raphael

 Beguiling … The Madonna and Child With the Infant Baptist by Raphael. Photograph: © National Gallery

This good-looking as well as gifted Renaissance wonder died in 1520, at the age of 37, after exhausting himself with a night’s arduous lovemaking – or so claimed his biographer Vasari, perhaps romanticising syphilis. The National Gallery honours his 500th anniversary with a blockbuster survey of an artist who stands alongside Leonardo and Michelangelo at the apex of the canon, and whose art is just as beguiling as theirs when you surrender to its sweet harmonious musical beauty.

National Gallery, London, 3 October to 24 January 2021

Bruce Nauman

Possibly the most innovative, daring and influential of American artists. However familiar his art seems to be, he has constantly reinvented himself in his long career, always giving something new. Mending fences on the ranch, watching cats in the barn, evoking interrogations, domestic strife, slapstick and Samuel Beckett – they’re all in there.

Tate Modern, London, 6 October to 17 January 2021

Rodin

This paradoxical 19th-century titan invented modern sculpture by returning to the Renaissance. In an age of sculptural vapidity, Rodin rediscovered the expressive power of Michelangelo. His icons of passion and pain start in hell – all his famous statues evolved from the anguished swarming figures in his unfinished masterpiece The Gates of Hell. Out of this giant illustration of Dante’s Inferno, he conceived The Thinker, The Kiss and his other visions of the agony and ecstasy of modern life.

Tate Modern, London, 21 October to 21 February 2021

Nero

In our age of tinpot tyrants, prepare to meet their prototype. The Roman emperor Nero made people listen to his awful singing, killed Christians for fun and set Rome on fire - or so the historian Tacitus said. But did he exaggerate Nero’s madness to prove his theory that absolute power absolutely corrupts? And will we get to see the booby-trapped boat with which Nero attempted to drown his mother Agrippina?

British Museum, London, November

Tracey Emin and Edvard Munch

Giant-sized … Tracey Emin with her model for The Mother, which will be 7 metres tall Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA-EFE

Emin is creating a colossal statue, The Mother, for the new Munch Museum (see below) that opens in Oslofjord in the spring. This exhibition explores their artistic intimacy. Her recent giant selfies showing her face exhausted by insomnia are homages to an insomniac Munch self-portrait, while her entire truth-telling confessional project emulates his terrifying honesty. Read our interview with Emin about the project.

Royal Academy, London, 15 November to 28 February 2021

Architecture and design

Countryside, the Future

At the age of 75, the radical Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is bored of the city. His next frontier? The countryside. Almost a decade in the making, this ambitious research-driven exhibition promises to confound your every preconception about the great outdoors, tackling leisure, climate change, migration, rural preservation and digitised agriculture in a multifaceted portrait of the 98% of the Earth’s surface not occupied by cities.

Guggenheim Museum, New York, 20 February to 14 August

Congregation, exhibition by the Architecture Foundation

Staged in the newly refurbished crypt of St Mary Magdalene in Paddington, west London, this thoughtful exhibition will examine the way that social and economic pressures have changed the nature of faith spaces in the UK over the past decade. It will feature 20 diverse projects, from the stunning new Cambridge Mosque, to a floating church designed to ply London’s waterways, and a proposal for a Finchley synagogue with a striking geometric roof.

From 22 February

Academy Museum of Motion Pictures by Renzo Piano

Dazzling new mecca … Renzo Piano’s Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. Photograph: Renzo Piano Building Workshop/Academy Museum Foundation/Image from L’Autre Image

Standing as a great bulging sphere on Miracle Mile in Los Angeles, the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures looks like an arrival from a Hollywood sci-fi movie. Designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, it is an appropriate guise for what promises to be a dazzling new mecca for film buffs, bursting with movie memorabilia and offering a behind-the-scenes look into how films are made.

Los Angeles, early 2020

Bags: Inside Out

It might not sound like a Bowie-level blockbuster, but the V&A’s forthcoming foray into bags will delve deep into the duffle, probe the purse and scrutinise the sack, shining a spotlight into every velcro’d pocket and zipped compartment of the ultimate accessory. From rucksacks to despatch boxes, Birkin bags to Louis Vuitton luggage, the exhibition will showcase 300 objects from the 16th century to today.

