The wonders of weird suburbia

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Lucy Davies on the Dutch and Flemish women who flourished as artists

Three centuries after her death, what do we know of Johanna Koerten? Almost nothing, is the answer. Yet in her heyday, the Dutch artist's woven silk 'thread paintings' and paper cuttings sold for sums more than double those Rembrandt van Rijn was pocketing for a portrait. Her fame was such that Tsar Peter the Great and Cosimo de Medici III visited her Amsterdam home.

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Will Wiles watches a sitcom with deep roots in the English imagination

Where Small Prophets excels is in the way it makes the thoroughly fantastical feel natural – not so much an intrusion, but something emerging from a deeper stratum of memory and meaning. Detectorists, Mackenzie Crook's previous sitcom, worked the same enchantment, giving us a tender comedy of provincial character that occasionally revealed it was unfolding atop a dazzling reservoir of millennia of history. As Agnès Varda said, 'If we opened people, we'd find landscapes.'

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Lucy Waterson finds Rose Wylie doing exactly as she pleases

An omelette, a figure skater, a doodlebug; a daffodil, a rat, Nicole Kidman's back. Try to find a link between these words and you'd be sure to come up short, but in an exhibition of Rose Wylie's work at the Royal Academy in London, such disparate references sit side-by-side in harmony. 'The Picture Comes First' is Wylie's largest exhibition to date and its title is both a nod to their making and an imperative – if Wylie likes the look of something, be it yesterday's breakfast, a newspaper clipping or a scene from her favourite film, she'll put it down on paper or in paint.

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Miriam Balanescu on the high-tech wizardry of Amélie

Decades before the use of visual effects and CGI became common in film and television of all genres to embellish cityscapes, touch up small details and add gloss, the quietly revolutionary visual effects of Amélie heightened the quotidian. For the main character, reality is another kind of fantasy. 'In general, special effects are for spaceships and monsters,' Jean-Pierre Jeunet said upon the film's release, 'but this time I wanted to use effects for a new kind of narration or poetry.'

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Arjun Sajip on the Estonian modernist who found himself in Norway

It was not until a two-year stint in Norway in 1908–10 that Konrad Mägi began to succeed as a painter. The landscapes he made there were among the smallest of his career – oddly, given the vastness of Norway's vistas – but reveal a facility for full-bodied cumulus clouds and trees that seem, with their fine vertical brushstrokes, to be straining for the heavens. Many works from this period show him engaging with wider artistic developments in compelling ways: the Klimtian Norwegian Landscape. Bog Landscape (1908–10) is an arboreal scene turned inside-out, the bog resembling so many organelles suspended in cytoplasm.

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Apollo draws attention to highlights from Salon du Dessin

Salon du Dessin is Paris's pre-eminent fair dedicated to drawings. While the format does not change much from year to year, the market does, and often for the better. 'The enthusiasm of contemporary artists for drawing is attracting a new audience,' says the dealer Hervé Aaron, who co-chairs the fair, while sketches and studies have become, in many cases, more sought-after than finished works. Alongside the Old Masters that are the fair's bread and butter, look out for an abstract painting by Pierre Soulages and some atmospheric ink drawings by the Chinese-French artist Zao Wou-Ki, offered by Galerie Jean-François Cazeau.

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