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.

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.

"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.

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 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.

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

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.

A new exhibition at the Ashmolean gives an education in the work produced by the precisionist artists of the 1920s through the 1940s, who used sharp, well-defined lines and striking applications of pigment to master the anxieties and ambivalences associated with modern life.

For ten years, the Aftermath Project—founded by the documentary photographer Sara Terry—has supported work by new and established photojournalists covering the aftermath of conflict and war. The project's anniversary show, and its accompanying book, showcase the work of more than fifty photographers working around the world.

The show at the Drawing Center, ably curated by Claire Gilman, restrained though it is by the modest size of the space, is a robust sampling of the last thirty-five years of Winters’s career.

An exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum gives a sprawling overview of twenty-five intensely productive years in Latin American feminist art, gathering the work of 123 artists from fifteen countries who ranged across video, photography, installation and performance art, painting, film, sculpture, and dance.

The masks of the Yup’ik, an indigenous people related to the Inuit, seem to float off the dark blue walls where they hang. The connection between the Surrealists’ productions and the Yup’ik artefacts in the installation is never direct: they seem, rather, to have drifted together naturally.

May brings us revivals of Derek Jarman's delirious portrait of Edward II and Andy Warhol's legendary The Chelsea Girls; restorations from the early years of Fox Film Corporation; a survey of films from and about downtown New York in the 1980s; and a program of militant French cinema from and about May '68.