It’s very difficult to believe that this is the first major museum retrospective of the work of Man Ray.  Like yesterday’s post on Duchamp, here’s an artist who played a major part in international visual art throughout the twentieth century but whose contribution now just seems like a given.

He identified first and foremost as a painter, but he’s best known for his photogram -- pictures that he called ‘rayographs’.  Dadaist, Surrealist, filmmaker, fashion photographer and paragon of the avant-garde, Man Ray’s influence is permanent.

This exhibition focusses on his career in Philadelphia, New York, Hollywood and Paris between 1916 and 1976 and takes as its central conceit his photographic portraits.  As one of the most significant artists of the period, we’re presented with a wide range of names to ponder on and linger over: Pablo Picasso, Ray’s muse and lover Kiki de Montparnasse, Lee Miller, Ava Gardner, Catherine Deneuve, and back to Marcel Duchamp again.

Photography is the great leveller: everyone takes pictures, everyone’s in pictures and everyone has an opinion on pictures.  Arguably, it’s the most popular of mainstream art techniques.  And here we have some of the best and most original.  Man Ray’s striking aesthetic never ages, and through the 150 or so works that are on display here they move as gracefully as the most classical of fine art.

Man Ray Portraits is at the National Portrait Gallery until 27 May.

Marcel Duchamp spent much of his later life ignored by the art world at large.  He died in 1968, but it’s only recently that his legacy has taken on greater affect and he is now known as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, influencing everything from Conceptual Art, to the Young British Artists, installations, dance and avant-garde music.  Conveniently, many people have forgotten this fact.  He’s back (or rather, his spirit is back) in London for a new reconsideration of his influence over some of the twentieth century’s other greatest artists, with a new exhibition at the Barbican: The Bride and the Bachelors.

They take us back to post-war New York, and bunch of guys who sat around wishing that art could be different; something else entirely.  This was a scene dominated by Mark Rothko in New York and Pablo Picasso in Europe.  Duchamp was busy dressing up as his female alter-ego Rrose Sélavy, and she was being anxiously pursued by four male suitors: painters Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham.

Of course, the title of this exhibition refers to Duchamp’s complex and influential glass artwork, but it makes perfect sense here as an analogy.  The show traces a line through the work of the four acolytes in relation to their inspiration by Duchamp.  What this show ultimately reveals is a systematic analysis of their work and how it fails to overcome the psychological symbolism of the grandmaster at work.  That’s not to say Rauschenberg, Johns, Cage or Cunningham’s work is no good, but they spent their lives in awe of the Frenchman.  ‘I can’t get along without Duchamp,’ said John Cage.  ‘(He) made it possible for us to live as we do.’  It’s an incredibly sweet sentiment, and brings much-needed vitality and life to art that can otherwise seem a bit too cerebral.

The Bride and The Bachelors is at the Barbican until 09 June.

Jason Brooks is a name we could know better.  He is an extremely talented fine artist, who specialises in photorealistic paintings and drawings.  His work is award-winning and he has completed portraits of some of the world’s most famous names.  He studied at Goldsmiths alongside Damien Hirst and the other major names of the Young British Artists movement.  So why is Ultraflesh, his first London solo show since 2008, filled with abstract landscapes and mini, seemingly unfinished, sculptures?

He’s a very smart and thoughtful man, is Jason Brooks.  While the majority of his former colleagues get fat off reputation, Brooks has gone back on himself.  Do you ever think how things could go if you went back in time knowing what you do now?  Brooks left London some years ago and built a studio in the countryside.  It didn’t quite work out how he imagined and he ended up moving back, but not before becoming something of a collector of amateur art.

The works in Ultraflesh begin with the art that Brooks has collected.  Placing them under intense scrutiny, he takes a specific element and plays with it, skews it, and re-represents it as something that’s all at once recognisable, uncanny, and markedly different.  It’s the mutant cousin of the original artist’s conception.  Star curator and former Goldsmiths professor Andrew Renton has recently taken over at Marlborough Contemporary, where Ultraflesh is showing.  It’s a perfect match between the conditions of public art, and the structures of the commercial gallery world.  I don’t say it often about private shows, but this is worth going out of your way for.

Jason Brooks: Ultraflesh is at Marlborough Contemporary until 16 March.