Please note that we’ve included some non-US citizens who nevertheless spent significant time in the United States. They are marked with an asterisk*.

However, it’s a narrow one, and intentionally so. The Art Institute focused “The Image Disappears” on a single chapter of Dalí’s life: the 1930s, the decade “Dali becomes Dali,” according to co-curator Caitlin Haskell. “He’s making his grand appearance on the scene in the United States—showing in American galleries, working in Hollywood and fashion, making a huge splash,” she says. “At the same time, as we studied our paintings, we noticed all these different kinds of disappearance happening. . . . We were really interested in drawing out that contradiction.” 

The Art Institute borrowed 11 artworks from other collections for the occasion and took its own Dalís off the walls for closer study—which, in one case, led to the biggest Dalí-related breakthrough in decades. Below is a guide to a half-dozen of the 50 Dalí works in the exhibition, including the one about which Cohen and Haskell made their big discovery.

So, whether the Met is your first stop of the morning or your last after a long day of sightseeing, you could probably use a little help getting the most out of your visit. With that in mind, we’ve assembled a list of must-see works on view. Some are among the museum’s biggest draws, but we’ve also included many lesser-known gems, hand-picked by a Met expert, that are often overshadowed by more famous works nearby.

We hope it goes without saying that you can pick and choose your own highlights along the way, depending on how much time you have. (And if you get lost, consult the Met’s handy online map.)

Here’s our walkthrough of works not to miss, in the order you’d encounter them if you entered the museum from 81st Street.

Say what now? Yep, that’s right: For speediest entrance, skip the grand steps at the main entrance at 82nd and Fifth Avenue and head a block south, where you’ll find a nondescript set of black doors at street level. As surreptitious as it might feel, it’s a full-fledged entrance, and usually a fraction as packed as the main entrance. “It’s the museum’s best-kept open secret,” says Managing Educator Kathy Galitz.

Before we begin, we’ll pause to acknowledge the fraught provenance of many of the Met’s artworks and the ongoing repatriation movements that are increasingly bolstered by law; earlier this year, for instance, authorities reclaimed 27 of the Met’s Italian and Egyptian antiquities, asserting that they had been looted.

All right, now on to the tour. Head up the stairs, and you’ll land in the Greek and Roman art section.

Among the Johnny-come-latelys? The United States. Van Gogh’s work wasn’t exhibited here until 1913, at the famed Armory Show in New York City, Chicago, and Boston. But none of his works sold—likely because their prices were similar to those of works by more internationally known masters like Monet and Cézanne. Van Gogh-Bonger refused to budge on the pricing, and she had good reason for her obstinance: Europe was beginning to buy. She didn’t realize, however, that America was a notoriously conservative art market.

“We weren’t quite ready for him yet. It’s mind-boggling to me that there was a moment when America didn’t embrace this artist, considering how ever-present he is today,” says exhibition curator Jill Shaw, head of the Detroit Institute of Arts’ modern and contemporary department and its curator of European art from 1850 to 1970.

Interestingly, when Van Gogh was finally embraced Stateside, elite East Coast collectors and institutions weren’t the ones leading the charge. Instead, for decades, Van Gogh’s greatest U.S. stronghold was the Midwest. In 1922 the Detroit Institute of Arts became the first public museum to acquire and display a Van Gogh—a Self-Portrait With Straw Hat (1887)—as part of its permanent collection. (Albert Barnes was the first American individual to acquire a work for his private collection, but it was rarely exhibited.) The Art Institute of Chicago followed in 1926 (The Bedroom, 1889), as did Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in 1932 (a painting in the “Olive Trees” series, 1889) and the St. Louis Art Museum in 1935 (Stairway at Auvers, 1890). 

Currently, American-held Van Goghs are on loan to the Detroit Institute of Arts for its “Van Gogh in America” exhibition, timed to the centennial of the institute’s acquisition of its Self-Portrait. According to Shaw, authorities at the Van Gogh Museum believe the exhibition is the first to focus on the artist’s reception in the United States.

Shaw says “Van Gogh in America” will expose audiences to a fuller view of Van Gogh than his “greatest hits.” “It’s incredible what we latch on to as his signature works,” she says. “There’s much more to Van Gogh than his swirly, thick brushstrokes.”

Below, Shaw gives us a rundown of some of the premier Van Gogh works in the United States, nearly all of which are on display at the Detroit Institute of Arts through January 22, 2023.

It was a major coup for the designer and deejay, then just 37 years old. The son of middle-class Ghanaian immigrants, Abloh’s entrée into high fashion six years earlier had been tarred by accusations of plagiarism and knee-jerk rejections from critics and commentators. But he would soon become a household name, his Off-White label jumping 31 places to become third on the 2017 Lyst Index of the world’s hottest brands (it became number one on the list the following year).

