Brian T. Allen

After its 2014 plan to expand was scuttled, its leadership rethought and made something better.

The redo is total, graceful, and chic . . .

A department supporting literacy, archive digitization, and conservation is set to sink into the briny deep.

But first, a look at some recent history.

Enforcing Trump’s EO on ‘Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History’ will take tough love, force, and deprogramming, and it won’t be pretty.

Two museums put on a blockbuster on the artist’s 80th birthday.

Materials for all seasons at the world’s grandest art fair, plus Cleopatra and a killer ship model.

And why wallop libraries? They teach people to think for themselves.

In Maastricht in the Netherlands, the exhibition hall bursts with art treasures and connoisseurs, checkbooks in hand.

The Horvitz collection of Old Master French drawings and paintings, the best in America, heads to Chicago as a gift.

In the news are smiles in The Hague and tears in Cleveland.

New, platinum gilt Native American sculptures look good, and the new jewelry gallery looks fab.

Gotham-mayhem pics still jolt while Hollywood-glam pics merely amuse.

A first-rate survey of Romanticism’s sublime nature mystic.

Brooklyn Museum’s 500-object show is a gilded albatross.

Plus: Raphael’s Mary Magdalene, earrings fit for a Greek goddess, and a house museum gets its woodwork back.

Angela Davis, the Nap Ministry, drag queen Miss Cracker, and a surreal, new take on American art.

A 1776 Kentucky rifle, a rare Grant Wood painting, and Tiffany’s Poppy Lamp are among the treasures to be purchased.

The visionary Ima Hogg bought the best old American furniture, silver, ceramics, and textiles to inspire good taste in design.

She was one of three women who created the museum, and her gifts of art and money still make a difference after 90 years.

Belle da Costa Greene’s legacy is artistic, but she had a secret.

Plus, a discovery in the Sea of Sicily, an odd pick for director of the Walters in Baltimore, and the Met releases designs for a new contemporary wing.

Lotusland, the botanical garden, stars as the art of the year, all 37 acres of it.

A French château look, porcelain, silk, and paintings galore, plus an automaton the size of a baby elephant.

Old Masters sales in London test Christmas wish lists.

Saint Nick among the stars of the Met’s lovely look at Siena, circa 1300.

Gothic Art meets the Renaissance via Duccio, Simone di Martini, and the Lorenzetti brothers.

It uses its millions to inject race grievance into American art.

Things went bananas at Sotheby’s when it turned from Tiffany to Chiquita, with a crypto-bro forking over $6.2 million for a bad joke.

Eastman Johnson’s 200th birthday is this year, and like Thanksgiving, his work fuses God, family, history, and civics.