London events in September

‘With great power comes great responsibility,’ said a wise uncle to his superhero nephew once. It’s a sentiment that hovers around Grayson Perry’s exhibition. Granted, Perry’s own alter ego wears lipstick and gingham rather than a mask and spandex, but the artist/transvestite/unlikely national treasure feels just as much the reluctant hero. This show is intended as a meditation on the role of popularity in art, but if it does anything, it highlights there’s little difference between one ‘P’ word and the other. It was Perry’s ceramic pots that threw him into the mainstream's limelight, but here you’ll also find tapestries, woodcuts, assemblages and custom-made motorbikes and skateboards. Those who deride him for glibly milking the zeitgeist (middle-aged broadsheet critics for the most part) won’t be converted here. Nationalist politics, art-world bickering, the class divide, austerity Britain – Perry casts his net far and wide, with a wry frown and his tongue in cheek. Curiously, it’s the bleaker moments that resonate most. Those who’ve read his book ‘The Descent of Man’ will know he views traditional masculinity as a ticking time bomb of rising suicide rates, domestic abuse and online misogyny; in one woodcut, it’s depicted as a snarling beast with humongous bollocks whose innards are labelled with words like ‘logical’, ‘rational’ and ‘important.’ Another piece, a savage takedown of the institution of marriage, features two miserable-looking wooden spouses encased in an ai

Whoever said the Square Mile is purely the domain of bankers and stockbrokers? The seventh edition of this urban sculpture trail will bring a dose of high culture to the City from June 27. It's quite a blokey line-up this year; look out for work by shark-pickling troublemaker Damien Hirst and American schlock merchant Paul McCarthy. You'll find a handy map of the trail here.

Nude drawings always come with a heavy whiff of old perv; a wafting aroma of thigh-rubbing horniness that overwhelms the art. But when Florence Peake does it, the work takes on a whole new scent. She makes these drawings of naked human bodies as part of choreographed performances, the paper laid out on the floor as she moves around it. Essentially, they’re performative drawings, which sounds like absolute nonsense, but it makes a difference. The bodies captured on these pastel-coloured sheets are exaggerated: big fleshy heaps, unctuous curves, swoops of legs, bums and tums. They’re erotic and sensual, but there’s something more going on. Nude drawings are usually such dead things – a motionless model, a motionless artist – but Peake’s drawings are full of the movement they were created with. They’re alive, they feel like the moment they were made. They’re bodies in motion, captured blurringly, fleetingly, quickly. Huh, how about that: nude drawings that don’t stink. @eddyfrankel

‘With great power comes great responsibility,’ said a wise uncle to his superhero nephew once. It’s a sentiment that hovers around Grayson Perry’s exhibition. Granted, Perry’s own alter ego wears lipstick and gingham rather than a mask and spandex, but the artist/transvestite/unlikely national treasure feels just as much the reluctant hero. This show is intended as a meditation on the role of popularity in art, but if it does anything, it highlights there’s little difference between one ‘P’ word and the other. It was Perry’s ceramic pots that threw him into the mainstream's limelight, but here you’ll also find tapestries, woodcuts, assemblages and custom-made motorbikes and skateboards. Those who deride him for glibly milking the zeitgeist (middle-aged broadsheet critics for the most part) won’t be converted here. Nationalist politics, art-world bickering, the class divide, austerity Britain – Perry casts his net far and wide, with a wry frown and his tongue in cheek. Curiously, it’s the bleaker moments that resonate most. Those who’ve read his book ‘The Descent of Man’ will know he views traditional masculinity as a ticking time bomb of rising suicide rates, domestic abuse and online misogyny; in one woodcut, it’s depicted as a snarling beast with humongous bollocks whose innards are labelled with words like ‘logical’, ‘rational’ and ‘important.’ Another piece, a savage takedown of the institution of marriage, features two miserable-looking wooden spouses encased in an ai

You might not expect to connect with an artist who hails from Ottoman aristocracy and once sat down with Hitler to trade notes on painting. But that’s the cunning of abstraction: through a mesh of colours and spontaneous shapes, we can share and understand a common language, without ever saying the same thing. And that’s what you get with the work of Turkish painter Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid – pulsating hives of colour on large cuts of canvas that unfold in front of the viewer like living Byzantine mosaics, letting the interpretive chips fall where they may. Her painting story is a familiar one: starts out classically trained, strays from figurative work, ‘finds’ herself in the abstract. But in this extensive exhibition of Zeid’s work, the sea change is like a kaleidoscopic sucker punch; her paintings from 1948 onwards literally leave you seeing stars. Tate has done good, giving her biggest pieces room to scream, the same privilege afforded to the macho creations of the RA’s ‘Abstract Expressionism’ show. Zeid led an extraordinary life (as princesses tend to). In 1921, she became one of the first women to study at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts. She went on to marry into the Iraqi royal family, and narrowly escaped assassination in Iraq’s 1958 military coup. Yet many in the West have never heard her story, let alone seen her work. Admittedly, her post-abstract period is less impressive. At 57 she cooked her first meal, and was so entranced by turkey bones that she pa

Now in its fifty-second year, the renowned and celebrated annual wildlife photography competition and exhibition returns to the Natural History Museum with images of the most extraordinary species on the planet, captured by professional and amateur photographers.  And FYI, all wannabe animal-snappers out there: next year's competition will be open for entries from October 24 and will close on December 15. Please note that last entry to the exhibition is daily at 5.15pm.

