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 career-spanning survey of Carolee Schneemann's paintings, films, and performances at MoMA PS1 is the first comprehensive retrospective in the US of this unpredictable and enormously influential artist.

The Guggenheim's new presentation of the art that emerged from Josef Albers's numerous road trips to Mexico showcases his appreciation for the country, juxtaposing his studies, typically drawn on graph paper, with both his finished artwork (mostly paintings, one lithograph) and his fastidious arrangements of tiny on-site photographs.

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.

The mannerisms in Modigliani's portraits and nudes—the elongated faces, the tilted heads, the lithe poses—display a young man out to make a mark, to signal his presence in an immediately recognizable style.

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.

An outsider artist is a figure who makes a body of work while operating in relative isolation, unaware of, or indifferent to, developments in the work of professional artists...someone who resolutely, and perhaps eccentrically, wants to live and work on her or his own terms.

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.

Ingmar Bergman’s centennial; an overdue retrospective of the maverick French-Eritrean-Greek producer and filmmaker Nico Papatakis; a new batch of Paramount rediscoveries; a survey of African-American superhero movies; and a new documentary on the political upheavals of 1968

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.

To criticize Araki’s photos—naked women pissing into umbrellas at a live sex show, women with flowers stuck into their vaginas, women in schoolgirl uniforms suspended in bondage, and so on—for being pornographic, vulgar, or obscene, is rather to miss the point.

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 second half of a two-part exhibition will focus on some of Parks’s most celebrated and iconic imagery, including his photographic essays on civil rights and his collaboration with Ralph Ellison, "A Man Becomes Invisible."

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.

The gripping and dramatic show “All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life” merits its title: it is “all too human” in the tender, painful works that form its core.

A major exhibition at the Tate illustrates the competing and overlapping streams of painterly obsession in London in the second half of the twentieth century. It shows us how, in their different ways, painters such as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach, R.B. Kitaj, and Paula Rego redefined realism.

March brings us two films by Bruce Conner; a series celebrating Emilio Fernández, a renowned figure in Mexican cinema's Golden Age; documentary portraits and political works by William Klein; a digital restoration of R.W. Fassbinder's television family drama; and Luis Buñuel's "Belle de Jour."

Throughout the 1920s in Paris, the painter Tsuguharu Foujita cut an arresting figure: a Japanese modernist as willing to trade on his own foreignness as he was to blend into his Parisian surroundings