“Andy Warhol is like the Beatles,” a family friend said to me. “It doesn’t matter whether you like them or not.” They are such large presences on the cultural landscape that they seem impervious to criticism. We were strolling through the sprawling exhibit “Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, open until March 31. Warhol, like the Beatles, was a cultural phenomenon, omnipresent in his place in time, and he still manages to hold unwavering relevance 31 years after his death. Time itself has much to do with not only his art but his posthumous popularity, considering our continuing interest in the raucous ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s—decades he ruled over with mystifying endurance and celebrity. The Whitney provides a startling abundance of his work, but its younger visitors will learn little about the man or his life. Warhol is turning mythic.

The 20th century German theologian Karl Barth once said that woman “is in her whole existence an appeal to the kindness of man.” Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875) saw in women something more—a side of them undefined by the male gaze—and captured this in his portraits of women that can be seen in the National Gallery’s exhibit “Corot: Women,” open until Dec. 31. Perhaps this is because his stalwart mother provided the primary source of income for his family with a substantial dowry and her successful milliner shops in Paris. From his early years, he recognized that some women could seize a sense of independence that many were denied. His portraits of women convey dignity and strength, not a Barthian fantasy of seduction or feudal delicacy.

The Guggenheim Museum in New York City is selling ouija boards, tarot cards, and a beginner’s guide to astrology “for the modern mystic.” The occasion for such oddities in a prestigious art museum’s gift shop is the Guggenheim’s latest retrospective exhibit, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, which is open until April 23. The Guggenheim stipulates that the Swedish artist and spiritualist was the true pioneer of the peak abstract movement, which is normally attributed to Kandinsky or Mondrian. It is a fair argument: Af Klint (1862-1944) made radically abstract paintings a decade before Kandinsky strayed from representational work. But she left specific instructions that her paintings never be shown until 20 years after she died. The world wasn’t ready for them—at least, that’s what her spirit guides told her.

Eugene Delacroix bucked whenever he was labeled a romanticist. “I am a pure classicist,” he insisted. That could come as a surprise: He is often called the leader of the romanticist genre that spread through the first half of the 19th century. While both movements celebrate the past, romanticism is unbridled while classicism is reserved. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit Devotion to Drawing: The Karen B. Cohen Collection of Eugène Delacroix, a preview for a far larger retrospective opening Sept. 17, shows that Delacroix managed to embody both. His commitment to “pure” classicism led to a romanticist style, however unintentional.

Alberto Giacometti’s first solo exhibition in America was unsuccessful. The art dealer in charge of the 1934 event, Julien Levy, admitted “almost nobody liked the Giacometti sculptures.” They were priced at $150 to $250. Over 170 sculptures and paintings are now well-received by the crowd lining the Guggenheim Museum’s signature curling walls for its summer retrospective, “Giacometti.” It is the Guggenheim’s first retrospective of the artist since 1955, which Giacometti never saw. He had just returned from seeing his works shown in London and was worried “the New York exhibition would have the same effect on me.”

I had taken about 15 steps into the Chicago Art Institute’s spring exhibit, “Helen Frankenthaler Prints: The Romance of a New Medium,” when I heard what I dreaded I would. “This looks like something a five-year-old made,” an older man muttered to his wife.

In his pseudo-intellectual film Manhattan, Woody Allen said he couldn’t go through life without Paul Cézanne’s famous pears and apples. Cézanne himself confidently knew he could make something special out of inanimate objects. “I, only I,” he once bragged to Camille Pissarro, “know how to paint a real red.” But the National Gallery’s exhibition Cézanne Portraits, curated by John Elderfield, shows the curious layman the artist’s struggle to take his unique, constructive method of painting and apply it to living, breathing subjects. It is the first exhibition concentrated on the artist’s portraits since 1910. And it’s about time.

“The younger generation just doesn’t get Edward Gorey,” an older woman said. She was dressed in a knitted brown cardigan, leaning on the elbow of her husband. She turned her head and noticed me. “Oh! Except for you of course. You’re here!” I was at the exhibit “Gorey’s Worlds,” a retrospective of the eminent author and illustrator accompanied by his collected art at the Wadsworth Atheneum in snowy, windy Hartford, Conn.

On a television show I was watching the other night, a teacher described a puzzling conversation she had with her student. “He asked me if I saw the color blue the same way he did,” she said.