Strange that there is no feature film about the life of Nina Hamnett, because it’s the kind of biopic that writes itself. We open on a bright-eyed, prematurely wizened woman, sitting in a tavern circa 1952. Flashback to turn-of-the-century Wales. Little Nina shows a flair for drawing, and her grandmother pays her way through the London School of Art, where she befriends Ezra Pound. She cuts her hair short, travels to Paris to paint, and develops a brisk, knowing style on the knife-edge of realism and caricature. On her first night in Montparnasse, Nina bumps into a dashing young fellow who turns out to be Amedeo Modigliani; he introduces her to Picasso and Cocteau. She loses her virginity in Rimbaud and Verlaine’s favorite hotel room, and, soon after, realizes she likes girls as much as boys. READ ON

The faces in Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s portraits feel familiar: located in the where and when of memory, yet just beyond recognition. The British-Ghanaian artist paints people dancing, seated, and smiling, playing on a beach or huddling in a circle, but her subjects are fictive, conjured from the imagination. This “slight remove from reality,” says Isabella Maidment, a curator of contemporary British art at the Tate, is a distinguishing feature of Yiadom-Boakye’s work, which will have its first major survey at the museum, beginning on May 17. READ ON

Anyone who has tried to photograph a sunrise—or paint it, or film it—can tell you its fleeting energy is not easily captured. But David Hockney, whose animation of a sunrise iPad drawing is being broadcast on screens in New York’s Times Square, London’s Piccadilly Circus, and Seoul’s SMTown Coex throughout the month of May, manages it beautifully. READ ON