Fresh art opening up

As an ad man he flogged us everything from the Tory party to condoms, but Charles Saatchi's most successful ongoing campaign must surely be his own brand of contemporary art. Now, he has installed his fabled collection in a permanent home just along the river from Tate Modern, filling County Hall's roomy 40,000 sq ft with works by artists whose names he has made, among them the Chapman Brothers, Tracey Emin and, of course, Damien Hirst, who is the subject of the gallery's opening retrospective.

The Museum Of The Mind: Art And Memory In World Cultures

It may lure coachloads of tourists and rowdy schoolchildren from across the world, but the British Museum is an attraction we Londoners tend to take for granted. As part of its 250th anniversary celebrations, this haunting exhibition asks us to banish images of dusty display cases and to think of it instead as a 'Theatre Of Memory'. To help explore the importance of memory across centuries and continents, some 60 objects have been skimmed from its vast collections, spanning Ancient Egyptian 'mummy portraits' to car-shaped coffins from present-day Ghana and a specially commissioned Day Of The Dead sculpture from Mexico.

Guy Bourdin

Legend has it that this photographer could make grown men cry, and he is even said to have had the consummately cool Serge Gainsbourg rolling around in a gutter, but as this retrospective shows, he got results. Bourdin spent more than three decades working for French Vogue, and key images from those years are displayed here alongside unpublished pictures. All combine slick, technical brilliance with a keen sense of drama and an eye for the unnervingly surreal - and his vision is further fleshed out by cine films made on the sets of fashion shoots. See feature page 36. Thur 17 Apr-Sun 17 Aug, Victoria And Albert Museum,Cromwell Road, SW7 (020-7942 2000).

Peter Howson: Stations Of The Cross

This acclaimed Scottish artist and ageing New Glasgow Boy has had a tumultuous time over the past decade, even by the gritty standards of his own art. Having always sought inspiration from the darker side of life, his numerous personal crises were compounded by a stint as the official war artist in Bosnia, and culminated in physical and mental collapse. Previous work has ranged from delicate pastels to hulking canvases, but as this latest show reveals, his Balkan experience has altered his perspective. Sat 12 Apr-Sun 11 May, Flowers East, 82 Kingsland Road, E2 (020-7920 7777).