Lance Esplund

There’s the famous image of a nude torso replacing a woman’s face: breasts for eyes, a navel for the nose and a triangle of pubic hair in place of her mouth.

The self-assured 27-year-old painter towers over us. His hand rests on his cocked hip while an affectionate, fat tiger cat nuzzles his leg.

An intense Shiva devotee gathers offerings of flowers. Rotund yet delicate, he floats through the lush garden like a red balloon.

A man and a woman are entangled, embedded within a sea of flowers, her nude round breasts like grapefruit. Marc Chagall’s heady, dreamlike bouquet, “Lovers Among the Lilacs,” (1930) is mystical, redolent, erotic.

Shocks of white against blackness, the screwy hair flashes like lightning in a night sky. In Julia Margaret Cameron’s portrait, astronomer and mathematician Sir John Herschel stares at the world through enormous melancholy eyes.

A woman’s plump derriere -- tightly wrapped in a pink negligee -- peeks out of the central bedroom window of a building’s dark facade in a painting by Edward Hopper.

It’s hard enough to tune out the pervasive chatter, noisy restaurants and toddler tantrums at the congested Museum of Modern Art -- New York City’s Mall of America -- while you are looking at Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie.”

Cats answer to no one, and like gods, they’re unpredictable, sagacious and ferocious. That’s why they were such popular subjects in ancient mythology.

Visitors to the fourth floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art this summer may think that the institution has already packed up its crates and moved on to its new digs in the Meatpacking District.

Since the late 1970s, James Turrell has been converting an extinct volcano near northern Arizona’s Painted Desert into a work of art.

Outside, it sounded like an outrageous orgy or, with all those high-pitched screams, a torture chamber for children.

In one necrophilic drawing, Isis straddles the supine, skeletal Osiris in a field.