This year U.S. museums, especially those in D.C., came under hostile pressure from an unexpected quarter — the federal government. Yet curators and their colleagues continued to mount magnificent shows.
Below our critics list, in chronological order, the best exhibitions they reviewed this year.
‘Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy’
Belle da Costa Greene’s father, Richard T. Greener, was the first Black man to graduate from Harvard, and went on to become a prominent civil rights activist. But that fact was carefully scrubbed from his daughter’s personal history as she “crossed the color line,” becoming the first and most consequential director of what is now the Morgan Library & Museum. She was a glamorous and celebrated society figure, and helped build the Morgan’s powerhouse collection of rare books. She destroyed her personal correspondence and private journals, and disappeared (while alive) almost entirely into her new identity, as a woman of Portuguese descent. The Morgan mounted an exhibition, “Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy,” devoted to her life and legacy, which dealt forthrightly and intelligently with the myriad issues raised by its leader’s life choices. It was one of the smartest and most revealing shows of the season. — Philip Kennicott
‘The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture’
The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s exhibition “The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture” opened late in 2024, but it became a 2025 must-see after President Donald Trump, who has assailed diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives using a litany of racial dog whistles, attacked the exhibition by name in a March executive order. The president accused the show of documenting how “‘sculpture has been a powerful tool in promoting scientific racism’” and promoting “the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct.” To which the curators of this well-designed and thoroughly researched show could proudly say, “Guilty as charged.”
“The Shape of Power” is a perfect primer in how art furthered cultural, political and pseudoscientific agendas, and it included key works from American history that still make the blood boil, for their caricature, bias and overt lies. It was well worth seeing before Trump arrived, but with Trump’s attack, it became obligatory. — P.K.
‘Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature’
“Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature” opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in February, which already seems a lifetime ago. Friedrich’s own lifetime began 250 years before 2025, a more-or-less arbitrary fact providing the happy pretext for this dazzling show. Friedrich didn’t just epitomize Romantic landscape painting. He invented it. He is one of those artists about whom you carry around an idea, having seen one or two of his most famous paintings and various pop culture riffs on them. The Met exhibit provided an opportunity to put aside preconceptions and wrestle with the entirety of his achievement. It confirmed that his art was greater, more beautiful and more puzzling than we realized. — Sebastian Smee
‘Degenerate Art: Modern Art on Trial Under the Nazis’
I saw “Degenerate Art: Modern Art on Trial Under the Nazis” at the Musée Picasso in Paris soon after the current administration assumed power. The show described what happened to artists labeled “degenerate” by the Nazis, not only for being Jewish, homosexual or communist but also simply for being modernist. Emphasizing its ongoing relevance is not an attempt to compare Trump to Hitler — I care little for that lazy habit. It’s about reflecting on what it means to use brute power to constrain or redirect culture. It doesn’t have to end up where it ended in the 1940s for us all to see clearly what can happen to freedom and the spontaneous, risk-loving expression of culture, in all its forms, when those in power go out of their way to make creative people feel intimidated and fearful. — S.S.
‘Jack Whitten: The Messenger’
I was introduced to Jack Whitten’s stunning paintings only five years before he died in 2018, and then again to his virtually unknown sculptures in a survey at the Baltimore Museum of Art. I learned more about him from those who knew him. Loving his work, I became convinced I would have loved the man, too. But when the Museum of Modern Art’s marvelous posthumous retrospective, “Jack Whitten: The Messenger,” opened in March, I remained unprepared for the richness, variety and creative conviction behind all his work. What a painter and sculptor! What an inventor! What a restless, intelligent, openhearted spirit! You think the best art is made by the worst people? Not so. — S.S.
‘Roaring: Art, Fashion, and the Automobile in France, 1918–1939’
I was not anticipating, as the year began, that a show in St. Louis about French car culture between World War I and World War II would be the museum exhibit that lingers most vividly in my mind by year’s end. But wow — “Roaring: Art, Fashion, and the Automobile in France, 1918–1939” at the St. Louis Art Museum just smashed it out of the park. The real ravishment came from the objects in “Roaring”: impossibly svelte Bugattis and shiny Citroëns; photographs by Man Ray and (everyone’s favorite photographer of high jinks and happiness) Jacques-Henri Lartigue; paintings by Matisse and Mondrian and a lot of exquisite gowns and racy accessories by the likes of Schiaparelli and Hermès. But “Roaring” was more than just a beautifully designed showcase for beautiful design. It got you thinking about upheaval and war, gender, sex, freedom, speed and how we are all, at every moment, expressing this multiheaded phenomenon we call “culture.” — S.S.
‘Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting’
Big, ambitious shows of major artists are getting harder to do, mainly because of rising insurance and transportation costs. Heartening, then, that a major commercial gallery is willing to take on the challenge. “Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting” at Gagosian was not a full-throttle retrospective — that would have been asking too much — but it was a powerful, beautifully distilled selection of works from across the great Dutch-American artist’s stellar career. A stowaway who lived illegally in the United States for 36 years, De Kooning influenced the likes of Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Grace Hartigan and Jack Whitten, and continues to inspire our best painters today. — S.S.
The Frick reopening
“The Frick is back.” New Yorkers, art lovers and tourists alike were delighted by the reopening of one of the city’s most beloved institutions, the Frick Collection, which closed during the covid pandemic in 2020 and remained shuttered for a four-year, $220 million renovation of its historic home on Fifth Avenue. Frick lovers eagerly awaited the return of the collection to its reconfigured home, which included access for the first time to the mansion’s second floor, a new cafe, an enlarged reception area, an underground theater and lecture hall and 30 percent more gallery space.
The new space is beautifully designed and helps with traffic flow. But it also gives access to the Frick family, including the personal space of Henry Clay Frick and his wife, Adelaide. Mr. Frick was an odious figure, a robber baron and a union buster, which the new Frick doesn’t discount or paper over. Rather, it shows us Frick’s domestic environment as a set of facts, owned and acknowledged, and inseparable from the public legacy of art he left behind. — P.K.
‘Sargent and Paris’
The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s popular exhibition “Sargent and Paris” surveyed the work made by John Singer Sargent while he was a young and rising artist in France, before his permanent move to England in 1886. The exhibition focused on a key painting, his 1884 portrait of a Louisiana-born Creole woman named Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, a work now known as “Madame X.” It provoked a scandal when unveiled at the Paris Salon, which helped cement Sargent’s reputation as a leading artist and helpmate to the elites of Europe. But the real interest of the exhibition was its focus on Sargent’s early years, his precocious talent, his essays in different forms and styles, and his inexhaustible virtuosity with paint. Some artists struggle to create a working version of their mature self; for Sargent, it was a matter of taming his several selves into something coherent and marketable, and he succeeded all too well. — P.K.
‘Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World’
The National Gallery of Art used to be a powerhouse when it came to Dutch and Flemish art, but has mostly forsaken this legacy in recent years. A midsize and thoroughly engaging exhibition called “Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World,” was a happy exception. The curators worked in collaboration with the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History to explore how artists struggled to make sense of the natural world, the horizons of which were greatly expanding in the 16th and 17th centuries as Europeans absorbed the intellectual, cultural and literal spoils of colonialism. They struggled with new ideas and a burgeoning catalogue of flora and fauna, which needed to be fitted into intellectual paradigms descended from the ancient world and medieval Christianity. The exhibition demonstrated in material and granular fashion the powerful nexus between understanding and owning the world, and how those powerful drives can both warp and refine our ability to see the most ordinary things. — P.K.
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