Framing the Message of a Generation

By HOLLAND COTTER

Metropolitan Museum of Art/Licensed by Scala, Art Resource

“Collection of Forty Plaster Surrogates,” 1982-84, by Allan McCollum, on view in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current exhibition “The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984.”

Two big history-writing and history-inventing exhibitions look at the new and the newer.

VIRTUAL GALLERY President Obama has captured the imagination of artists worldwide, and many are finding an audience online.

Obama’s Face (That’s Him?) Rules the Web

By RANDY KENNEDY

Perhaps not since John F. Kennedy has a presidency so fanned the flames of painterly ardor among artists.

Slide Show: Paintings of President Obama

Sebastião Salgado at the Peter Fetterman Gallery in Santa Monica, Calif.

Back to Nature, in Pictures and Action

By JORI FINKEL

Sebastião Salgado sets out to record undeveloped pockets of the planet.

Slide Show

Yolande Moreau as the French naïve artist Séraphine Louis in the film “Séraphine,” directed by Martin Provost.

Rendezvous on a Path With a French Artist

By JOAN DUPONT

“Séraphine” tells the story of a solitary housemaid who transcended class taboos to find her art.

Trailer: 'Seraphine'

Exhibition Review

Detail from William Shatner's "Wrath of Khan" costume, part of "Star Trek: The Exhibtion" at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

The U.S.S. Enterprise, in Strange New World of Museum

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

“Star Trek: The Exhibition,” at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, includes costumes and replicas of props drawn from various installments of the space saga.

Slide Show: Surveying the Final Frontier

Where Louis XIV Meets Crash and Blade

By MELENA RYZIK

“Whole in the Wall,” in a multistory studio space on Manhattan’s far West Side, is an exhibition of American and European street art.

Slide Show: Bringing the Streets Inside

A rendering of the 76-story Beekman Tower, which will be the city’s tallest residential building.

Savings on Labor Allow Work on Residential Skyscraper to Resume

By CHARLES V. BAGLI

Work resumed this week on Beekman Tower, which will be the architect Frank Gehry’s first skyscraper and the tallest residential building in New York City.

Art Review

Harlem: 1970-2009 Photographs by Camilo José Vergara "Girls, Barbies, Harlem" from 1970, is part of this show of urban transformation, at the New-York Historical Society.

Harlem in Time-Lapse Photography

By HOLLAND COTTER

The photographer Camilo José Vergara has documented the ever-evolving city with an attitude of studied neutrality.

Antiques

At Christie’s: a set of three skylight panels from the old Chicago Stock Exchange, in a contemporary frame.

Assets of Splendor From a Stock Exchange

By EVE M. KAHN

On Tuesday, Christie’s will auction fragments of the former Chicago Stock Exchange building, which was known for its ironwork and stained-glass windows.

Art Review

A scene from Yang Fudong’s “Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest,” at the Asia Society.

From an Ancient Bamboo Grove to Modern China

By KEN JOHNSON

Two concurrent exhibitions of works by filmmaker Yang Fudong afford a supremely stylish and at times frustratingly narrow glimpse into the collective soul of modern China.

Video

Art Review

Left, “Untitled (Dalí Crucifixion With Nancy),” from around 1980, and right, “Clipping of Shot Red Marilyn by Andy Warhol (1964) With Knuckle Sandwich on Marilyn,” from 1992, both among the Ray Johnson works at Richard L. Feigen & Company.

Code and Inside Jokes (Wink, Wink) for Notorious Provocateurs

By KAREN ROSENBERG

Art-world and traditional celebrities overlap, as in the nightclub, in the latest exhibition at Richard L. Feigen & Company.

Abu Dhabi Gets a Sampler of World Art

By CAROL VOGEL

The public on Tuesday got its first peek at some of the art that will fill the Louvre Abu Dhabi.

Architecture Review

NOW Tourists and New Yorkers alike lounged in the middle of Broadway on Monday, a day after the city opened the five-block-long Times Square pedestrian mall.

Lose the Traffic. Keep That Times Square Grit.

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

A day after a stretch of Broadway between 42nd and 47th Streets was closed to cars, the soul of Times Square remained intact.

Slide Show: A Traffic-Free Broadway

Art Review | 'Luis Meléndez: Master of the Spanish Still Life'

Luis Meléndez: An exhibition at the National Gallery
in Washington includes “Still Life With
Watermelons and Apples in a Landscape” (1771).

A Spaniard Who Liked His Vegetables

By KEN JOHNSON

Only 31 pictures are on view in this splendid show at the National Gallery of Art. But because each is so absorbing to study, the exhibition seems bigger.

Sam Maloof in 2001 with a courtyard gate he built for his home.

Sam Maloof, Furniture Craftsman, Dies at 93

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Mr. Maloof’s simple, elegant wooden furniture, which he designed and made by hand, made him a central figure in the postwar American crafts movement.

Michelangelo Sculpture in Naples Is Disputed

Compiled by FELICIA R. LEE

A debate over whether Michelangelo was the artist who made a wooden sculpture depicting Jesus on the cross continues to enmesh the Italian art world, according to a report by BBC News.

