“Shh,” the well-dressed woman with a finger to her lips cautions as she stealthily approaches the man asleep in his chair. A self-satisfied look plays on her face as she dips her hand into his jacket pocket. She need have no concern. From the pitcher and glass on the crimson tablecloth, it appears that he has passed out from too much drink and is not likely to awaken.

“Sleeping Man Having His Pockets Picked” was painted around 1655 by Nicolaes Maes, a student of Rembrandt. The oil on board genre scene is one of almost seventy masterpieces on view – portraits, still lifes, landscapes, sea paintings, and furniture – in “Golden: Dutch and Flemish Masterworks from the Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection.” The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), Salem, organized and is hosting the exhibition through June 19 when it begins a national tour.

They were meant to be together so when I learned that the Guggenheim Museum was celebrating the 50th anniversary of its landmark building with an in-depth retrospective of the Russian avant-garde artist Wasilly Kandinsky, I knew I had to go.

“The Angel in The Architecture,” trumpeted The New York Times headline for the review of the Guggenheim show, which runs through January 10. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the building especially for the museum’s founding collection of Kandinsky’s non-objective work.

Next year marks the centennial of the Mexican Revolution. Still, the country seems forever in flux. Two exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Boston, present views of Mexico that not only differ from each other, but also from the pictures we’re used to seeing on travel brochures and in magazines.

Mexico has been called Edward Weston’s Paris. It is the only country the American photographer ever visited, and Viva Mexico! is about how he thoughtfully explored new techniques there in the 1920s and 1930s. By contrast, the companion exhibition, Vida Y Drama: Modern Mexican Prints presents bold, emotional images inspired by a long, tumultuous history.

Boston Herald editorial cartoonist Jerry Holbert and bestselling author/artist David Macaulay will be special guests when the Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH, celebrates Family Day from 1-5p.m. on Saturday, May 30.

A guided tour of “The Making of a Book,” the exhibition featuring Macaulay’s work, is scheduled for 12:30 p.m. More than 100 manuscripts, drawings, and such artifacts as the dummies he uses to create his books are on display through June 14.

Art is often subversive. Hitler knew it. Stalin knew it. And Mao Zedong knew it. Dictators regard ideas expressed by art for art’s sake as a threat. They use art as propaganda, a tool to glorify the state. They prevent artists who do not hew to the party line from exhibiting their work in public. Some of the groundbreaking Chinese artists who made the works currently on view at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), Salem, still aren’t allowed to show in their own country.

Mahjong: Contemporary Chinese Art from the Sigg Collection “is ultimately a way of accessing China,” says Uli Sigg, the Swiss businessman who participated in China’s first joint venture with the West and later served as Switzerland’s ambassador to China and North Korea.

BOSTON/South Boston - Unless you’ve arrived only recently from another planet, you know that Shepard Fairey’s first museum exhibition, a 20-year survey of his images, is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Fairey is the world’s most famous street artist, best known for his iconic red, white and blue “PROGRESS,” “CHANGE,” and “HOPE,” posters of Barack Obama. He made headlines in Boston over the weekend when he was arrested.