Part of the delight of trompe l’oeil is the way it relocates, at least for a moment, the edge between art and life. The most dramatic example here is an actual marble tabletop on which Boilly painted a spill of pocket contents—business card, letter, miniature portrait, coins. Collage can do something comparable, as in Picasso’s inclusion of a real calling card whose folded corner has been removed and replaced with a drawn imitation. For both artists, real-world utility and social relationships are at play: Boilly’s tabletop portrays a client, and the business card is his own, with his studio address and directions. The card in Picasso’s work had been left by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, who called when he was out; the collage was a gift to them in response.

What has Johns done for us lately? Pretty much what he did for us in the first place: he continually disrupts the mental shorthand that converts complex visual experience into simple mental categories, with all their buttressing opinions, received wisdom, and personal preferences. In a world (including the art world) where “visuals” are used to simplify arguments and kindle beliefs, Johns reminds us that doubling, bifurcation, and uncertainty are the terms of vision itself.

Glenn Adamson and Alan Sekula take different approaches and rely on different areas of expertise, but the central story they tell is the same: how expressions of mind have gained hegemony over manipulations of matter, and what has been damaged in the process.

Art history is, inevitably, a story imposed on a selected group of artifacts by people who, consciously or unconsciously, have predilections and agendas. Ideally, the story grows from the objects, and the question of which objects is what animates both conservative critics and the protesters in the streets. .

For four decades Marshall has been helping himself to the bounty of art history, extrapolating distinctive strengths of early Renaissance or French rococo and setting them to work in entirely novel ways to depict Black subjects and Black experience. In a spellbinding exhibition now at Jack Shainman Gallery, it’s Surrealism’s turn. Hilarious and sinister, easy to approach and impossible to resolve, the paintings and drawings in “Exquisite Corpse: This is Not the Game” follow the segmented protocol to which the Surrealists laid claim under the name le cadavre exquise.

Between-the-wars has become a popular trope of film and television—cloche hats and people huddled before enormous radios—but Uglow gives us something else: thinking people navigating a world that was not just different from our own but also different from the one that nostalgia had imposed on them. Sybil and Cyril may have been adventurous and “modern,” but they spent as much time looking backward as looking forward.

Like the cigarettes and bottles, like the eye that looks insatiably but never grows a hand to fix what it sees, the hood signals a history of poor decisions and ineffectual resolutions that may or may not include mob violence. It is the kind of bad that can find a home beneath all kinds of headgear

“To Fix the Image in Memory” is an important show for many reasons, but mainly because it puts looking before speaking. It is enjoyable because Celmins’s affection for images is contagious, and it is critical because her affection does not imply gullibility—all of that looking is used to dig into just what makes images tick. 

The Homer of The Gulf Stream is both more worldly and more elusive than the Homer of little red schoolhouses and sou’westers. And what the 90 or so paintings and watercolors assembled in “Crosscurrents” make clear is that the most salient quality of his art was never straightforwardness; it is his knack for using visual precision to demonstrate the limits of vision. We can see what is happening but not what will happen. He is the master of the ambiguous outcome, which also makes him the master of the unclear moral: Believe in the ship, and The Gulf Stream is a lesson in forbearance; believe in the waterspout, and it is a lesson in futility.

It is hard, looking at the young Alessandro de’ Medici in Jacopo da Pontormo’s painting of 1534–1535, not to empathize. Long-nosed and tender-eyed, he has a moody Adam Driver gravitas. Though he is looking at us, his hands emerge from his vast black cloak to fiddle with stylus and paper, where a faint female profile can be seen. Reputedly

The events of 1944 are beyond our reach. The subject of these paintings is not that world, but our own—the place where we actively choose to know or not know, see or not see. At the Met Breuer, the whole confab of paintings, facsimiles, and historical photographs is further multiplied by a thirty-foot stretch of gray

When af Klint died in 1944, she left more than 1,200 paintings, 134 notebooks and sketchbooks, and more than 26,000 manuscript pages to her nephew, a vice-admiral in the Swedish navy. She also gave instructions that her work not be shown for twenty years after her death. The work is now being seen by thousands, though whether they are ready to receive its message is another question