Denver

It is one thing to know, perhaps vaguely, that many American artists ventured to France in the mid-19th through early 20th centuries to study in French academies and ateliers. It's another to recognize the French influence from a display of the drawings and paintings they made there and thereafter. "Whistler to Cassatt: American Painters in France" at the Denver Art Museum goes a step further: In a theatrical installation, with giant scene-setting photographs, background music, artificial flowers and other props, it attempts to transport visitors to the Paris and French countryside of that era, in hopes of attracting more visitors and making a lasting impression.

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Los Angeles

A portrait, by definition, is personal, and Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98-1543) is celebrated as a master of them. So a wander through "Holbein: Capturing Character in the Renaissance," at the J. Paul Getty Museum through Jan. 9, 2022, might seem confounding. His pictures seem similar. Most are small, with some measuring just a few inches across. All are half- or three-quarter length images, and most are set against a marine blue background. The sitters often look away, avoiding the viewer's gaze. They clasp their hands together or clutch an object. Many seem grim.

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By Her Hand: Artemisia Gentileschi and Italian Women Artists, 1500-1800 at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut—an exhibition showcasing the talents of 18 under-recognised artists—just got a bit richer. Two pastels by Rosalba Carriera, one of the few women featured in the show who gained an international reputation while she was alive (1673-1757), were reunited with two more from the same series, creating the "only opportunity for the public to see an entire original set by the artist in the United States" said Oliver Tostmann, the European art curator at the Wadsworth. The quartet had been split apart a half century ago.

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Hartford, Conn.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, women not only became artists in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, but some also thrived. They counted kings, queens, popes and nobles as patrons. Some gained fame; some were elected into exclusive academies; some supported their families. But they were ignored by art history. In recent decades, a few—especially Artemisia Gentileschi —have gained some recognition in monographic exhibitions, but many more early female artists remain obscure.

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Waterville, Maine

You can't talk about Bob Thompson, a mid-20th-century Black figurative artist, without mentioning the blazing colors of his paintings. Bright reds, blues, greens and yellows are almost everywhere. When, in 1998, the Whitney Museum gave him a retrospective, curator Thelma Golden, now the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, flaunted the pervasiveness of his intense hues by hanging his works on walls painted in brilliant yellow or red—an unprecedented, much-remarked, winning move at a time when no one else dared to challenge the ubiquity of the white-walled galleries that still prevail in modern art museums.

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