Among the lesser-known idiosyncrasies of the Frick Collection is that it has never had a painting by John Singer Sargent, the in-demand Gilded Age portraitist. But Sargent’s “Lady Agnew of Lochnaw,” a supremely stylish dark-haired beauty afloat in a voluminous white satin and chiffon tea gown, looks so at home at the Frick that visitors may mistake her for a resident.

As it did last year with masterworks from the Mauritshuis, the Frick has welcomed 10 paintings from the Scottish National Gallery, in Edinburgh, home to a renowned collection of fine art from the Renaissance to the end of the 19th century. The new show, “Masterpieces From the Scottish National Gallery,” running through Feb. 1, is a quieter sort of exhibition, exemplified by the under-the-radar entrance of “Lady Agnew."

The Park Avenue Armory has announced an ambitious lineup for the 2015 season including mammoth installations, artist commissions, and cross-disciplinary collaborations from artists including Philippe Parreno, Olafur Eliasson, Laurie Anderson and Marina Abramovic.

The season launches in March with FLEXN, a commission co-directed by Reggie "Regg Roc" Gray and director Peter Sellars focused on street dance. It will be followed by a work from Philippe Parreno that promises to "radically morph the exhbition tradition by enveloping the viewer and the Armory's building into the artwork itself," according to a release from the Armory.

The Guggenheim has named architect and scholar Troy Conrad Therrien as Curator, Architecture and Digital Initiatives. As the first person to hold this position, Therrien will contribute to the development of the museum’s engagement with architecture, design, technology, and urban studies, in addition to providing leadership on select new projects under the direction of the Chief Curator and the Director’s Office.

The Guggenheim's role in architecture has always been one of patronage, commissioning Frank Lloyd Wright to design its landmark building in New York City and Frank Gehry to design the celebrated Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which extended the institution's global constellation of museums.

Ed Ruscha’s art exudes humor and honesty. What you see is what you get. Subsequent viewings won’t reveal hidden depths in it. And they make you feel really good.

Perhaps, that’s the reason why Parisian art dealer Thomas Bompard asked several international art dealers to lend Galerie Gradiva works by Ruscha from their private collections to be displayed ‘just like at home,’ on the walls of an 18th-century private mansion opposite the Louvre. Larry Gagosian, Dominique Lévy, Enrico Navarra, Almine Rech and Paolo Vedovi accepted to play along.

The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in La Jolla is planning to expand its museum space to make room for more art.

The museum’s current building is big enough to exhibit 50 to 75 works of art. Close to 4,000 pieces in its permanent collection sit in storage vaults. The proposed expansion would triple the exhibition space to 30,000 square feet.

The firm chosen to design the expansion, Selldorf Architects, is led by German-born, New York resident Annabelle Selldorf, who was in town this week to meet with museum staff and give a lecture about her work.

The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College has received a gift of 75 works of contemporary art from the collection of the computer programmer and philanthropist Peter Norton. This is the first in a series of gifts to university art museums and teaching museums throughout the country—drawn from Norton’s personal collection—to support the integration of the visual arts in higher education, foster creative museum practice, and engage diverse audiences with contemporary art.

Norton initiated his first large donation project in 2000, gifting over 1,000 pieces from his collection to 32 select institutions. His gift to the Tang Teaching Museum represents the inauguration of his second major donation project.

A new arts center will make its Miami Beach debut at 32nd Street and Collins Avenue in December 2015. Founded by Alan Faena, an Argentine hotelier and real estate developer, the 50,000-square-foot Faena Forum will be dedicated to the development of the area’s cultural programming, including the arts, urbanism, politics, science, and technology.

Designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his firm OMA (The Office for Metropolitan Architecture), the center will be a partner institution to Argentina’s Faena Arts Center Buenos Aires. Ximena Caminos, the executive director of the Faena Arts Center Buenos Aires, will work with an advisory committee of arts professionals to fine-tune the Faena Forum’s mission and develop programs that will help it reach its goal of fostering dialogue about Latin American cultural practices in the United States.

A new bill introduced in Washington, DC last week seeks to block looted Syrian cultural heritage from entering the US. The Protect and Preserve International Cultural Property Act asks Congress to appoint a cultural property protection czar and establish emergency import restrictions to protect endangered cultural patrimony. The bill aims to “deny terrorists and criminals the ability to profit from instability by looting the world of its greatest treasures,” says the congressman Eliot Engel, a Democrat from New York, in a statement. Engel is co-sponsoring the legislation with Chris Smith, a Republican from New Jersey.

Black market sales of looted cultural objects are the largest source of funding for the Islamic State after oil, according to Newsweek.

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art announced today that Don Bacigalupi will be the organization's founding president. He'll be leaving his current job as president of Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, to join the Lucas Museum on January 15.

Bacigalupi was hired by Crystal Bridges as executive director in 2009, two years ahead of its opening, and became president in 2011. Before that, he was president of the Toledo Museum of Art. He oversaw major construction and start-up projects at both institutions. He has a PhD in art history from the University of Texas at Austin.

"Forbidden Games” is an exhibition of 167 of the 178 photographs David Raymond donated and sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2007. The show, which runs through Jan. 11, 2015, includes works taken from 1920 through the 1940s by such major surrealist and modernist photographers as Man Ray, Bill Brandt, Brassaï and Hans Bellmer, as well as many less well known, such as Dora Maar, Marcel G. Lefrancq and George Hugnet. There are also works by photographers not ordinarily identified with either tendency who nonetheless occasionally took pictures that could be so considered. The images Mr. Raymond assembled make a grand introduction to important aspects of art photography between the end of the First World War and mid-century.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler's iconic 1871 painting "Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1," better known as "Portrait of the Artist's Mother," is coming to Pasadena's Norton Simon Museum in March as part of an exchange with the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the museum announced Wednesday.

