The Best Art of the Year, From MoMA’s Jack Whitten Restrospective to a Caravaggio Blockbuster

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio—known far and wide as Caravaggio—was quite the enfant terrible. Highlighting his lengthy rap sheet: He killed a man. Let’s just say it wasn’t his first fight. Violent altercations appear to have been something of a hobby for the immensely influential artist, who was born in Milan in 1571 and made his name in Rome. There he built a thriving studio, winning commissions from rich patrons who also wielded their leverage to get him out of trouble. (Plus ça change… ) 

The incessant drama of his life was matched only by the intensity of his canvases, which are alive with wild-eyed men, gentle youths, and serene saints (sometimes modeled by well-known prostitutes). Rome’s Palazzo Barberini, in collaboration with Galleria Borghese, has brought together two dozen of his remarkable works this year for an exhibition that underscores the bridge he built from the late Renaissance into the Baroque period. He inspired a raft of followers, the Caravaggisti, with his extreme chiaroscuro, expressive emotions, and uncanny realism. A rare bonus for ticketholders: access to his only mural, Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto, which he painted on a ceiling in Villa Ludovisi for a powerful cardinal. 

After the homicide, Caravaggio fled to Naples, then to Malta, to escape a sentence of death by beheading. Little coincidence that severed heads became a frequently recurring motif in his paintings—some, as in David With the Head of Goliath, bearing his own tortured visage. Caravaggio didn’t make it to his 39th birthday, and sketchy details surrounding his death leave open the possibility that his enemies exacted their revenge. But you still have time to hotfoot it to Rome: The show closes July 6.

Above: An installation view of Caravaggio 2025 at Palazzo Barberini. From left: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Giuditta e Oloferne, 1598-1602, and Marta and e Maddalena, 1598, both oil on canvas. Opposite: Ecce Homo, 1606-1609, oil on canvas.

Arguably even more so than its uptown neighbor the Met, the Frick has always been the quintessential New York City museum. Housed in Henry Clay Frick’s Beaux-Arts mansion on Fifth Avenue, it has transported visitors with its stunning collection of European art, from Goya and El Greco to Rembrandt, Bellini, and Turner, as well as fine antiques and decorative art, all displayed in the grand salons, some as its namesake had installed them. But in need of more space, the museum has been closed for the past four years so that Annabelle Selldorf, the architect of choice for sensitive historical projects like this one, could work her magic. 

The Frick reopened this spring with 27,000 square feet of limestone-clad construction that elegantly complements the original inside and out. Highlights include a striking marble staircase (pictured), a sculptural auditorium, and new galleries that seamlessly connect to the mansion, all done in collaboration with the firm Beyer Blinder Belle. And the $220 million refresh offers an additional treat that might mollify even the most rigid preservationists: The home’s second floor—the Frick family’s former living quarters and an ideal backdrop for more intimately scaled treasures—has been refurbished and, for the first time, is open to the public. 

Her 2018 portrait of a regal Michelle Obama—dressed in a flowing gown subtly reminiscent of quilts sewn by Black women in Gee’s Bend, Ala.—made Amy Sherald a household name, but this exhibition proves beyond a doubt that she’s more than a one-hit wonder. The former first lady’s irrefutable star power is also the exception: Since the late 2000s, Sherald has built her career by depicting everyday Black Americans, becoming a leader among a generation committed to representing those previously overlooked by our art institutions. 

Originating at SFMOMA and on view at the Whitney through August 10, the survey traces Sherald’s development as she toiled in a small Baltimore studio. There’s a deceptive simplicity to her portraits, which often place her subjects against a single, vibrant hue—perhaps to contrast with their skin tones, rendered in shades of gray. In other cases, the artist chooses props indelibly representative of Americana: a white-picket fence, a bright- green John Deere tractor. But unifying the roughly 50 canvases is a realism that digs beneath the surface to consider her subjects’ complex inner lives.

Above: Amy Sherald, American Grit, 2024

Arlene Shechet is one of those artists who may have been slow to percolate, but in the past decade or so she has been on a fully caffeinated tear, wowing viewers with her beguiling sculptures at such venues as the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Frick Collection, and the mega gallery Pace. She is owed a heaping helping of credit for the long-overdue respect that ceramics is now being given. 

