The Best Art of 2024

(Excerpt) A different kind of surprise was offered by “The Anxious Eye: German Expressionism and Its Legacy” at the National Gallery, Washington. Unfamiliar images, sometimes by unfamiliar artists, drawn largely from the museum’s own holdings, made us consider freshly a well-explored moment in the history of modernism. A gallery of contemporary artists—some printmakers, all responding to the mood and affect of the German works on view—spoke to the currency of those concerns.