A new show at the National Portrait gallery tracks Sylvia Plath's obsession with divided selves, from her Smith senior thesis on the double in Dostoevsky, to the many masks she wore during her short lifetime.

Simon Rattle's last year as the head of the Berlin Philharmonic—he has been conducting the orchestra to great acclaim since 2002—is the last chance to see his energetic conducting style at work in the orchestra's acoustically superb concert hall.

The Museum of Modern Art's retrospective focuses on Stephen Shore's photographs of hyper-quotidian America, our stalest shades of red, white, and blue.

In 'The Disasters of Peace,' artists Tsuge Tadao and Katsumata Susumu depict the financial desperation, moral confusion, and the shame of military defeat that afflicted in the years following the Pacific War,

Two concurrent exhibitions showcase the brilliant collections of the Stuart kings Charles I and Charles II, who in their record as patrons of the arts surpassed any other dynasty in British history.

Peter Hujar, a reluctant stalwart in the downtown demi-monde of late twentieth-century New York, made portraits that are intimate, quirky, well composed, and often quite beautiful.

The photographers who documented the unconstitutional forced removal and incarceration of roughly 120,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II—the consequence of a 1942 executive order by President Franklin D. Roosevelt—are at the center of a new show in New York.

Francisco de Zurbarán's remarkable series of Jacob and his sons at the Frick has hung since the eighteenth century in the bishop of Durham’s palace at Bishop Auckland, in northeast England. An unusual treasure to find in an Anglican bishop’s palace given Protestant horror at religious imagery, it is notable as being the only such series of paintings known to survive in Europe.

"Journeys with 'The Waste Land': A visual response to T.S. Eliot’s poem" is a dense and many-layered exhibition—but, then, so is The Waste Land on first reading, with its multiple voices, echoes, and allusions. The exhibition, like the poem, has a brave experimental energy.

"Soul of a Nation" features some 170 works made between 1963 and 1983 by sixty-seven artists, living and dead, all but two of African descent: some of sustained prominence; others who surged initially, then fell out of fashion; and others, again, who produced steadily but have only recently achieved widespread acclaim.

This celebration of the seventieth anniversary of Magnum Photos, which appeared last year at the International Center of Photography in New York and now travels to Rome, showcases the work of seventy of the legendary agency's most influential photographers.

Jasper Johns’s ambivalent American paintings, equipoised between image and object, invention and preexistence, have long confounded art historians and critics—unsure of whether they stand for the United States and what sort of political orientation Johns imagined for them.

A group show at Cambridge's newly reopened Kettle's Yard, an experimental gallery space established in the 1950s by the art collectors Jim and Helen Ede, establishes a sense of continuity between the museum’s history and its present.

At NYU, a gem-like exhibition offers a welcome reminder that Islamic and Western thought have, for centuries, fruitfully converged.

This exhibition brings together the large-scale tableaux of three American artists from different generations, each with a different perspective on black culture and its representation.

For more than forty years, Paul Kolnik has been taking indelible photographs of the New York City Ballet. As part of this year's Harkness Dance Festival, a selection of his images will be on view in the Weill Art Gallery, including his views of George Balanchine and the dancers with whom he worked.

In this wide-ranging Israeli artist's new solo show, human figures have lost basic contours, to the point that their humanity is sometimes hard to identify.

The English painter Eric Ravilious expressed his romanticism in naturalistic watercolors, in a style almost antithetical to the imaginary landscapes and aristocratic fêtes champêtres of Rex Whistler—who, like Ravilious, served in uniform in World War II.

April brings us retrospectives of Harun Farocki and Lucrecia Martel; a survey of recent black cinema at BAM; a rare screening of Giuliano Montaldo’s 'Sacco and Vanzetti'; and a revival of 'Le Corbeau', Henri-Georges Clouzot's classic Nazi-era fable about a small town terrorized by a poison-pen writer.