Last May, Storm King—a rambling 500-acre gem of an outdoor museum in New York’s Hudson Valley—unveiled a half dozen monumental sculptures it commissioned from the artist. The steel and aluminum pieces punctuated the verdant green of the rolling landscape in joyful, saturated colors—yellow, blue, pink, purple—and quirky shapes that were both curvy and sharp, with cutouts that framed views of the site and each other. Three years in the making, they also demonstrated Shechet’s ability to scale up from her intimate porcelains and ceramics: These works were as tall as 20 feet, as long as 30, and as confidently original as the all-women rock bands alluded to in the show’s title.

There was something so decidedly old-school about revered gallerist Marian Goodman’s longtime location on West 57th Street in New York. Steps from Bergdorf Goodman, it recalled a period when leading art dealers wanted to be in close proximity to their uptown clients. It wasn’t even at ground level. But on opening nights, the cognoscenti happily squeezed into the elevator together, disembarking on the fourth floor to see the latest works by some of the globe’s most admired artists, many of them European. As the art world migrated to SoHo and then Chelsea, the gallery remained a destination.

The once-indefatigable Goodman, 96, stepped back from the day-to-day four years ago, but the new leadership, made up primarily of her protégés, is determined to push the gallery forward. Last fall, the operation relocated a few miles south, taking over the grand five-story Grosvenor Building in Tribeca (pictured). With soaring ceilings and a sprawling blueprint of 35,000 square feet, the space feels more like a museum than a commercial gallery. And maybe that’s the point: Goodman always seemed closer in spirit to intellectual curators than to sharp-elbowed dealers. Though some of the earlier stars—Gerhard Richter, William Kentridge—have moved on, the new space gives acclaimed artists such as Julie Mehretu, Tavares Strachan, and Danh Vo room to stretch.

MoMA’s sweeping retrospective, one of the best dedicated to any artist in years, finally does Jack Whitten justice. With more than 175 works spanning nearly 60 years (Whitten died in 2018 at the age of 78), the show takes the viewer from his youth in Jim Crow Alabama to his emergence in 1960s New York and his development into one of the most inventive artists of his generation. 

Whitten built his studio practice the way a scientist develops a successful laboratory: with a dedication to experimentation and innovation. A committed abstractionist, he used giant rakes, Afro picks, and squeegees to scrape away layers of paint, revealing glimpses of what lay beneath, and later cut thin sheets of acrylic paint into “tiles” that he then painstakingly rearranged into cosmic compositions. He incorporated unusual materials—aluminum foil, eggshells, blood—and created homages to some of his Civil Rights–era idols, such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Ellison. On Crete, where he spent his summers, he made textured sculptures from the island’s detritus. 

One highlight of the show, which will be on view through August 2, is his magnum opus: 9.11.01. Whitten’s studio was near the World Trade Center, and after witnessing the horrors of that day, he spent five years making this—and only this—monumental, grief-streaked painting. 

In an emotionally potent exhibition, the Morgan examined a fascinating figure from its own history: its first director, a powerhouse who helped build J. P. Morgan’s world-class rare-books collection. A Black woman, she passed as white. Born in 1879, Belle da Costa Greene hailed from the African American elite of Washington, D.C.—her father was the first Black graduate of Harvard College—but her light-skinned mother later moved to New York City and decided to reinvent her heritage to provide more opportunities for her children. They changed their surname from Greener to Greene, and Belle and her brother adopted the da Costa middle name to enhance their new backstory of Portuguese ancestry. 

Before taking the viewer through some of Greene’s acquisitions for the library and her personal art collection (she was said to be the highest-paid woman in the country), the show lent context to the practice of racial passing as well as to her romantic involvement with art historian Bernard Berenson, who was born Jewish but converted to Episcopalianism. The gut punch landed near the end, as the story of her nephew, whom she raised as her ward, unfolded. A soldier in WWII, he was listed as killed in action, but Greene soon found out that shortly before his death, his fiancée had learned of his ancestry and broken off their engagement in a hate-filled letter; he took his own life in despair. Whatever Greene felt about her decades-long assimilation into white society remains a mystery: She destroyed her personal papers before her death in 1950. 

Above, from left: The bejeweled Gospels of Judith of Flanders, 1051-1064, one of many medieval works Belle da Costa Greene acquired for J. P. Morgan’s famed library; a 1910 portrait of Greene by Ernest Walter Histed.