Art & Design

Visions That Flaunt Cartoon Pedigrees

The Museum of Modern Art offers a sometimes perky but ultimately dispiriting show of works by 13 artists who borrow from comic strips, cartoons and animation.

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Exploring Identity as a Problematic Condition

Lorna Simpson?s refined and impassioned work, which focuses on race, is the subject of a 20-year retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Captain Smith, the Tides Are Shifting on the James

Despite its flaws, the Jamestown Settlement?s exhibition does much to spur a greater understanding of the history behind the first English colony in the Americas.

Smile and Say ?Peanut Butter,? Mona Lisa

Vik Muniz offers much more than just toothsome imagery in his seductive photographs and portraits at P.S. 1.

Lights! Darks! Action! Cut! Maestro of Mise-en-Scène

The Jacopo Tintoretto show at the Prado Museum in Madrid is a model of connoisseurship and smart editing.

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2 Paintings by Picasso Are Stolen in Paris

Police said the two oils, ?Maya With Doll? and ?Portrait of Jacqueline,? are estimated to be worth about $66 million.

• Back Story With The Times's Alan Riding (mp3)

Defacer With Mystery Agenda Is Attacking Street Art

An anonymous figure has been splashing paint on street art, earning the nickname the Splasher.

The Things They Left Behind: Photographs From Poland?s Lost Jews

An exhibition of 450 exquisitely ordinary snapshots at the Yeshiva University Museum show the last normal moments in the lives of so many.

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Iconoclastic Art Historian, Seeing the Old in the New

Robert Rosenblum, the most consistently edifying art historian of his generation, will be honored at the Guggenheim Museum.

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Heinz Berggruen, Influential Picasso Collector, Dies at 93

Mr. Berggruen was a German-born Jewish art collector who made a powerful gesture of reconciliation by moving his modern art collection to Berlin.

So They All Get Naked and Play, Like Mom Did

A photographer populates the landscape with tribes of nude women, fertility goddesses carefree in an American Eden.

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Out of Tiffany?s Shadow, a Woman of Light

A new exhibition of classic lamps gives Clara Driscoll her due as a valuable designer and craftswoman.

The Luminist

How Jeff Wall?s large, glowing, elaborately staged pictures are helping to make photography the painting of our times.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda

The new status symbol in the West is a work of art from the East.

We Are Not a Muse

Francesca von Habsburg did not become the art world?s leading lady simply by sitting pretty.

Cool and Collected

In this modern Baltimore house, art and life find a happy medium.

Eyes Wide Open, With Stories to Tell

Jeff Wall?s photography mines a welter of traditions and is favored by both critics and the market.

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Cross Sections of Yesterday

The excellent Matta-Clark retrospective at the Whitney Museum recalls this charismatic Pied Piper of experimentalism from the frontier days of SoHo.

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That Sanitation Truck Parked on the Pier? It?s Part of the Show

The Armory Show 2007 feels more consolidated, more vacuum-packed, more well tuned than ever.

• Slide Show | Related Events and Venues

Finding Art in Nature, and the Beauty in the Beast

The intimate exhibit at the Frick Collection makes clear that the artist was brilliant at capturing mammals and humans, offering meticulous attention to figures and details.

A Fair?s Strategy: Solo Artists, Themes and Specters of Blockbusters

To breathe new life into the commercial-bazaar format, the show combines replicating, the gallery experience of solo-artist shows and themed group exhibitions.

Recovered Artworks Heading to Auction

About 170 old master paintings returned to the heirs of Jacques Goudstikker, a prominent Dutch dealer who fled Amsterdam in 1940, are to be offered at Christie?s.

History vs. Homogeneity in New Orleans Housing Fight

A proposal by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to demolish four public housing complexes in New Orleans has touched a raw nerve.

Present at an Empire?s Corrupted Birth

Eve Sussman?s film is extravagantly beautiful, endlessly noble and largely devoid of humor.

Colorful Photographs of the Inanimate That Run the Alphabetical Gamut

A is for apple. It?s really that simple in Neil Winokur?s portfolio of 26 supersaturated color portraits of generic objects.

Dia Appoints a New Director: Next Stop, Manhattan

After an eight-month search, the Dia has appointed Jeffrey Weiss of the National Gallery of Art, and now plans to focus on finding a new Manhattan site.

Blood Unsimple: The Ties That Bind, in All Their Complexity

An exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum addresses the family as metaphor and social prism.

Looking for Mme. Bonnard? Sorry, but She?s in the Tub

Israel Horovitz?s play teases out various mysteries about Pierre Bonnard, the artist whose domestic scenes masked, romanticized and sometimes revealed his personal life.

Joe Edwards, 85, Artist for Archie Comics, Is Dead

Joe Edwards was an artist who worked on the 1942 debut issue of Archie comics and later created the character Li?l Jinx.

A Tower That Sends a Message of Anxiety, Not Ambition

If built, the Freedom Tower would be a constant reminder of our inability to produce architecture that shows a faith in America?s future rather than nostalgia for a nonexistent past.

What Surrounds a Legend? A 3,000-Pound Gilt Frame

One of the most complex reframing projects in the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art has collided with a 9-foot-3-inch-high doorway. The doorway won.