At the same time, Abloh was making good on his promise to prop open the door behind him, mentoring numerous young designers of color through his Post-Modern scholarship fund, the NikeLab Chicago Re-Creation Center, the educational online series Free Game, and more. He invited some 1,500 students to his very first runway show for Louis Vuitton, an event that also attracted Kanye “Ye” West, Rihanna, A$AP Rocky, and fashion’s best and brightest. “I often refer to my career as a bit of a Trojan horse: It exists to traverse two spaces and allows other people to partake in it,” Abloh told WSJ. Magazine in 2021.

Just a few months after that interview, Abloh was dead, felled by a rare heart cancer that he hid from the public. The fashion world hasn’t been the same since, and it still struggles to categorize Abloh’s unboxable creative output. Abloh himself rejected the “street wear” moniker that often trailed his work, contesting it as a racist dismissal of his legitimacy. “The systems recognize me as different: They label the work as street wear, they say I’m not a designer, they say it’s not art—the list goes on,” Abloh told the hosts of the Ethical Fashion podcast in 2021. “I need to tell my own narrative . . . I’m not waiting for a narrative to come back about whether my work is valuable or not.”

So far, public opinion has been on Abloh’s side. Figures of Speech,an exhibition of his work cutting across music, fashion, architecture, and design, has toured five art museums so far and has been received with worshipful admiration at each. The Brooklyn Museum, the first to host the exhibit since Abloh’s death, recently rolled out commemorative items unique to its iteration of the exhibit, ongoing through January. After months of anticipation, Nike also dropped the limited-edition lime-green Air Force 1 Lows designed by Abloh and worn by exhibit security earlier this month, just as it did for the Lows worn in 2019 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (sky blue with red accents) and in 2021 at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art (a vibrant marigold). Unsurprisingly, they’re already sold out.

Speculation still smolders about the Abloh-less future of Off-White. Ibrahim “Ib” Kamara, Abloh’s stylist, was named art and image director several months after Abloh’s death; the first Off-White collection created under his leadership hits runways in early 2023. Louis Vuitton continues to salute the fallen designer, but as of this writing, the house has not named Abloh’s successor. Instead, those who best enshrine Abloh’s legacy will likely be the same enthusiasts he happily chatted up via Instagram DMs and mentored, rather than the slow-moving institutions he couldn’t help but feel he sneaked into.

In addition to founding his own brands, including Off-White, Abloh collaborated with countless others—Equinox, Gore-Tex, Jimmy Choo, Kith, Sunglass Hut, and Timberland, to name a few. Listed below are his six most essential collaborations.

When second-wave feminism crested, Schneemann’s body of work was ready to meet it; in fact, some of her earliest artworks prefigured it, like a 1957 nude painting of her then boyfriend, composer James Tenney. She claimed an unapologetically female perspective of desire, one that was relational to men but rejected patriarchal values. (Her heterosexual vantage point sometimes ran afoul of lesbian separatists, who vehemently opposed her film Fuses, discussed below, when it was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in the early 1970s.)

As sensibilities changed, Schneemann later felt her work was being met with ambivalence by third-wave feminists. Her output became more elegiac, memorializing friends and colleagues in the avant-garde with whom she collaborated. What didn’t change, however, was her long-held disregard for cultural taboos, whether reading a manifesto extracted from her vagina (Interior Scroll, 1975 and 1977), forcing viewers to confront the horror of war crimes (Viet Flakes, 1962–66), or magnifying the bodies of 9/11 victims hurtling through the air toward their death (Terminal Velocity, 2001–05).

Schneemann died in 2019, two years after receiving the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale. Now through January 8, 2023, the Barbican in London is exploring her work in Body Politics, a new retrospective. Here, Barbican curator Lotte Johnson comments on highlights from the show.

A new retrospective currently in transit from the Art Institute of Chicago (ending Sept. 5) to the Tate Modern (Oct. 5, 2022 to Mar. 12, 2023) builds on these truisms while illuminating less widely known biographical details about this iconoclastic artist. You’ll notice a big one right out of the gate: The exhibition spells Cezanne’s name without the accent over the first “E,” just as he signed it. The accented “É,” curators argue, would have been a holdover from a more urbane Parisian dialect; Cezanne’s own lack of written accent reflects his allegiance to the Provençal dialect of the era. (We’ll stylize the artist’s name the same way here.)

Below are 10 emblematic artworks by Cezanne included in the retrospective, as selected by exhibition curators.

You know what? It might be high time to repaint some walls.

Let’s operate on some generally shared, if not universally true, assumptions. For many of us, priorities have shifted, wallets are thinner, and we’d rather not invite painters or designers into our homes while vaccine rollout runs at a trickle. If you’re going to be indoors for the long haul, DIYing a brand-new wall color is an attainable way to breathe new life into your home—ideally with no- or low-VOC (volatile organic compound) paints, especially if your space isn’t well ventilated.

