A founding member of the New York School and the last surviving painter of its first generation, Hedda Sterne, now 96, discusses many phases of her life and career. Her work is currently on view in a traveling retrospective.

From the beginning, reaction to Anselm Kiefer's work has been polarized. His remarkable early success, and enthusiastic acclaim by museums and collectors, soon produced a backlash. The critical left (Benjamin Buchloh, notably) dismissed him as a commercialy motivated purveyor of a bombastic nationalistic style.

Three imposing diptychs completed in 2004 presided over Sperone Westwater's selective five-decade survey of paintings by Carla Accardi. Each measures 86 1⁄2 by 126 inches, a scale used only rarely by the octogenarian artist and achieved by abutting modular canvases. All were rendered in two colors (a hallmark, if not an apodictic rule, of her work for half a century), with solid fields against which limber graphic elements arc, squirm and drift. The reductive marks plainly evoke the graffiti-based imagery of Keith Haring, but there are no squawking TVs or copulating couples to be seen—just gymnastic linear fragments that seem about to stretch and reconfigure themselves even as they momentarily suggest the partial contour of a leg, a derrière, a swimmer, a sickle, a piano lid, a creeping worm.

In his latest film, set in a small isolated community during the Depression, Danish director Lars von Trier presents a bleak morality tale that takes a dim view of the U.S.-and of humankind.

In a conversation with the curator of his forthcoming retrospective, Gerhard Richter looks back on his 40 years as an artist. From his boyhood in East Germany, through his student days in Düsseldorf with Sigmar Polke, Blinky Palermo and others, to the launch of his career and beyond, his self-imposed task remained the same: "to decide what is good and what is bad."