Art-wise, 2025 has already packed some hot events into a few short months. After being closed for several years, two monumental museum projects — an expanded Frick Collection and the Met’s reimagined Rockefeller wing — splendiferously unfurled. Major exhibitions of European art, including ancient Roman sculptures and 19th-century German Romantic painting by Casper David Friedrich, landed with acclaim in Chicago and New York.
Spring delivered a long-overdue tribute to the great under-sung contemporary artist Jack Whitten at MoMA. Solo surveys elsewhere brought significant midcareer figures — Lorna Simpson and Rashid Johnson — into rich focus, and offered a first full look at the much-noticed portraitist Amy Sherald. More good news: much of all this bounty is still on view right now. Holland Cotter
‘Amy Sherald: American Sublime’
Whitney Museum of American Art
Amy Sherald is drawn to loud, retro-ish fabrics — to wide stripes and dresses imprinted with floral patterns or strewed with rows of strawberries or cherries or lemons. She excels at painting pleated skirts, their folds of fabric as stately and evenly spaced as ancient Greek columns.
And note the exaggeratedly clean ambience. White shirts gleam with Tide-strength brightness, and khakis remain unblemished by mystery grease stains. You cannot find fresher clothing in the work of any contemporary painter, with the exception of Alex Katz, the pre-eminent realist who similarly garbs his figures in shirts and pants that look as if they were removed five minutes earlier from a J. Crew gift box. In the case of both artists, the squeaky-clean attire echoes in the formal neatness of their respective painting styles.
(Read Deborah Solomon’s review here. Through Aug. 10 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, traveling to the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., in September.)
‘Caravaggio 2025’
Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome
Brute, brawler, cursed genius, queer outlaw: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio has become, for better and worse, the old master painter that modern people claim as our own. This once-in-a-generation retrospective — timed to a jubilee year in Rome, and fortuitously open upon the death of his fan Pope Francis — sloughs away Caravaggio’s loutish reputation to bring a rigorous gaze on 24 paintings (one newly attributed; you be the judge) that distill the dogmas of the Counter-Reformation into dark, naturalistic drama.
Caravaggio gave religious painting the intensity of opera, or maybe soap opera. Yet this rare exhibition allows us to see through the artist’s biography and grasp his view of life: too brief, too violent, yet freighted too with the promise of life everlasting.
Read our Close Read by Jason Farago here. Through July 6.
‘Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature’
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Two masterpieces of early-19th-century painting, exceptionally brought to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art from Hamburg and Berlin, anchored the first proper American retrospective of a great Romantic artist: the austere “Monk by the Sea” (1808-10), depicting a solitary observer dwarfed by a shore of gray and steely blue, and the melancholy “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” (circa 1817), whose backward-facing hiker in green velvet has become a metaphor for Germany itself. Friedrich’s landscapes, finally, were always a journey into the unknown: the geographic unknown, but also the unknown of the heart.
Read Jason Farago’s review here.
‘Jack Whitten: The Messenger’
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
In 1980, Jack Whitten’s TriBeCa studio was destroyed in a fire, and while renovating a new one he stopped making art for three years. When he began again it was with a set of newly invented forms and techniques. And from this point on an already powerful exhibition lifts off into the stratosphere. The final work in this format is a 20-foot-long mural-like memorial to the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, an event he witnessed firsthand. A pyramidal pileup of molds of shoes and glass and metal shards mixed with ash and dirt from the site, the piece has the entrapping weight of a PTSD nightmare and is as powerful a response to a still unthinkable event as I’ve seen in art.
Read Holland Cotter’s review here. Through Aug. 2.
‘The Michael C. Rockefeller Collection’
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
If you want to feel the charge of excitement that great art — no imaginative limits — and new thinking about it can bring, head to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s redesigned and reconceived Michael C. Rockefeller wing, and its collection of work from Africa, the Americas and Oceania. Every step of the way through the revamped galleries, closed since 2021, is wondrous. Spaces that once felt cramped and crowded have become enveloping vistas that will stop you in your tracks.
These 1,726 objects — majestic carved wood figures from Africa; pocket-size mythical beings, cast in gold, from Mexico; a communally painted, Sistine-worthy ceiling of the South Seas from New Guinea — are as beautiful as any art anywhere on this earth, and represent the spiritual, political and emotional lives of people spread over five continents and eight millenniums.
Read Holland Cotter’s review here. Sam Roberts reports on the family legacy. Derrick Bryson Taylor’s wrote about the villagers 9,000 miles away who helped reconceive a Ceremonial House Ceiling.
