Discover prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi from the Arthur R. Miller Collection at Japan Society.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi's vivid scenes from history and legend, wildly popular 150 years ago, are a major influence on the work of today's manga and anime artists. This exhibition features over 130 dramatic depictions of giant spiders, skeletons and toads; Chinese ruffians; women warriors; haggard ghosts; and desperate samurai combat.

The son of a butcher, Agnolo di Cosimo Mariano di Tori, better known by his nickname Agnolo Bronzino, was born on November 17, 1503, in Monticelli, then a suburb of Florence. From 1515 to 1518 he was apprenticed to the painter Jacopo Pontormo (1494–1557), and by the early 1520s he had gained some independence as a collaborator in the elder master's workshop. The friendship and professional association between Pontormo and Bronzino, who were relatively close in age, continued for almost four decades.

Mason Klein, curator of fine arts at the Jewish Museum, gives a tour of the exhibition Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention. Man Ray, as one of the iconic figures of the avant-garde of the 20th century, recast the concept of artistic identity - as a poet, as a painter, as a photographer, as a filmmaker, and an essayist.

From 1963 to 1978, John D. Rockefeller 3rd and his wife Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller worked with legendary art historian Sherman E. Lee (1918–2008) to assemble one of the most spectacular private collections of Asian art in the United States. The founder of Asia Society and son of collectors John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, JDR 3rd (1906–1978) played a leading role in fostering cultural understanding and cooperation between Asia and America during his lifetime. Lee was a dynamic former director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, and was advisor to significant public and private American collections. Like JDR 3rd, Lee had extraordinary knowledge of the art and politics of Asia, and their partnership led to a very particular vision of collection building.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and private collections related to a mystical branch of Islam known as Sufism. While differing Muslim sects and diverse nationalities of the Islamic world may not always share a single religious or cultural ideology, the mystical and romantic aspects of Sufism tend to appeal to a global audience. Inspired by Sufi ideologies and the poetry of celebrated mystics such as al-Ghazzali (d. 1111) and Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273), artists from the medieval Islamic period through the present day have produced works of art ranging from ceramic and metal wares to illustrated manuscripts and photographs.

This show marks first major showing of the artist’s oeuvre in New York in over thirty years. In addition to the well-known Parisian cityscapes that have traditionally marked him as the “Urban Impressionist,” Caillebotte painted scenes of outdoor life away from the city on the coast of Normandy and in the villages of Yerres and Petit Gennevilliers, where he and his family maintained estates.

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In this special exhibition the Bard Graduate Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art collaborate to exhibit English embroidery from between 1580 and 1700. In this SundayArts Choice co-curator Andrew Morrall shows us a very special piece, a portrait of an Elizabethan lady that is the oldest portrait in the embroidery medium as well as other unique pieces shown in this exhibit on view until April 12, 2009.

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No other modernist painter melded the traditions of Jewish Hasidism, eastern Orthodoxy, and western catholic tradition into such dramatically rich and personally significant expressions of biblical narratives. The intersection of Hasidic and Christian iconographies in Chagall’s representations of biblical heroes, prophets, or scenes of the Crucifixion yields an intriguing dynamic tension, which has never been adequately addressed in a major museum exhibition.

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Designed for Pleasure examines—in the context of Japan’s famous floating world—aesthetic, social, and commercial forces active in contemporary art today: fashion, celebrity, marketing, and popular culture. Ukiyo, literally, “floating world,” means something like “going with the flow.” In practice, this implied disporting oneself in the pleasure quarters and theater districts of Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka that captivated the popular imagination of Japan from the late seventeenth to late nineteenth centuries.

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One of the most prominent landscape painters of the 19th century, Albert Bierstadt established his reputation with grand-scale and dramatically conceived “Great Pictures” of the American West that embodied the national agenda of expansionism known as Manifest Destiny. A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie, an 84 square foot canvas that stands as a pivotal work in Bierstadt’s very public career, was the most important painting to result from the artist’s second western expedition, in 1863.

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