Whoever said the Square Mile is purely the domain of bankers and stockbrokers? The seventh edition of this urban sculpture trail will bring a dose of high culture to the City from June 27. It's quite a blokey line-up this year; look out for work by shark-pickling troublemaker Damien Hirst and American schlock merchant Paul McCarthy. You'll find a handy map of the trail here.

Life stinks. And to prove that, the East Wing of Somerset House has been transformed into ten abstract looking chambers – each given over to a different pioneering fragrance –  for an interactive exhibition all about, you guessed it, perfume. It opens with a room of beautifully presented bottles of perfume housed in glass cloches, each representing a different decade, with the ’90s of course being summed up by the iconic frosted glass bottle of CK One. For the 1930s, there’s a bottle showing the genius of Elsa Schiaparelli – it looks like Marc Jacobs’s Daisy and Jean Paul Gaultier’s Classique went back in time and had a baby. But the curators don’t want your nose to be overwhelmed, so there are only a couple that are available to smell. One of them, the ground-breaking L’Origan from Coty, was created in 1905 and is long out of circulation, but those clever perfumers have recreated it from the old recipe. Powdery and delicately floral, it smells just like my grandma. And that’s the thing with perfume. It’s not just about the notes that you can sniff out – it has incredible powers of nostalgia that can transport you, in a soft, dreamlike state, to a vague time or feeling in the past. The rest of the show is more abstract. And because your sense of smell can be easily misled there is very little direction throughout; instead, each room been designed to reflect the scent that it houses. You’re left to follow your nose around the space with a notes card on which you jot down

There are stories of John Singer Sargent painting in the field: sploshing colour around with sponges, hissing at his paper, muttering to himself. The American artist is best known for his fantastically accomplished, mildly eccentric society portraits. He was the classic expat Yank Europhile, courting favour (and occasionally opprobrium) among monied sorts in Paris and London. Alongside his day job, though, he painted watercolours throughout his life, and this show of them, the first in this country since 19-bloody-18 reveals Sargent’s manic devotion to his craft. He returns to the same subjects over and over. Venice in particular obsessed him: he would paint in a gondola, so his perspective on the city is sea-level, with buildings and boats looming over the viewer, dashing in the rippling, ever-changing light and water. You sense his freedom away from the salon and the studio: constantly starting over, revelling in the never-finishable. You can see the influence of photography, too. Scenes are tightly, weirdly cropped: nothing is polite or planned. Elsewhere, there are superb studies of Alpine torrents and glacial moraines. Unlike a lot of watercolourists, Sargent could actually paint people, and his workmen, recuperating soldiers, friends and family are all accorded the same democratic casual brilliance. I think this is key to this show: in a Europe increasingly divided and class-ridden, Sargent went looking for subjects and places that didn’t have any attendant societal bag

If you’ve heard of Alberto Giacometti, you’re probably thinking: ‘Oh yes, that bloke who did the spindly stick people.’ So much has already been written and said about the Swiss artist; luckily, this show doesn’t attempt anything too spurious. But that invites a slightly worrying question: if there’s nothing new to add to the Giacometti story, then does he still matter? The first few rooms go through the usual motions: formative years, early influences. He was 21 when he moved from Switzerland to Paris to train as a sculptor and entered an art scene that would have been a feverish petri dish of avant-garde movements and radical ideas. It’s interesting to see how the young Alberto dabbled in cubism and surrealism, and how he applied them to his twin sources of obsession: the head and figure. Lots of the early stuff is delicate and sensual – informed by the art of non-Western cultures like Ancient Egypt and West Africa – but do look out for the fascinatingly horrifying ‘Woman With Her Throat Cut’ (1932), a deconstructed heap of abstracted body parts, its ribcage open like a sprung bear-trap. By the time World War Two broke out, Giacometti found himself trapped in Switzerland and working on figurative sculptures that were growing ever smaller, in an attempt to depict a sense of distance between viewer and subject. Let’s be honest, bronze figures the shape and size of a matchstick should come off as a bit gimmicky. But they don’t. It’s at this point you realise the one, embarra

Nude drawings always come with a heavy whiff of old perv; a wafting aroma of thigh-rubbing horniness that overwhelms the art. But when Florence Peake does it, the work takes on a whole new scent. She makes these drawings of naked human bodies as part of choreographed performances, the paper laid out on the floor as she moves around it. Essentially, they’re performative drawings, which sounds like absolute nonsense, but it makes a difference. The bodies captured on these pastel-coloured sheets are exaggerated: big fleshy heaps, unctuous curves, swoops of legs, bums and tums. They’re erotic and sensual, but there’s something more going on. Nude drawings are usually such dead things – a motionless model, a motionless artist – but Peake’s drawings are full of the movement they were created with. They’re alive, they feel like the moment they were made. They’re bodies in motion, captured blurringly, fleetingly, quickly. Huh, how about that: nude drawings that don’t stink. @eddyfrankel

This exhibition looks set to flip the idea of 'black art' on its head, tracing an underlooked 20-year period of creative innovation among African-American artists, against the seismic backdrop of the Civil Rights movement.