Yesterday the Board of Trustees of the McNay Art Museum announced a major acquisition of a portrait by Alice Neel. Julie and the Doll depicts a slight Hispanic girl with large brown eyes cradling a blond, blue-eyed doll as she looks beyond the viewer. The 1943 painting illustrates the racial divide experienced daily by the residents of New York City’s Spanish Harlem, an uptown neighborhood the artist called home for twenty-four years. “We all seek images of ourselves —or people who look like us— on museum walls as proof that we are meant to be here, that this place is for someone like us,” said Richard Aste, the McNay’s first Hispanic director. “This portrait helps us truly lean into our mission of engaging a diverse community by mirroring our own diverse community, San Antonio being over 60 percent Hispanic.” “The McNay exists because of the vision of a woman artist, Marion Koogler McNay

For the first time since they were painted more than a century ago, two oil paintings of Claude Monet’s garden in Vetheuil have been reunited, in Washington. Monet moved to this village in the Paris suburbs in 1878 with his sickened wife Camille and their two young children as they faced financial difficulties, along with the family of one-time patron Ernest Hoschede. The period that ensued was one of the most prolific for the French Impressionist, who produced in just three years nearly 300 paintings, including “The Artist’s Garden at Vetheuil” (1881). Until August 8, the National Gallery of Art is presenting two of four known works of this lush summer scene with huge sunflowers, including its own, larger piece and another temporarily on loan from California’s Norton Simon Museum. “It’s a turning point in terms of his career, his struggles, he’s turning more toward landscape, he’s becoming more interested in atmospheric effects,” National Gallery curator of 19th century French paintin

Opening Wednesday 30 May, Southbank Centre’s Hayward Gallery presents an ambitious exhibition of work by one of the most acclaimed contemporary artists from Asia, Lee Bul (born in 1964 in Seoul, South Korea). Taking over the entire Hayward Gallery, this exhibition – the artist’s first major solo show in London – brings together 118 of her works from the late 1980s to the present day in order to explore the full range of her pioneering and highly inventive practice. Throughout her career, Lee Bul has received international recognition for her imaginative and provocative work. She draws on diverse sources that include science fiction, 20th century history, philosophy and personal experience, whilst making use of deliberately ‘clashing’ materials that range from the organic to the industrial, from silk and mother of pearl, to fibreglass and silicone. Shaped by her experience of growing up in South