Sebastian Smee

The Whitney exhibition of the painter’s portraits and political art is a triumph.

Artist Judy Chicago was a trailblazer. This career survey at the New Museum in New York shows her at her best and worst.

Remedios Varo fled Europe for Mexico and became a leading Surrealist painter.

In “The Upside-Down World,” Pulitzer Prize winner Benjamin Moser combines biography, art criticism and touches of memoir.

He made portraits of the likes of Aretha Franklin and Miles Davis for magazines, and broke barriers in his personal work.

Painted as war raged, “The Piano Lesson” is both sensuous and severe.

This Seamus Murphy photograph shows just one moment captured during a long relationship with a family in Afghanistan.

Kano Sansetsu’s six-panel screen illustrates the legendary story of the Chinese calligrapher Wang Ziyou.

Rembrandt painted self-portraits throughout his career. This 17th-cenury work is one of his best.

A survey of the career of the Ivory Coast’s Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, one of the continent’s most celebrated artists, comes to New York.

Alberto Giacometti, known for stick-like sculptures of the human condition, has a major traveling exhibition.

This painting is a complicated portrait of its maker, who threw legendary parties and inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald.

America’s most original colorist, the subject of new retrospective at the Wadsworth Atheneum, was inspired by Matisse, and in turn inspired Rothko.

This masterpiece by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, at the Met, captures the heat of summer — and the complexity of life.

“Entrance to an Inn in the Praestegarden at Hillested” captures an extended moment of Zen-like stillness.

Edward Hopper’s beloved painting of an usher in a movie theater is the subject of the 100th piece in Sebastian Smee’s “Great Works, in Focus” series.

Sally Mann took this photograph of her daughter Jessie, who collaborated in the fiction it stages.

The Los Angeles artist is the subject of a major show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, two shows in Paris and one at Glenstone Museum.

Judith Leyster was mistaken for Frans Hals and not rediscovered until the end of the 19th century. But her smile was unmistakably her own.

A large donation and a new research center have transformed Boston into one of the world’s best places to get to know Dutch and Flemish art.