The artists who went wild in Paris

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Susan Moore is bowled over by the boldness of the Fauvists

Fauvism was the first avant-garde movement or 'ism' of the 20th century. It was also one of the shortest lived. Even so, the radical experiments of the artists drawn into its ambit were profound and long-lasting. Theirs was no intellectual, manifesto-driven agenda: the term Les Fauves ('the Wild Beasts') was meant by the critic Louis Vauxcelles in a review of the Salon d'Automne of 1905 as an insult – but gleefully accepted as a badge of pride by the artists themselves. The movement is perhaps best described as a coalescing of ideas among artists exploring the ramifications of the Post- and neo- Impressionism of Van Gogh, Cézanne, Gauguin and Seurat. The result of their meeting, as this exhibition demonstrates so vividly, was an explosion of pure colour.

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Gill Partington finds that blank books can be very expressive

Inside the opulent neo-baroque exterior of the Leopold Hoesch Museum in Düren, east of Cologne, an altogether more austere prospect awaited visitors this summer: room after room of blankness. Curated by publisher and collector Moritz Küng, 'Raw, Blank, Illegible: Artists' Books as Statements' gathered together no less than 256 unreadable volumes, dating from the 1960s to the present. You might expect the overriding effect to be one of monotony – surely one empty page is the same as any other, after all? But it's just the opposite: blankness turns out to be surprisingly versatile and generative. In Idries Shah's The Book of the Book (1969), it conveys the spiritual principles of Sufi mysticism. For herman de vries, it's the vehicle for a multi-volume meditation on the colour white (1970). Bill Adler's The Official Government Nuclear Survivors Manual (1982) deploys it for satirical purposes.

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Digby Warde-Aldam takes a turn around the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont

Have you ever worked as a tour guide? Until I did a spot of it earlier this summer, it was pretty much my fantasy job. Alas, the dream was quickly shattered: the problem was not my unanimously charming clients, nor the crowds packing out the museums of Paris and its environs; it was other tour guides. The cacophony of hearing your own rehearsed factoids pre-empted in unison by dozens of other semi-qualified voices was excruciating. Indeed, the only thing preventing my charges from rumbling me as a Wikipedia-educated fraud was the fact they could barely hear me. It fast became obvious that the ideal place to learn about the history and character of modern Paris lay far away from the summer scrum that is the Louvre – ideally, somewhere slightly off the beaten track, out in the open and, crucially, free of 'expert' competition. My local park, say.

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Jonathan Griffin pays tribute to Anna Atkins, the queen of cyan

The cameraless photograms of Anna Atkins are instantly recognisable: they typically consist of a ghostly pale silhouette of a plant or lichen floating on a blue ground. While some may be more individually spectacular than others, they make best sense in series, when Atkins' methodical objectivity is most clearly conveyed. Her gaze – which one might even describe as mechanical – now seems radically modern, anticipating, perhaps, the rigour and austerity of Bernd and Hilla Becher's photographic series of water towers and blast furnaces. The work lends itself especially well to republication because it was made, originally, in book form. During her lifetime, Atkins produced volumes of cyanotypes, each unique plate recording a particular botanical specimen.

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Will Martin wonders who's watching who at London Zoo

Since I moved to London years ago, I have never had my photo taken in a phone box, or taken a ride around Soho in one of those neon rickshaws. I'm trying my best to blend in. If it's something I can't imagine a 'real' Londoner doing, then I'm not doing it. London Zoo doesn't fit into this bracket for me: lions, tigers and giraffes aren't in Eastenders. But Apollo offered to arrange a visit, so I compromised on this stance and headed off to the zoo on a sunny weekend. I decided to be led for the day by a free map with a checklist of 12 animals on the back: 'Who can you spot at the zoo?'. Halfway down the list was the western lowland gorilla and, as I soon found myself next to a wooden sign saying 'Gorilla Kingdom', I seemed to be off to a good start.

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Achim Gnann explains how Michelangelo discovered a dynamic new style

The artistic competition between Leonardo and Michelangelo to prepare vast murals of battle scenes in the same hall in the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence is well known. Leonardo was to depict the Battle of Anghiari, fought in 1440 between Milan and the Republic of Florence, while Michelangelo was commissioned to paint the Battle of Cascina, which took place in 1364 after bathing Florentine soldiers were startled by Pisan troops. Both battles were Florentine victories that had been transformed into key components of Florence's image of itself and were central to its mythology. The drawings on this sheet were made by Michelangelo as part of his preparation for the mural. In the autumn of 1504 he was assigned a room to produce the cartoon, and by this time the project was certainly well underway. However, these two battle scenes – the most famous battle scenes not only in the Renaissance but possibly ever – were not finished; today, they are lost.

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