“Paint is still the cheapest, quickest way to change a room. It’s the easiest way to create impact,” says Rayman Boozer, principal designer and founder of Apartment 48 in NoHo. Boozer would know. In 1997, when he was still an upstart design consultant, a fortuitous project for a Time Out New York editor led to that publication crowning him New York’s “color guru.” The moniker became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy for Boozer, who has since color-consulted for scores of private and corporate clients. Whether he’s designing a Manhattan loft or a boardroom for Vox Media, Boozer’s work is unified by a penchant for bold, declarative hues—royal purples pinging off rich grays, blue-greens and chartreuse nestling together like a peacock’s plumage.

“I’m not afraid of taking risks with color. My biggest color conundrum is when I have clients who don’t want color, because my go-to is something bright and happy,” he says. Boozer points to a practical application of bright hues during shelter-in-place. Imagine, for a moment, the space you work in. Do you often find yourself gazing out the window? At a time when many of us are sighing longingly at the outside world, Boozer believes it’s imperative to choose a color that refocuses attention back inside the space. For example: if you have a sunny, plant-filled room but still find yourself staring covetously at the big oak outside your window, try a leafy green hue that plays up the solarium vibe.

Nor should you be spooked by space constraints: You can create a whole world of dimension in even the most cramped, overstuffed room by painting just one wall or accenting with a gutsy hue. “I always tell my staff I like colorful wallpaper because it keeps people inside the apartment. Otherwise they look right out the window, which just makes the space feel smaller,” Boozer says.

Of course, what makes a color engaging is all in the eye of the beholder. Parents in particular typically find themselves on the tamer side of their children’s color preferences. Say you’re repainting and your kid is keen on a garish bedroom hue that doesn’t work with the rest of your place. What then?

“A small child doesn’t have any reference for color, so of course they’re going to pick the brightest color they can think of,” Boozer says. “The best thing I’ve come up with is to paint a dado or chair rail with the brighter color. Then, above it, you paint a lighter, softer color”—Boozer is a big fan of Benjamin Moore’s Windmill Wings—“or just keep it white. It works great, because the child’s preferred color is on their level, at their height.”

But when it comes to the COVID-19 era, Chicago-based design writer Jude Stewart suggests throwing caution to the wind and simply letting your tyke have her way. After all, it’s her space too—even if your daughter’s zest for Pikachu Yellow makes you cringe.

“I’m now speaking as a parent, but projects you can do together that give your kid a sense of agency are huge,” Stewart says. “It’s their room, and you can close the door. Plus, if it makes the kid want to curl up and read, then that frees up the rest of the house from getting colonized by the child—which, speaking from experience, often happens.”

If technicolor hues aren’t your thing in any context, there’s still an entire universe between bland and utterly eye-popping. Stewart suggests that sheltering painters venture outside their comfort zone rather than instinctively gravitating to inoffensive hues. Case in point: A few years ago, Stewart toured a series of staged apartments that were all painted the same “sad default gray.” It made her realize how much social conformity is coded in “safe” colors.

“It was the gray, an ‘upper-middle-class gray,’ ” Stewart remembers. “What a non-choice! It made me feel like I’m not a person. Just because it affirms some vision of how much one can afford doesn’t mean it’s beautiful or attractive.”

On the other hand, it’s certainly possible to go “too wacky, too early,” In her 2013 book Roy G. Biv: An Exceedingly Surprising Book About Color, Stewart recalls the time she hastily painted her living room Little Angel yellow, charmed by its appearance on a paint chip. But after swathing the entire room in that color, she writes, “the oppressive cheerfulness clamped down on you like a migraine.”

“Sometimes we want to be creative but don’t give ourselves enough time to let that idea develop. You have to live with it, let yourself live with it,” she says.

Never has that been more possible than during shelter-in-place. With more time in the home, prospective painters can slow down the process and select colors more deliberately. Stewart recommends painting large swatches and mulling over the colors for weeks, even months, to see how well you get along together.

By giving it time, you’ll also be more aware of how the paint holds up throughout the day. “A room changes all day long as the light changes. The same paint color you like at the brightest point of the day might feel oppressive at the end of the day,” Stewart says. “That’s the sort of thing we can notice now, whereas before, if you left the house at 8:30 and got back at 5:30, you might not have dialed in to that too much.” (An additional tip from Stewart: If your space is wanting for natural light to begin with, redo your window trimmings in semigloss. Its gentle, unobtrusive sheen will reflect more natural light into your room.)

The bottom line: While quarantine feels like forever, paint is not. Why not take a relatively inexpensive risk? “Over the years, I’ve gotten really good at choosing colors just based on some bad choices and experimenting,” Boozer says. “You can live with something for a week, decide it was a mistake, then just paint over it. All you have is time. We aren’t going anywhere for a while.”