The British have been in a bit of a froth ever since the Duke of Sutherland announced he needed to sell a pair of Titian masterpieces, with a Dec. 31 deadline set for “Diana and Actaeon.” The National Gallery of Scotland, where the picture has been on loan since 1945, and London’s National Gallery have [...]

At Art Basel Miami Beach, a sprawling art fair that runs through Sunday, a wall-to-wall text piece by Barbara Kruger spells out two quotations. One from Goethe observes, “We are the slaves of objects around us.” The other, from a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, reads, “He entered shop after shop, priced nothing, spoke [...]

Paris Bordon (Italian, Treviso, 1500-Venice, 1571), Venus, Mars, and Cupid Crowned by Victory. Ca. 1550. Oil on canvas. 44 x 63 3/4 in.
Key moments in the lives of Italian men and women in the Renaissance were marked by celebrations carried out with the greatest possible degree of magnificence. Of these, betrothal, marriage, and the birth [...]

Alfred Sisley, Bridge at Hampton Court, 1874. Wallraf Richartz Museum & Fondation Corboud, Cologne. © Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Cologne.
Alfred Sisley (1839–1899) was one of the greatest landscape painters of the 19th century and a leading figure in the Impressionist movement. Yet Sisley, the only ‘Englishman’ among the French Impressionists, remains a relatively unknown figure [...]

The Lenbachhaus in Munich, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Guggenheim Museum in New York are the three museums worldwide that hold the largest collections of works by Wassily Kandinsky. Together these three museums organized a large joint show on this outstanding modernist artist and founder of abstract painting.
This large and ambitious retrospective includes [...]

Picasso was one of 20th-century art’s major makers and shapers. He was also one of its most prolific purveyors of kitsch. I would place a high percentage of his output in the kitsch category. That would include some of the dozen closely related paintings in the exhibition “Picasso’s ‘Marie-Thérèse’ ” at Acquavella Galleries, and for [...]

An installation view of “Alexander Calder: The Paris Years” at the Whitney Museum.
Is art basically glorified child’s play, extending into adulthood, through a lifetime, picking up ideas and gaining finesse as it goes? That’s one way to think of “Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926-1933” at the Whitney Museum of American Art.