Must See...Ileana Sonnabend at MoMA

Ambassador for the New is the title of the Ileana Sonnabend retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art celebrating her half century of shaping the course of post-war art in Europe and North America. On display until April 21, the show explores her unique eye through art works collected and exhibited in her eponymous galleries in Paris and New York.  You can read more about this incredible art visionary at the MOMA site or in Holland Carter's review of the show for the New York Times.

Must See: Drawing on the Edge

At the the National Portrait Gallery in DC through  August 18, 2013 The works in Drawing on the Edge expand the narrow boundaries that once defined drawing. (from the website) "Probing the intersection between drawing and photography, painting, video, textual writing, and computer technology, they introduce a sense of appealing complexity. They incorporate collage, exaggerate scale, or experiment with such surfaces as frosted Mylar, handmade paper, or a computer screen. Despite the variety in size, style, and mood in these works, all six artists show a commitment to make direct, immediate, highly personal marks on paper. Each of them employs a painstaking technique; their meticulous, repetitive actions result in a contemplative, almost meditative, engagement with process that adds a psychological depth to their work.

Must See...Inventing Abstraction at MoMA

"In 1912, in several European cities, a handful of artists—Vasily Kandinsky, Frantisek Kupka, Francis Picabia, and Robert Delaunay—presented the first abstract pictures to the public.Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925 celebrates the centennial of this bold new type of artwork, tracing the development of abstraction as it moved through a network of modern artists, from Marsden Hartley and Marcel Duchamp to Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, sweeping across nations and across media. The exhibition brings together many of the most influential works in abstraction’s early history and covers a wide range of artistic production, including paintings, drawings, books, sculptures, films, photographs, sound poems, atonal music, and non-narrative dance, to draw a cross-media portrait of these watershed years." (MoMA exhibition notes) Roberta Smith's review of the exhibit for the New York Times is particularly brilliant.

Must See...Edvard Munch's The Scream

"Edvard Munch’s iconic The Scream (1895), among the most celebrated and recognized images in art history, will be on view at The Museum of Modern Art for a period of six months. Of the four versions of The Scream made by Munch between 1893 and 1910, this pastel-on-board from 1895 is the only one remaining in private hands; the three other versions are in the collections of museums in Norway. The Scream is being lent by a private collector." (from MoMA exhibition notes). That Open Mouth and Its Silent Voice, a very smart review by Karen Rosenberg of the Times makes you want to drop what you are doing  and run uptown.