“Rebus” by Robert Rauschenberg, 1955 Organized by Ann Temkin, a curator in the Museum of Modern Art’s department of painting and sculpture, “Color Chart” looks at contemporary artists for whom color functions as a ready-made — something to be bought or appropriated, rather than mixed on a palette. As Frank Stella famously quipped, “I tried [...]

Gallery workers hang a painting entitled ‘The Golden Age 1530′ by the German artist Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

Children may know William Steig as the creator of Shrek, but their grandparents can trace the ornery green ogre’s roots through a body of children’s books, New Yorker cartoons and drawings dating back to the Depression. Neither group will be disappointed by the Jewish Museum’s exhibition “From The New Yorker to Shrek: The Art of [...]

The Stamford Museum & Nature Center presents Architecture of the Imagination: The Lure of the LEGO® Brick Featuring Nathan Sawaya: The Art of the Brick™, on view through August 17, 2008. More than just child’s play, the nearly iconic LEGO® brick has become an art medium all its own. “LEGO® is a phenomenon,” explains Curator [...]

The Guggenheim Museum’s retrospective of the work of the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang is nothing if not action packed, writes Roberta Smith. The galleries are so rife with the sound of explosions and the sight of suspended objects and wildlife (stuffed) that it might almost be a movie set for some new martial-arts spy thriller. [...]

The best paintings in the extraordinary Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art exude a commanding discombobulation, Roberta Smith writes. They challenge and seduce with their brusqueness of surface, inconsistencies of space or scale, emotional ambiguities and alternately frank and improbable accounts of the female form. Courbet himself was, and remains, a [...]

Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt presents Women Impressionists: Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Eva Gonzalès, and Marie Bracquemond, on view through June 1, 2008. Everyone knows the names of famous Impressionists – Manet, Monet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro – but it is less well known that important women painters also belonged to their circle. Berthe Morisot, a successful and [...]