‘Myth & Marble: Ancient Roman Sculpture from the Torlonia’
Art Institute of Chicago
Everything we ask of art is in the 58 extraordinary Roman sculptures from the world’s finest private cache of ancient art: the Torlonia Collection, an aristocratic assembly of hundreds of Roman marbles that was out of sight for the better part of a century. Many of the sculptures (almost all hybrids of ancient stone and Renaissance additions) are portrait busts of emperors and other grandees, and against the Art Institute of Chicago’s purified white walls you can stare down Hadrian, instantly recognizable with his stern mien and tight beard, or Faustina the Younger, the wife of Marcus Aurelius, whose pulled-back hair and full cheeks project the stability of the Antonine Dynasty. The stupendous Torlonia collection reaffirms that corruption, violence and unashamed imperialism could coexist with the most sophisticated cultural endeavors.
Read Jason Farago’s review here. Through June 29 at the Art Institute of Chicago; the show travels to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth on Sept. 14.
‘Piet Mondrian: Even further’
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art
Blame its Slinky-shaped real estate, but the Guggenheim rarely has enough opportunities to showcase its own holdings. The first in what we hope will be a vigorous new series of collection displays brought out 18 paintings, drawings and sketchbooks by Piet Mondrian, whose youthful Dutch landscapes gave way, after World War I, to glossy black lines and clean planes of red, yellow and blue.
Mondrian never gave up entirely on depicting the world after hitting on the fundamentals of the grid and primary colors. He returned frequently to botanical motifs, and this show’s thrilling admixture of pure abstraction and tender floral drawings affirmed that Mondrian’s true project was to discover the interdependence of single things with the whole living world.
Read our Close Read by Jason Farago here.
‘Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers’
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art
A slip-slide between serious and comical is a continuing dynamic in Rashid Johnson’s work, one that has given some viewers looking for a readily locatable politics in his art the impression that’s it’s unserious, not to say lightweight. But keeping his work off balance, creating an art that offers multiple-choice responses, is pretty clearly what he’s after.
He does traditional oil-on-canvas work, like the scrawly, mask-like images called “Soul Paintings.” But he also spray-paints words — “Run,” “Promised Land,” “Stay Black and Die” — graffiti-style on mirrors. In 2008, he made a series of abstract paintings from a mixture of African black soap and melted wax. In 2019 he started applying almost all of these painterly media to fields of broken ceramic titles incorporating mirror-shards, shells, wax and cast bronze forms. With their high-relief texture they walk a thin line between painting and sculpture. And the show’s sculpture is some of Johnson’s strongest work.
Read Holland Cotter’s review here. Through Jan. 18, 2026.
Renewing ‘The Frick Collection’
New York City
Monuments are, almost by definition, unitary things, distillations of specific histories and emotions. And the reopened Frick, with its familiar art back in place and some significant new features added — notably an entire second floor of family rooms repurposed as intimate galleries — feels organic in that way. It celebrates the idea of Beauty as filtered through the tastes of an era (the Euro-American Gilded Age of the late 19th and 20th century), and through the tastes of a single family: Henry Clay Frick, who favored mild-mannered modern landscape painting before moving into European old master terrain; his wife, Adelaide Childs Frick, a lover of Rococo painting and decorative arts; and their daughter Helen Clay Frick, who, after her father’s death, assembled a collection-crowning treasury of early Italian Renaissance religious works.
Read Holland Cotter’s tour inside the splendor of the new Frick. Read Michael Kimmelman’s architectural review. Read Patricia Leigh Brown on the artisans behind the renovation.
‘Lorna Simpson: Source Notes’
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Some of our best artists have one thing in common. They do outstanding work early on, then, rather than coasting on that, they complicate it, even radically shift gears. Lorna Simpson, a star of a new generation of conceptual photographers in the 1990s, one whose poised studio-staged tableaus homed in on the politics of gender and race, is just such a restless soul. Photographic processes are still central to her art, but now her images are borrowed from archival sources — scientific texts and vintage copies of poplar Black lifestyle and newsmagazines like Ebony and Jet — which digitally transfers to panels painted with sumptuous combinations of acrylics and inks. The result is a kind of poetically haunting imagery new to her and to us.
Read Holland Cotter’s review here. Through Nov. 2.
‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’
The Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art
It’s probably too much to show up at one of the Costume Institute shows at the Met looking for the object that ties the whole thing together. Just because they’re about clothes doesn’t mean they have to do what a smart outfit does. And yet damn if I didn’t find a single object in this year’s installment that accomplishes just that, an et voilà piece that not only brings off the show itself but explains the courage that clothes have lent a people, a people who often weren’t meant — in the lands that either enslaved them or bankrolled their enslavement — to possess either: power or clothes, at least not the good ones.
Read Wesley Morris’s review here. Through Oct. 26.
Holland Cotter is the co-chief art critic and a senior writer for the Culture section of The Times, where he has been on staff since 1998.
Jason Farago, a critic at large for The Times, writes about art and culture in the U.S. and abroad.
Wesley Morris is a Times critic who writes about art and popular culture.
Deborah Solomon is an art critic and biographer who is currently writing a biography of Jasper Johns.
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