V&A, London, 25 April to 3 January 2021

Sneakers Unboxed: Studio to Street

Can you tell your Air Jordans from your Air Force 1s? The Design Museum gets down with street style next year, with an exhibition that will track the influence of trainers from high-performance sportswear to cult objects and red carpet attire. It will look at how 3D-printing, self-lacing and recycled materials are changing footwear, and give visitors a chance to design their own pair of superfly kicks.

Design Museum, London, 6 May to 6 September

Munch Museum, Oslo, by Juan Herreros

Enigmatic … the new Munch Museum, Oslo. Photograph: Ivar Kvaal

Housed in an enigmatic aluminium mesh tower that leans forward at the top, as if craning its neck out over Oslo’s harbour, the new Munch Museum is a controversial new addition to the Norwegian capital’s waterfront. The building will finally provide an adequate home for the collection of 28,000 paintings, sketches, photographs and sculptures that the artist bequeathed to the city, arranged over 13 floors, making it one of the largest museums in the world dedicated to a single artist.

June (to be confirmed)

Bee’ah headquarters, Sharjah, by Zaha Hadid

A rippling dune-like structure rising out of the desert in Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, one of Zaha Hadid’s last posthumous buildings will open next year. This lithe headquarters for the emirate’s waste management company is one of her most futuristic works, billed as the world’s first AI-powered office building. From visitor arrival to energy consumption, every aspect of the building’s performance will be tracked by an omniscient digital brain.

Summer (to be confirmed)

Noel house and restaurant by Junya Ishigami

Architect Junya Ishigami said his client asked for “something like a wine cellar”, but the result couldn’t be more strange. Burrowed into the ground, as if excavated by gigantic worms, this grotto-like residence and restaurant will be one of the most unusual buildings to open next year. Formed by digging a series of holes into the ground, casting concrete into the spaces, then carving out the earth beneath, it promises to be a gnarled, primitive place like no other.

Yamaguchi, Japan, autumn

Grand Egyptian Museum by Heneghan Peng

Geometric … the Grand Egyptian Museum takes shape in Giza, Cairo. Photograph: Mohamed el-Shahed/AFP/Getty Images

Looking like something the pharaohs might have summoned into being, the Grand Egyptian Museum rises out of the landscape near the Great Pyramids as a chiselled, geometric form. Designed by Irish practice Heneghan Peng, the building is wrapped with a veil of translucent stone, covering a series of sunken halls that will contain almost four football pitches of permanent exhibition space, where the Tutankhamen collection will be displayed alongside innumerable other treasures.

Giza, Egypt, October (to be confirmed)

Taipei Performing Arts Centre, by OMA

A veritable transformer of a building, the Taipei Performing Arts Centre will finally realise the architects’ holy grail of a truly flexible and adaptable performance venue. It combines a 2,000-seat auditorium, a 1,500-seat theatre and a black box space, each of which can function separately and be combined into an enormous multi-sided events space, while a public loop meanders its way through the building, giving enticing backstage glimpses.

Autumn (to be confirmed)

Photography

Visual Rights

Including work from visual artists in Palestine and Israel as well as Britain, this show explores how images are used to manage people’s ability to live or move freely, particularly in contested regions where the boundaries between civilian and military ways of seeing are constantly and intentionally blurred. Artists include Hagit Keysar, who experiments with aerial photography in Israel and Palestine, and Argentinian-born Miki Kratsman, who has documented the harshness of daily life in the Palestinian territories.

Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, 16 January to 22 March

Wright Morris: The Home Place

Everyday vignettes … Dresser Drawer, Ed’s Place, Norfolk, Nebraska 1947. Photograph: Estate of Wright Morris

This underrated pioneer of the visual novel (fictional storytelling combined with photographs) travelled through the US in the immediate aftermath of the Great Depression, producing three books that form the basis of this show. Unlike more celebrated contemporaries like Walker Evans, Morris never made portraits, instead photographing everyday objects and landscapes to create a haunting depiction of human struggle and decline.