A Christie’s Record for a Chinese Oil

Compiled by FELICIA R. LEE

A Minimalist 1950s oil-on-masonite painting, “Cats and Birds,” by the celebrated Chinese artist Sanyu fetched a record $5.4 million at Christie’s Hong Kong auction, Reuters reported.

Donna Reed saved hundreds of letters from star-struck World War II servicemen. Her children discovered them in a shoebox.

Dear Donna: A Pinup So Swell She Kept G.I. Mail

By LARRY ROHTER

Recently released letters from soldiers to Donna Reed, the actress and archetypal sweetheart of the 1940s, offer a candid glimpse of a vanished era.

Letters to Donna Reed

Andy Cushen working on the installation of the refurbished windows at St. Thomas Church.

Let There Be Light, and Color, on Fifth Avenue

By GLENN COLLINS

Several stained glass windows have been refurbished and are returning, piece by piece, to St. Thomas Church in Manhattan.

Slide Show

New Yorker Cover Art, Painted With an iPhone

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

The art editor for the magazine said the cover “doesn’t feel like something that was done digitally; quite the opposite.”

Louise Deutschman, Curator in the Arts, Dies at 92

By ROBERTA SMITH

Mrs. Deutschman, who gave Gordon Parks his first art-gallery show, had a five-decade-long career as a curator and gallery director.

Close Reading

Setting the Stage With Shadows

By J. D. BIERSDORFER

A look at how Robert Edmond Jones, one of the most influential stage designers of the 20th century, came up with the set for Arnold Schoenberg’s “Die Glückliche Hand.”

Interactive Feature

'The Photographer'

By EMMANUEL GUIBERT, DIDIER LEFÈVRE and FRÉDÉRIC LEMERCIER
Reviewed by CHRIS HEDGES

A harrowing account of a Doctors Without Borders mission to Afghanistan; part photojournalism, part graphic memoir.

Art Review | New Jersey

PARIS QUILT “The French Collection Part 1: #2 Wedding on the Seine” (1991), by Faith Ringgold.

Master of Story Quilts and Much More

By BENJAMIN GENOCCHIO

A half-century of artmaking by Faith Ringgold is on display at Rutgers University.

New Jersey Arts Listings | More on New Jersey Arts

Art Review | Connecticut

NEW VENTURE Peter M. Brant is putting up some of the works in his collection of more than 1,000 pieces of modern and contemporary art.

Displaying a Taste for the Moderns

By BENJAMIN GENOCCHIO

A collector puts 94 works of modern and contemporary art on view in a new Greenwich gallery.

Connecticut Arts Listings | More on Connecticut Arts

Exhibition Review

Seafarers’ Memoirs, Written on Skin

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

An exhibition at the Independence Seaport Museum in Philadelphia explores the role of sailors within tattoo culture.

Slide Show: Ink at Sea

Art Review

"The Vine" (1921), by Harriet Whitney Frismuth, in the newly renovated section of the Met.

‘Made in U.S.A.’ Shines After Makeover

By HOLLAND COTTER

The Metropolitan Museum’s newly reopened American galleries include 20 generously appointed period rooms and a full-fledged sculpture garden.

Art Review

Francis Bacon: a Centenary Retrospective The exhibition, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, features a triptych inspired by T.S. Eliot's poem "Sweeney Agonistes." The show originated at the Tate Britain last fall.

If Paintings Had Voices, Francis Bacon’s Would Shriek

By ROBERTA SMITH

More than that of any other artist who emerged at the end of World War II, Francis Bacon’s work, now on view at the Met, tells us about the strengths and weaknesses of the moment.

Slide Show

Art Review

“Schoolyard” (2009), commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art and one of eight Aernout Mik videos on view there.

Video Spectacles, Imagined or, in One Case, Real

By KEN JOHNSON

Aernout Mik’s videos as seen at the Museum of Modern Art, which seem to document chaotic situations involving scores of people, are by turns mesmerizing, tantalizing and frustrating.

Video: Schoolyard by Aernout Mik

Art Review

Wood photos from 1989: “Cooling Tower,” left, and “Cactus.”

A Photographer Who Refused to Think Like a Photographer

By KAREN ROSENBERG

In the best of John Wood’s work, impure photography becomes pure poetry.

Cecilia Beaux’s “Portrait of Alice Davidson” (1909), from the UBS Art Gallery show.

Women Determined Not Only to Make Art but Also to Have It Seen

By KAREN ROSENBERG

At the UBS Art Gallery in Midtown, a show that celebrates the history of women in art.

Arthur Erickson, Canadian Architect Who Mirrored Landscapes, Dies at 84

By IAN AUSTEN

Mr. Erickson was a Canadian Modernist architect who established an international reputation for designing innovative complexes and buildings.

Michelle Obama, right, was introduced by Caroline Kennedy at the American Ballet Theatre Opening Night Spring Gala on Monday.

In New York, Mrs. Obama Praises Arts as Vital to U.S.

By RACHEL L. SWARNS

Michelle Obama visited New York to promote the arts, at the American Ballet Theater and the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Mr. Stein in about 1953, when he worked with the Mexican muralist Siqueiros.

Philip Stein, Muralist Who Adorned Village Vanguard Jazz Club, Dies at 90

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Mr. Stein created the mural of a primordial man and woman bursting from a kaleidoscopic background that is on the back wall of the famous Greenwich Village jazz club.