While it should be possible for someone looking at Pat Steir's paintings to feel that they depict or suggest the flowing of water downward over rock or stone, that is to miss the point of works that are concerned much more with the potential of paint than the need to represent something in nature.

The figure of Mansa Musa looms at the center of a major new exhibition, "Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time," that recently opened at the Block Museum of Art in Evanston, Illinois.

Just outside Marrakech, a magic circle of gravity-defying boulders stands at the entrance to a sleekly repurposed office building, whose rose-pink brick echoes the color of the city walls. Fatiha Zemmouri’s installation 'Gravity and Grace' is part of “Material Insanity,” a group show at the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden.

The earliest painting that survives from Jodhpur shows the unmistakable stamp of Mughal realism and artistic refinement. This only intensified during the period of Mughal collapse, as the courts offered generous patronage to painters left unemployed at the Mughal court.

The exhibition at the Jewish Museum in London seeks both to document and to refute the stereotype of the moneyed Jew, through a wide range of documents, artworks, portraits, posters, and souvenirs.

"Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice" reminds us that Ruskin was right about Tintoretto’s wildness, apparent in a number of paintings filled with the fierce absence of any sense of repose, paintings whose pattern is not easy to discern but whose impact is forceful and shocking because the eye does not know where to settle.

"Black Models: From Géricault to Matisse," at the Musée d’Orsay, builds on archival research to recover the biographies of models of African descent in canonical French painting.

The US Constitution is not often Broadway fare—and for good reason: its place is in the National Archives, not Times Square.

Sections of “Van Gogh and Britain” display homages to—or arguments with—Vincent by a dozen British artists, from Walter Sickert to Francis Bacon.

Nearly a half-century later, Peter Brook’s "A Midsummer Night's Dream" still hangs heavy over British theatre. Nicholas Hytner, who ran London’s state-subsidized National Theatre for twelve years until 2015 and is now the impresario of the Bridge Theatre, his own commercial theater complex opposite the Tower of London, has chosen to tackle Brook’s legacy head on.

Dora Maar’s largest exhibition in France contains over 400 of her works, yet she turns away, and hides her face, remaining enigmatic in her work.

To walk through Sarah Lucas’s first major American retrospective is to move across this emotional register with her: stirred, amused, and to some extent implicated in her willful incorrectness and smirking, post-punk critique of everyday sexism.

Paula Rego’s subjects are physically vulnerable, but it’s clear that she’s not painting victims.

The problem with nasty Bouguereau was that it didn’t sell. The problem with nice Bouguereau was that it sold so well that it undermined the intermittent impulse to unleash nasty Bouguereau.

Six women photographers are featured in an exhibition, now at the New York Historical Society, on how these women’s work “contributed to LIFE’s pursuit of American identity through photojournalism."

Francesco Rosi's Christ Stopped at Eboli, back by popular demand, a retrospective of Iran's great filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, and a short series of long epics at BAM.

Ronald Reagan would tell many that he couldn’t understand how anyone could be president without having first been an actor. A politician who built a career on a professional image, Reagan knew how to take direction and hit his marks.

Some of James Nasmyth’s photographs can be seen in a superb exhibition, “Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography,” now at the Metropolitan Museum. They are peculiar and fantastic, using plaster and staged lighting to create images of mountains and craters that could not yet be properly seen.