Worth crossing the Channel for: one week of fairs, and the shows that will still be there when they've gone.
Why goThe best part of Frieze is free.
Skip the queue at Frieze London if you don't want to buy anything: the free sculpture park in the English Gardens of Regent's Park has a few dozen large works scattered among the flower beds, and it stays up for six weeks after the tents come down. Go on a weekday morning when the park belongs to dog walkers.
Why goA fair worth seeing for its building alone.
More than 200 galleries under the restored glass nave of the Grand Palais, the most beautiful fair building in the world. The art market's attention has moved to Paris; the real pleasure is the city's programme around it, from the Bourse de Commerce to the Fondation Louis Vuitton. Book a public day, and look up at the roof.
Why goThe centenary show in the building Monet made for his last work.
A hundred years after Monet died at Giverny in December 1926, the Orangerie, home of his Water Lilies, looks at how he painted time: the same motif at different hours and seasons, until the subject became the light itself. Then walk into the two oval rooms he designed and see time stop.
Why goThe collector who saw it first.
Gustave Fayet was a wine grower from Béziers who bought Gauguin and Van Gogh early, became Odilon Redon's great patron, and asked Redon to paint the library of his abbey at Fontfroide. The Fondation's autumn show tells the story of a collector with a better eye than most museums of his time, and of the works he lived with.
Why goThe walls of Paris, torn off and framed.
From the late 1940s, Jacques Villeglé tore posters off Paris walls and exhibited the layers: politics, cinema, soap and protest, ripped into accidental collage. The city's own history museum shows him beside the street art that followed. Go to Carnavalet for him; stay for the reconstructed shop signs and the ballroom of the Hôtel de Wendel.
A marriage, a medium and a decade.
Why goTwo painters, one barn, and the question of who led.
The first exhibition to look at Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock as two painters in conversation rather than a genius and his wife. They shared a farmhouse in the Springs, on Long Island, a vocabulary and a few arguments; after his death in 1956 she moved into his barn studio and painted for almost thirty more years. Seen side by side, it is not always obvious who was following whom.
Why goSix hundred original pages: manga as drawing.
More than 600 original drawings, the pages before printing, by the artists who made manga the most widely read visual art form on earth. Seeing the corrections, white-out and screen tones on the original paper turns a mass medium back into drawing, and very good drawing.
Why goThe broke city that invented three kinds of music.
In the mid-1970s the city was close to bankruptcy, and it was also the moment of disco, punk and hip-hop's first block parties. This exhibition sets the clothes, records and flyers of the dance floor against the housing crisis and the blackouts. A history show with a soundtrack.
A Lebanese painter's line, and a forgotten abstractionist.
Why goBeirut, Paris, Venice Beach: a life drawn in one line.
Huguette Caland, the daughter of Lebanon's first president after independence, left Beirut for Paris at 39 and spent her last decades in Venice, California. Her lines turn bodies into landscapes and landscapes into bodies, with a humour and frankness about desire that was rare in any language. About 150 works, at the end of a tour that began at the Reina Sofía, in the city where she ended her life.
Why goThe city being built and torn down, as abstraction.
Mavis Pusey, born in Jamaica, worked in New York and made crisp, architectural abstractions out of the demolition and construction she saw around her. Long overlooked, she is shown here at last as a serious figure of geometric abstraction. Same building, same free ticket as Caland.
A painter between Mexico and Paris, and a house carved like a cave.
Why goMexico's Paris painter, back in the national palace of art.
Ángel Zárraga left Durango for Europe in 1904 and spent three decades in Paris, painting saints, athletes and footballers, before coming home in 1941. Around a hundred works at MUNAL make the case for a painter caught between Mexico and modernism, in a palace that is itself an argument about national art.
Why goA cave house, rebuilt as a stage.
The Spanish artist Álvaro Urbano builds installations that feel like film sets after the crew has gone home. His starting point here is the Casa Cueva, one of the strangest houses in Mexican architecture, built like a cave. Pair it with Richard Prince downstairs.
Thirty years of a museum, and an artist who never sat still.
Why goThe artist who made Germany argue with itself.
Christoph Schlingensief (1960–2010) staged a container in Vienna from which the public voted asylum seekers out, ran a party for the unemployed, built an opera village in Burkina Faso and turned his own cancer into theatre. This retrospective tries to show work made of actions, scandals and stages, and that is never easy. If anyone deserves the attempt, he does.
Why goThe Berlin that cheap studios built.
For its 30th anniversary, the museum invites artists who once had studios in the warehouses next door before they were torn down: Olafur Eliasson, Tacita Dean, Thomas Demand, Tomás Saraceno and others. A show about the Berlin of cheap space, which made the city's art world and is now mostly gone.
Why goA cloud in Mies's garden.
Fujiko Nakaya has been making sculptures out of fog since 1970. In the sculpture garden of Mies van der Rohe's glass temple, her clouds roll in on a timer and swallow the steel and the people. Catch it before it goes.
This wasn't part of our plan, but you should know about it.
Why goA biennial in a locomotive cathedral.
The 18th Lyon Biennale spreads across eleven venues, with Les Grandes Locos, a colossal former railway workshop at La Mulatière, at its centre: 118 artists, and one pass for all of them. Two hours from Paris by TGV, it is the most generous detour of the autumn.