Consider the numbers: The Met holds 20 paintings by Rembrandt, 11 by Frans Hals, and a total of 228 works, including such masterpieces as Vermeer’s Young Woman with a Water Jug (early 1660s) and Jan Steen’s The Dissolute Household (c. 1665). Usually only a fraction of these rich holdings are on display at one time.

“The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” on view through January 6, 2008, offers fans of exquisite 17th-century realism plenty to feast their eyes on. But the exhibition may be of even greater interest to visitors who are interested in the museum’s institutional history, with the artworks arranged according to their approximate order of acquisition.

Many came from millionaires such as William Vanderbilt and J. P. Morgan, financial titans who were eager to give their legacy to the first world-class public collection in New York. “They were consciously building a museum comparable to those in London and Paris,” notes Walter Liedtke, a curator in the Met’s Department of European Paintings and an organizer of the exhibition. “A good number of American collectors bought things with the intention of donating all of them to the Metropolitan.”

Ultimately, the exhibition is a lesson in “how one of the best collections of Dutch paintings was formed,” Liedtke says; it’s a mysterious process that visitors seldom see. In conjunction with the show, the Met also presents “Drawings and Prints from Holland’s Golden Age: Highlights from the Collection,” featuring works by 17th-century artists including Rembrandt, Adriaen van Ostade, and Jacob van Ruisdael, through December 17, 2007.

A Rebel Rephotographer
If the art market is the measure of a contemporary artist’s worth, the more than $1 million price tag on Richard Prince’s Untitled (Cowboy) (1989) at a 2005 Christie’s auction might be a good indication of where Prince stands today. The sum was illuminating not just because it was the highest price ever paid at auction for a photograph at the time, but also because it revealed how Prince’s work had fundamentally altered the landscape of contemporary art.

The artist produced Untitled (Cowboy) by simply taking out a camera and photographing a Marlboro advertisement. Prince had been doing the same thing since 1977, when he first snapped pictures of photographs that appeared in the New York Times and touched off a hailstorm in the art community about what an artist can claim as his or her own.

Further outcry ensued when Prince “rephotographed” a picture of tenyear- old Brooke Shields standing naked in a bathtub in 1983. Called Spiritual America, a title Prince borrowed from Alfred Stieglitz’s 1923 photo of a castrated horse, the image remains his most controversial work.

It’s appropriate, then, that the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum chose to name the most comprehensive retrospective of the artist’s work to date “Richard Prince: Spiritual America.” Prince worked closely with Nancy Spector, the museum’s chief curator, to assemble key examples from his most influential series, including the “Cowboys,” “Girlfriends,” and “Upstates” sets of appropriated photos; “Jokes” text paintings; “Nurses” digitized and painted pulp fiction covers; and “Hood” muscle car sculptures.

The selection reveals the precision with which Prince has zeroed in on the underbelly of American culture. He examines our obsession with fame, fascination with rebellion, and voyeuristic appreciation for the tawdry and illicit.

See “Spiritual America” through January 9.

Believe the Hype
In an art world often dismissed as elitist and insular, few artists manage to become mainstream cultural figures. Kara Walker, named one of the “100 most influential people in the world” by Time magazine this year, is one of the rare exceptions.

Since earning an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1994, Walker has dealt brashly and unapologetically with the legacy of slavery. You Do (1993–94) sets the tone for much of her later work. The black paper silhouette depicts two African-American women clad in grass skirts manipulating doll-sized figures, including a man in plantation-era coattails and a top hat. By subverting the genteel 18th-century art of paper silhouette, Walker plays on grotesque stereotypes in stark black-and-white.