With Unrest Escalating Around the World, New York’s Museum Shows Reflect a Tense Mood

The defining work of the winter season in New York is a small painting of a nude female figure crouching in a black void, her body barely visible before a mysterious emanation—a white-hot corona, perhaps, or maybe the aftershock from an explosion. The painting was left unfinished when a bomb was dropped on artist Layla Al-Attar’s house in Iraq by the American military in 1993, killing her. It now serves as a kind of de facto memorial.
Al-Attar’s Unfinished painting is one of mo