All that is solid ... The Cliffs at Etretat, 1885 (detail), by Claude Monet, in From Paris: A Taste for Impressionism. Photograph: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute
The art of the French avant garde in the 19th century always has the power to startle because it is always underestimated. Newspapers tend to see it as safe; art historians analyse its bourgeois ideology. But the public knows better. The reason Monet, Renoir, Manet and their contemporaries remain so popular is not because people want "safe" art. It is because we can recognise true inspiration when we see it. The impressionists captured the feel of modern life in a way that was unprecedented. There's a lightness and reality to their paintings that is the taste of the world we inhabit. In these paintings, as their contemporary Karl Marx said of modernity, all that is solid melts into air.
• Royal Academy, London W1, from 7 July until 23 September
Richard Wilson
The artist who filled Saatchi's tank with oil offers a sculptural take on a British pop icon, as he recreates the tottering bus from the final moments of the film The Italian Job.
• De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, from 7 July until 1 October
Peter Blake
A hero of pop art revisits the music that has inspired him.
• Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, until 7 October
Mark Wallinger
This quirky conceptualist always goes his own way – and it's worth following along.
• Baltic, Gateshead, until 14 October
Olympic Posters
Chris Ofili's is the best and Tracey Emin's is the silliest, but whose will capture imaginations this summer?
• Tate Britain, London SW1, until 23 September
Masterpiece of the week
Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, Young Spartans Exercising
Young Spartans Exercising, 1860, by Edgar Degas. Photograph: The National Gallery The strange erotic intensity of this history painting by Degas is a clue to the passions that pulse within his later impressionist and post-impressionist works. Near-naked young men and women face each other in tense competition, a fantasy of some athletic sex war. Degas shows a similarly charged sexual obsessiveness in later paintings in the same gallery: through his eyes, even hair-brushing becomes a sadomasochist ritual, and as for an acrobat suspending herself by her teeth ...
• National Gallery, London WC2
Image of the week
Shepard Fairey's mural at the London Pleasure Gardens What we learned this week
That it's possible to redo Van Gogh in dominoes
What a jumbo jet nose, a ginormous megaphone and a bus spray-painted with bubbles have in common
That a contemporary collection of Middle Eastern photography has been acquired for the UK – and about time, too
How beautiful the new Turner, Monet and Twombly show is
What the wild men of Germany, Romania and Croatia look like
And finally
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