Ariella Budick

Imagine a woman in her forties, the mother of two children, sitting at a kitchen table in the Bronx, obsessively exorcising her terrors by piecing together scraps of fabric, torn paper and string into elegant collages for nobody to see. Hannelore Baron, an artist so overcome by anxiety and mental anguish that she rarely left the house, shut out 20th-century America where protests raged, cultures clashed and bloodshed dragged on in Vietnam. And yet, even hunkered in her lair, she somehow osmosed…

This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to New York No matter how aggressively MoMA expands — and by now it’s consumed nearly an entire midtown block — the museum can still only display a meagre slice of its possessions at any given time. Rather than commit to a single ossified version of art history, curators keep the permanent collection in slow, ever-changing rotation. A few crowd-drawing perennials — Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” and Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”, for instance…

Those who adore (or despise) Gustav Klimt for his gold-flecked, sinuous women in ornate boudoirs and curtained salons might be surprised to discover that the man ever stepped outdoors. But he did, eagerly — desperately, even — and his lust for nature infused his summertime work. “It is terrible, awful here in Vienna, everything parched, hot, dreadful, all this work on top of it, the ‘bustle’ — I long to be gone like never before,” he complained in 1901. When he did escape all those exacting cli…

In the 1920s, Harlem taught Americans how to be modern in a thousand different ways. The Harlem Renaissance transcended style or school, spanned art forms and flew far beyond the confines of one New York neighbourhood, to Chicago, Philadelphia and Paris. More than a movement, it was a sensibility: urban, novel and proudly Black. “We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” proclaimed poet and activist Langston Hughes in 19…

The classic story of modern art goes like this: there once was a city called Paris, where the world’s most brilliant artists converged, jostling and mingling into an international avant-garde. Then Hitler’s armies invaded, and everybody left. André Breton, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, Piet Mondrian and many other luminaries decamped to America so that, by the time the war ended, New York had become the new capital of art. That narrative isn’t wrong, exactly, but it lacks nuance. Pari…

Absence was a vital presence for the sculptor Toshiko Takaezu. She built her forms around soft mounds of emptiness richer than anything the eye could reckon. “The important thing is the dark space that you can’t see,” she once said and, in that spirit, she wrapped voids in ceramic, sometimes breaching the shell with a tiny oculus. Her work is also gloriously extroverted: the Noguchi Museum’s survey of her 60-year career is alive with stunning surfaces, curved, smooth and pocked planes, glazed in…

A colossal spider is smiling down on Central Park in New York. From the roof of the Metropolitan Museum, it waves its bronze-and-steel tentacles genially at the humans below. One limb provides a perch for a tiny bird stretching its wings. The outsized arachnid is the centrepiece of the Met’s seriously charming rooftop commission by the Kosovo-born, Berlin-based sculptor Petrit Halilaj, who amplifies the school-desk graffiti of yesterday’s children into monumental doodles drawn in black metal li…

One of the more curious encounters in the history of Modern art took place in September 1945 at a psychiatric hospital in southern France. A pall of ash still hung over Europe when Jean Dubuffet, a prosperous wine merchant-turned-painter, showed up at the hilltop village of Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole and met the asylum’s unconventional Catalan director, Francesc Tosquelles. Their private conversations rate only a passing mention in the American Folk Art Museum’s tangled and sporadically illumina…

This article is part of FT Globetrotter’s guide to New York The Met is the world’s greatest museum — prove me wrong! — and each visit makes the place seem vaster, deeper and more bounteous. Picking 10 of its 1.5 million pieces is like choosing your favourite ripples in the ocean. The museum may seem immutable in its loyalty to the past, but it is always tinkering, eking more gallery space out of its footprint, balancing history with the need to serve ever-refreshing crowds. (Right now, the gall…

The American artist’s oblique sayings were a hit at the museum in 1989 but her more recent work falls short

Mary Cassatt has long been pigeonholed as a painter of podgy children being bathed, snuggled and fussed over by single-minded mothers. The critical consensus about her holds that tenderness spills into treacle and her depictions of domestic bliss verge on the cloying. Here to blow away that reductive characterisation is Mary Cassatt at Work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. This polemical exhibition makes the case that, far from sentimentalising motherhood, the artist was actually reporting on…

Echo Park wasn’t always the preeningly hip, rapidly whitening Los Angeles enclave of vegan cafés and vinyl boutiques it is today. A few decades ago, when the photographer Reynaldo Rivera shared an apartment there with his sisters and a never-ending parade of passers-through, it was a predominantly Latino neighbourhood. It was also drug-soaked, dangerous, permissive and hugely fun. That, at any rate, is the vibe that comes through in a bracing, drama-filled retrospective at MoMA PS1 in New York.…

A New-York Historical Society exhibition covers department stores, a theatre where Houdini played and forgotten herds of pigs

His intense style, which includes shooting the faces of passers-by close up with a flash, is laid bare by a confronting retrospective in New York

The Antiguan poet, singer and painter was obsessed with his lineage and the world around him

The artist’s outdoor works are biomorphic yet baroque pieces that verge on architecture

He vanished for centuries, but now a Massachusetts museum is spotlighting him for the first time

A ravishing $230mn restoration of the former Albright-Knox Gallery is crowned by an overdue survey of sculptor Marisol

The struggle to overcome an anti-epiphany is laid bare in a heartbreaking New York show

Young artists from across the globe celebrate the beauty of crowded cities at the International Center of Photography