Strangeness is overused as a selling point in contemporary art. There’s no real reason that “strange” should equate with “good,” and anyway most of what gets called strange trades on century-old surrealist tricks (jarring juxtaposition, biomorphic distortion, sexual kink) that are no longer strange at all. Every once in a while, though, something comes along for which no other word really suffices—something whose strangeness is not a strategy or a goal but the by-product of following a certain line of thought. Something whose strangeness creeps up on you, as it must have done on the artist as she worked, and changes the way you look at things.

A century after Constantine, Saint Augustine, a Berber from what is now Algeria, asked: “Who now knows which peoples in the Roman Empire were what, since we have all become Romans?” Two centuries after that, Emperor Heraclius considered moving the capital from Constantinople to Carthage, in present-day Tunisia. Visitors to the exhibition would do well to leave at the door any contemporary assumptions about the geography of wealth, power, religious animosity, and ethnic identification.

Sergei Eisenstein, Sir Walter Scott, and my late in-laws had little in common but for the chosen companionship of Piranesi. When Eisenstein wrote, “I am now looking at this etching on my wall,” it was 1946, and he was in his Moscow apartment with eyes on Carcere oscura (Dark Prison). Scott never wrote about the Vedute that hung in his Edinburgh dining room (unlike Eisenstein, he had not bartered with a provincial Russian museum to secure them, having taken the easier route of inheriting from an uncle), but the prints’ dramatic entanglements of heroic history, ruination, and busy human actors surely reverberated with the author of Ivanhoe.

“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 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

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. .

The setting for Archibald Motley’s bright and bumptious dance scene Blues (1929) was a café near the Bois de Boulogne frequented by African and Caribbean immigrants, where he would sit and sketch into the night. The subject is unquestionably modern, as are Motley’s smoothed-out surfaces and abruptly cropped edges, but the gorgeous entanglement of musicians and revelers—the chromatic counterpoint of festive clothing and faces that come in dark, medium, and pale—recalls far older precedents, such as Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding Feast at Cana (1562–63), the enormous canvas at the Louvre that people back into when straining for a glimpse of the Mona Lisa.

History, Kentridge wants us to understand, is like his sculptures, or his films, or his drawings on concatenated book pages. There may be an instant where it all comes together and makes sense, but it’s we, not the data, who make the sense—“make” as in “manufacture,” as in “making it up.” Our brains are hardwired to find meaningful connections among any sensory inputs. We can’t help it. (This is a game at which art critics, like gamblers, habitually overestimate their skills.)

One reason we keep missing the mark is that Vermeer’s era straddled two quite different ideas of what painting might be—the old one of religious and mythological allusions to be untangled, and the proto-modern one of a reflection of personal experience. The Dutch populace was still reflexively religious, but also eager for pictures of its immediate world. It liked high-minded art with messages about piety and proper conduct, and it also liked still lifes, landscapes, and scenes of regular people doing regular things. Not infrequently, it liked them both on the same canvas.

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.

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

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

In the standard telling, the story of midcentury American art is a saga of hyperbolically talented painters working large and abstractly to manifest an existential encounter between man (notwithstanding the occasional begrudged woman) and material. “What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event,” in Harold Rosenberg’s catchy 1952 formulation. Canvas-as-event became a publicity magnet, inspiring popular news items like Life magazine’s 1949 “Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?” along with decades of New Yorker cartoons. On the home front, however, in private houses and apartments, things were different.

Ruscha has described the jolt of leaving Oklahoma (“very slow and simple”) for Los Angeles (“fast and complicated…and also very swanky”). Culturally speaking, the journey was not just from state to state, but also from the Fifties to the Sixties and all that followed, and from the bell curve of middle America to the crazy dumbbell curve of the art world—bohemian dilapidation at one end, pompous glitz at the other, and a long empty stretch between them. The cliché is to say he never looked back, but there’s a difference between looking back and moving back. As “Now Then” makes clear, he’s been looking back and listening ever since.

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.

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.

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.

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

In the Anniversary picture, Paula Modersohn-Becker wears nothing but an amber necklace above her hips and extends her stomach as if pregnant (the pose is reminiscent of Saint Catherine in Jan van Eyck’s Dresden Triptych, though Saint Catherine keeps her clothes on). As a nude self-portrait by a woman, the picture is almost unprecedented, but her attitude is one of contemplative curiosity, not bravado. It’s the expression people wear when trying on clothes—not how do I feel, but how does this look?