New York Times - Art & Design

A slide show of photographs of cultural highlights from this week.    

Graham W. J. Beal, the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, said he believes the collection of his museum is “held in the public trust” and could not be sold by the city to help pay down its multibillion-dollar debt.    

In his jewelry and at home, the French designer Marc Auclert fuses ancient artifacts with modern whimsy, to fantastic effect.    

Institutions like the Museum of Medical History in Berlin are responding to increasing claims to return bones and other human artifacts in their collections to indigenous peoples.    

The online exhibit “What Jane Saw” allows viewers to peruse a London gallery as Jane Austen saw it in 1813.    

Richard Koshalek, director of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, announced his resignation after trustees failed to agree on the future of a long-planned project to cover the museum’s interior courtyard with a temporary inflatable bubble.    

Maurizio Cattelan, “retired” after his 2011 Guggenheim retrospective, has an exhibition opening at the Beyeler Foundation in Switzerland next month.    

The Met’s galleries of European paintings dating from 1250 to 1900 have reopened in a significantly enlarged space after the first reinstallation in four decades.    

Our attraction to the mythical unicorn is explored in a new exhibition at the Cloisters, using Metropolitan Museum holdings and items from other collections.    

A critical guide to the visual arts in New York and the region.    

Images from the exhibition at the Cloisters.    

The exhibition “Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, 1909-1929,” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, celebrates the synergy of dance with music and visual arts.    

A Mel Bochner exhibition at Peter Freeman provides a glimpse of old SoHo in the midst of new SoHo’s retail madness.    

Next month Christie’s will sell silverware long displayed at Oxford University, all of it part of the private collection of Jane Penrice Benson How.    

Massimiliano Gioni’s ambitious Venice Biennale art extravaganza opens this week.    

A breezy show of Mr. Hantaï‘s paintings at the Paul Kasmin Gallery challenges you to recreate his lines or patterns in your mind.    

In Mr. Voisine’s small paintings at McKenzie Fine Art, dark geometries enact telling dramas of texture, shape, symmetry, color, edge and light.    

Mr. Quinn’s much-enlarged bronze sculptures of seashells at Mary Boone glow from within, suggesting female sexuality and art’s primordial origins in natural forms.    

Aiko Hachisuka’s sculptures reward reflection on the elaborate effort that goes into making them.    

A legendary catalogue raisonné of Picasso’s works is being republished at a stratospheric price.