To the ancient Greeks and Mesopotamians, the Persians were the neighbors from hell. There was an exception: Cyrus the Great, who launched the Persian Empire by conquering Baby...

Any art exhibition that features a faux stick of butter is clearly unconcerned with the grand and exalted. Sculptor Robert Gober’s particular butter stick — “Untitled (2...

The Phillips Collection calls the show “Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet.” An alternate title might be “Faces in the Crowd.” Few of the intricat...

The good thing about photography is that it apprehends reality exactly. But that’s its limitation, too. So almost as soon as the medium was invented, photographers began tin...

Ellsworth Kelly is a hard-edged man. The 89-year-old American abstractionist’s paintings feature hard geometric forms and stark single-color blocks. But Kelly took a more fl...

If you think the art in Xavier Veilhan’s Phillips Collection exhibition “IN(Balance)” — the sculptures, the mobiles, the paintings and the photo-based works, both abst...

Is that a skull? Knitting and crocheting flaunt some serious attitude in “High Fiber: Women to Watch 2012,” a survey of work by seven textile artists from the U.S., Britai...

German actress Nina Hoss seems to specialize in playing resilient women in harsh situations. In “Barbara,” opening Friday, she’s the title character, an East German doc...

Writer-director Nicholas Jarecki’s debut feature, “Arbitrage,” was inspired by the 2007 financial-sector meltdown, but it has a classic theme. The drama, starring Richar...

“Whose body?” “Who is beyond the law?” “When was the last time you laughed?” Those are among the questions posed in “Belief+Doubt,” Barbara Kruger’s new inst...

The illustrated books made in Persia and Mughal-ruled India between 1400 and 1700 are “among the greatest manu-scripts ever produced anywhere,” according to Debra Diamond,...

Many viewers were surprised when abstract impressionist painter Barnett Newman first showed his “The Stations of the Cross: Lema Sabachthani” series at New York’s Guggen...

The works in “Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series,” on view through Sept. 23 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, are not exactly representational. The series is named fo...

Jasper Johns broke into the art world in 1958 as a painter. Within two years he had become a printmaker as well. The latter vocation is the focus of “Jasper Johns: Variation...

In the 1930s and ’40s, photographer Harry Warnecke was a sort of emissary from the full-color future. His work revealed to ordinary people what their black-and-white heroes ...