The first-time collaboration between the museums will see three 19th century masterpieces from the Norton Simon traveling to the Musée d’Orsay, while three paintings from the Paris museum will visit Pasadena. The six paintings will be on display simultaneously March 27 to June 22.

The Smithsonian Institution has announced the details of a new $2 billion plan to renovate the area of museums and gardens in its South Mall campus, including a “revitalization” of the Castle, its administrative headquarters.

Under the design by the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, new entrances will be installed and connections made between the museums and gardens along Independence Avenue, SW, from Seventh to 12th Streets.

Three unique mosaics, dating to the second century BC, have been unearthed in the ancient Greek settlement of Zeugma, in southeast Turkey, according to the "Greek Reporter."

The mosaics, which were found in excellent condition, were unearthed after five years of archaeological excavations. The effort was carried out in a race against time before a large part of the site was flooded by water held back by the nearby Birecik dam.

The Museo del Prado presents "Danaë and Venus and Adonis : Titian's Early Poesie for Philip II," an exhibition that will showcase the first two "Poesie" created by Titian following their recent restoration. The artist painted these works in the mid-sixteenth century and they can be seen together for the first time since Ferdinand VII presented Danaë to the Duke of Wellington as a gift. Alongside these masterpieces, visitors will be able to contemplate another of the versions of Danaë belonging to the Museo del Prado, which was created by Titian in around 1565. This work was paired with another work, "Venus and Adonis," in the "Bóvedas de Tiziano" Halls at the Real Alcázar Collection.

Inspired mainly by Ovid's "Metamorphoses," the themes chosen by Titian for these works are portrayed in order to delight the senses and demonstrate the capacity of painting to convey emotions.

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center recently made a major acquisition: "Pasturing Horses," an eighteenth-century scroll painting by Japanese artist Soga Shohaku.

The painting is a key addition to the Art Center’s impressive collection. James Mundy, the Anne Hendricks Bass Director of the Art Center, said, “The size, quality and expression found in this work make it among the very best available.” Shohaku is one of the three key mid-Edo period painters in Kyoto known as “The Eccentrics.”  The other two artists of this group, Ito Jakuchu and Nagasawa Rosetsu, are already represented in the Center’s collection. The acquisition of this painting is “a capstone for the Center’s Japanese collection,” Mundy added.

Felice Fischer, the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s curator of Asian art, concurred. “'Pasturing Horses' is a showcase for Shohaku’s skills: his finely controlled brushwork, his wonderful sense of humor, and his ability to capture a whole world even on a relatively small-scale surface. His marvelous depiction of the horses’ movement and the individual expressions of the grooms speak volumes about Shohaku’s creativity.”

Back in 2013, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, acquired Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bachman Wilson House from Lawrence and Sharon Tarantino, a husband-and-wife architect-designer team. The only catch was that the house was located in Millstone, New Jersey. Staff at the Crystal Bridges quickly got to work devising a plan to disassemble, transport, and rebuild the house on the museum’s sprawling 120-acre campus. After months of preparation, The Art Newspaper reports that the structure’s first posts are due to be raised this month.

Wright designed the Bachman Wilson House for Abraham Wilson and his wife Gloria Bachman, whose brother, Marvin Bachman, was an apprentice in the Frank Lloyd Wright Taliesin Fellowship, in 1954. Perched on a bank of the Millstone River, the house was subject to repeated flooding over the decades as the river and surrounding landscape continued to encroach on the glass-and-mahogany structure.

Christie’s auction on Tuesday 2nd December 2014 will be 'Old Master & British Paintings Evening Sale', in London; will feature a remarkable portrait by Sir Anthony van Dyck of the musician Hendrick Liberti. The work was in the collection of King Charles I at Whitehall by 1639; the piece has not been seen for almost a century, since its sale at Christie’s by the 8th Duke of Grafton in 1923.

The auction at Christie's will present a selection of 36 high quality works that have been curated with the aim of being new to the market and attractively priced.

Of all the portraits that Paul Cézanne painted during his lifetime (1839-1906), his most frequent subject was himself. Second came his wife, Marie-Hortense Fiquet (1850-1922). The exhibition “Madame Cézanne,” opening Wednesday and running through March 15 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will present 23 of the 29 images of her that Cézanne is known to have made. They don’t give much away. Far from idealized as a woman or a beloved mate, she usually appears stiffly reserved, a dignified enigma. In fact, not a lot is known about her.

Billionaire collector Steven Cohen, who recently added Giacometti's "Chariot" (1950) to his vast art collection for a cool $101 million, donated a tour of his Greenwich, Connecticut collection to the Foundation for Prader-Willi Research charity auction last week, as per "Page Six." Cohen, who was also actively involved with the Robin Hood Foundation for many years, was revealed as the buyer of the Giacometti sculpture, which sold on a single $90 million bid at Sotheby's on November 4 (see "$101 Million Giacometti Leads Sotheby's $400 Million Imp Mod Evening Sale") to David Norman, Sotheby's co-chairman of Impressionist and modern art worldwide, who was bidding for his client.

No word yet on whether the tour was successfully sold at the charity auction, or for how much—the Foundation for Prader-Willi Research did not respond for comment.