Foam Amsterdam, 24 January to 5 April

Haley Morris-Cafiero: The Bully Pulpit

A provocative response to the often anonymous trolls who responded to Morris-Cafiero’s work on social media. Following the publication of her previous series, The Watchers, she became the focus of a sustained wave of body-shaming. She has responded by dressing up like her most vociferous detractors, whom she tracked down online, and posing alongside representations of their most abusive comments. Selfies, but not as we know them.

TJ Boulting, London, 13 February to 14 March

Pieter Hugo: La Cucaracha

Created in Mexico in 2018 and 2019, and named after a well-known Spanish folk song, La Cucaracha mixes arresting portraits and mysterious still-lifes made by the South African photographer on various visits to Mexico City, Oaxaca de Juárez, Juchitán and Hermosillo. “Alongside the flamboyance and high-pitched register of this series, there is the ordinariness of the everyday,” Hugo has said. “I am drawn to the fabulousness of the banal and the banality of the exotic.”

Huxley-Parlour, London, 18 February to 14 March

Masculinities: Liberation Through Photography

Ambitious and timely … Masculinities: Liberation through Photography. Photograph: Collection T Dworzak/Magnum

An ambitious and timely group exhibition exploring the changing nature of masculinity through the work of 50 artists. Addressing complex themes – patriarchy, power, queer identity, race, sexuality, class, fatherhood – it will show how photography and film have been crucial in shaping masculinity in its many forms. Includes work by Richard Avedon, Peter Hujar and Annette Messager.

Barbican, London, 20 February to 17 May

Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things

Cecil Beaton

 Cecil Beaton. Photograph: National Portrait Gallery

“Art without snobbery didn’t interest him,” said Tom Wolfe of Beaton, making it a tricky moment to celebrate this photographer. This exhibition of portraits of the famous and the privileged of the 1920s will do nothing to sway sceptics. Expect glamour aplenty, though, and a cast of characters that includes socialites (Diana Mitford), film stars (Tallulah Bankhead) and the supposedly brightest of the “bright young things” (Stephen Tennant).

National Portrait Gallery, London, 12 March to 7 June

Zanele Muholi

Tate Modern hosts the first major survey of the work of Zanele Muholi, the photographer-activist whose massive archive of South African black lesbian and trans people, Faces and Phases, is one of contemporary photography’s great documentary projects. The exhibition will also include a more recent series of dramatic self-portraits, Somnyama Ngonyama (Hail the Dark Lioness).

Tate Modern, London, 29 April to 18 October

Don McCullin

Having drawn huge crowds to Tate Britain in 2019, this retrospective of the revered war photographer opens in Liverpool this summer. Alongside his iconic images from the Vietnam war and famine-stricken Biafra, the show will also include an added selection of photographs depicting everyday life and the industrial landscapes of northern towns and cities during the 1960s and 70s. Among the wealth of ephemera is his Nikon camera that was struck by a bullet in Cambodia.

Tate Liverpool, 5 June to 27 September

Britain & Photography: 1945-79

Spanning the years between the end of the second world war and the election of Margaret Thatcher, this exhibition maps out a defining period for British photojournalism and documentary photography. It will include iconic images by the likes of Bert Hardy, Lee Miller, Bill Brandt, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Don McCullin. An intriguing visual portrait of another Britain, both familiar and impossibly distant.

Tate Britain, London, 30 June to 27 September

Helen Levitt

Rich street scenes … New York, 1940 by Helen Levitt. Photograph: Helen Levitt

One of the greatest American street photographers, Helen Levitt began shooting in New York in the 1930s. Her work is quieter and more socially aware than that of the mainly male counterparts who followed in her wake, with children appearing often in her photographs. Her colour tones are richly hued and her eye for gesture second to none, bodies crouching or stretching in a wonderful choreography of the commonplace. The exhibition includes many rarely seen images and short films.

The Photographers’ Gallery, London, 10 July to 11 October