A dozen people in winter coats stand with their backs to the camera while a guide talks. Above and behind them, eleven or twelve paintings crowd a single wall in two and three loose tiers, tondos beside rectangles, wide frames beside narrow ones, a Chagall village floating at the far right with its white horse and its enormous eye. Nobody in the photograph is looking at the same picture, and several of them are looking at the guide instead.

Nobody standing in the plaza in December is looking at the sculpture. They are looking at a tree, and behind it a limestone slab that goes up further than the phone can frame. But the block they are standing on holds the most ambitious coordinated art commission ever attempted on a private American site, executed by roughly thirty artists working to a single written program, and it has never really been repeated.

Draw the Louvre from memory. You will draw a triangle. Not the Cour Carrée, not the Grande Galerie, not the Renaissance wings that took four centuries and a dozen kings to assemble. A triangle with some lines through it, and if you are feeling thorough, a horizontal band of masonry behind it. That is a strange outcome for a building finished in 1989 against the loudest architectural opposition in modern French history.

The big blue canvas reads as a burst of energy. Five figures, a green mound, a flat blue sky, almost no detail, the whole thing apparently thrown down in an afternoon. Visitors treat it that way. They stand back, take the picture, and move on with the impression that Matisse was a man who worked fast and got lucky. Then you turn around and there are the bronze heads on the plinth, the same subject remade over and over, each one further from the last.

The wall label gives the date with unusual precision: Paris, June to July 1914. Francis Picabia was working on a canvas over eight feet tall, filling it with pistons, tubing, gears and flesh, while the Austrian archduke was shot in Sarajevo and the ultimatums began moving between capitals. He finished it, or stopped working on it, at roughly the moment Europe committed itself. Within weeks he was in uniform. The painting is called I See Again in Memory My Dear Udnie, and it hangs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The Bauhaus had an ambivalent relationship with the poster. Founded by Walter Gropius in Dessau in 1919 with the intention of reconciling fine art and craft production, the school’s core pedagogical commitments — truth to materials, functional form, rejection of ornament — did not map cleanly onto a medium whose entire purpose is affective manipulation. A poster that tells the truth about its own conditions of production is not necessarily a poster that works.

The International Typographic Style, developed primarily in Zurich and Basel in the 1950s, is the most successful design movement of the twentieth century by any measure of influence. It conquered corporate identity, magazine layout, wayfinding systems, and poster design with a thoroughness that would be remarkable even if its formal prescriptions had been arbitrary — which they were not. The Swiss style solved real problems, and its solutions were good enough that they became defaults, and its defaults became invisible, and its invisibility is now so complete that most people cannot see the infrastructure it built.