Irving Penn

THROUGH JAN. 10 FLORENCE “Robert Mapplethorpe: Perfection in Form Many of his images of gay and fetishistic sexuality remain shocking some three decades after he made them. Yet many of those images, as well as his still lifes and portraits, demonstrate a profound debt to classical ideals of beauty. The raw and the sculptural equally inform his work.

NEW YORK — Director Arthur Penn, a myth-maker and myth-breaker who in such classics as “Bonnie and Clyde’’ and “Little Big Man’’ refashioned movie and American history and sealed a generation’s affinity for outsiders, died Tuesday night, a day after his 88th birthday. His daughter Molly said her father died at his home in Manhattan of congestive heart failure. Longtime friend and business manager Evan Bell said yesterday that Mr. Penn had been ill for about a year.

BEVERLY - Annie Leibovitz is the most famous photographer in the world. Much of her fame comes from the fact that many of her subjects are some of the most famous people in the world. Think of it as the sweet circularity of celebrity. So fame, both her own and that of her sitters, doubly informs Leibovitz’s work. There are 29 portraits in “Annie Leibovitz: Women,’’ a compact, attractive, and somewhat empty show which runs at Endicott College’s Center for the Arts through March 26. They’re drawn from Leibovitz’s 1999 book, “Women.’’ Slightly more than half are of well-known...

BEVERLY - Annie Leibovitz is the most famous photographer in the world. Much of her fame comes from the fact that many of her subjects are some of the most famous people in the world. Think of it as the sweet circularity of celebrity. So fame, both her own and that of her sitters, doubly informs Leibovitz’s work. There are 29 portraits in “Annie Leibovitz: Women,’’ a compact, attractive, and somewhat empty show which runs at Endicott College’s Center for the Arts through March 26. They’re drawn from Leibovitz’s 1999 book, “Women.’’ Slightly more than half are of well-known...

CHICAGO -- From the beginning, photography has had travel as a major genre. The photographer acted as proxy, taking viewers where they could not otherwise go. It's easy to forget how important this once was, now that nearly everyone has easy access to travel, and nearly everyone who travels packs a camera (preferably, digital). I think, therefore I am? I travel, therefore I snap. Some of the great chapters in photographic history have come from journeys: Timothy O'Sullivan out West, Edward Weston in Mexico, Henri-Cartier Bresson in Spain, Walker Evans in the South, Robert Frank on the road, Diane Arbus...

NEW YORK — Director Arthur Penn, a myth-maker and myth-breaker who in such classics as “Bonnie and Clyde’’ and “Little Big Man’’ refashioned movie and American history and sealed a generation’s affinity for outsiders, died Tuesday night, a day after his 88th birthday. His daughter Molly said her father died at his home in Manhattan of congestive heart failure. Longtime friend and business manager Evan Bell said yesterday that Mr. Penn had been ill for about a year.

PORTLAND, Maine - Fine art museums can be heavy and intimidating or, like the Portland Museum of Art, they can be light, airy places of inspiration and discovery. While not designed specifically for children, it says a lot about the place that youngsters and teens appear to be as immersed in its exhibits as the adults are. "Our goal is to get kids, and all our visitors, to slow down," said Stacy Rodenberger, coordinator of school programs. "We want people to see what's happening in a work of art and talk about it. " Maine's largest and oldest public art museum,...

I must have mentioned to Lucian Freud one day that I had never eaten grouse, because he arranged a dinner at his house in Notting Hill one night for me and his granddaughter Frances Costelloe. I was 29, Frances was about 15. Lucian, who had recently finished a small portrait of the queen (so small that he used to pull the unfinished portrait out of a Camper shoe box to show me), had some grouse sent down from Chatsworth by his friend the Duchess of Devonshire. He and David Dawson, his assistant, roasted the birds, and we all ate them, taking care to avoid the little...

WALTHAM - Marisol Escobar, known as Marisol, is the most interesting postwar artist you've probably never heard of. Within a few years, trust me, that will change: She will be the subject of retrospectives at major museums (one is already being planned for 2014 by the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Tennessee; bigger shows will follow); her works, most of them still privately owned, will come to auction and fetch millions; her name will become as familiar as those of male counterparts such as Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, Claes Oldenburg, and Jasper Johns.

THROUGH MARCH 28 CHICAGO “The Nature of Diamonds Or at least the most fabulous product of the cutting edge. This Field Museum exhibition features more than 700 objects, tracing diamonds’ past and present, as well as the science of their making and their various cultural roles. Beginning in geology, the exhibition moves through mineralogy to art, fashion, and technology. The highlight of the show is “The Vault,’’ a treasure house displaying pieces owned by such famed wearers as Catherine the Great, Mae West, Joan Crawford, and Elton John.

THROUGH JAN. 10 FLORENCE “Robert Mapplethorpe: Perfection in Form Many of his images of gay and fetishistic sexuality remain shocking some three decades after he made them. Yet many of those images, as well as his still lifes and portraits, demonstrate a profound debt to classical ideals of beauty. The raw and the sculptural equally inform his work.

CHICAGO -- From the beginning, photography has had travel as a major genre. The photographer acted as proxy, taking viewers where they could not otherwise go. It's easy to forget how important this once was, now that nearly everyone has easy access to travel, and nearly everyone who travels packs a camera (preferably, digital). I think, therefore I am? I travel, therefore I snap. Some of the great chapters in photographic history have come from journeys: Timothy O'Sullivan out West, Edward Weston in Mexico, Henri-Cartier Bresson in Spain, Walker Evans in the South, Robert...

THROUGH JAN. 24 PARIS “Claude Monet’’ Parisian street scenes, railway stations, poppy fields, Rouen Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament, the banks of the Seine, haystacks, lily ponds: All Monet’s familiar and cherished subjects are here. The show has been called the most important presentation of his painting in decades. Certainly, it’s being treated like an event of national importance: President Nicolas Sarkozy has contributed a foreword to the exhibition catalog, hailing Monet as “an unmistakable emblem of the international influence of French culture.’’ 3 avenue...

WORCESTER -- In 1904, the Worcester Art Museum became one of the first institutions to exhibit photographs as art objects. The foresight in mounting such a show should not be underestimated. The acceptance of photography as an art form is startlingly recent. John Szarkowski, the legendary longtime curator of photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art, boasts that well into the 1960s he could buy a print of any living photographer's work for $25 -- and the work of dead ones "cost only a hundred!"