Almost 100 years ago, French painter Claude Monet began one of his last great masterpieces. After his death, the work, the triptych titled “Agapanthus,” was eventually split up. Today, after more than 50 years of separation, its pieces hang together in the Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM), located on Art Hill in Forest Park.

Ranging from “Metabolics” in 2009 to “Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other” last year, Washington University’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum has often provided a forum for avant-garde or atypical art forms. Its two new fall openings, “Precarious Worlds: Contemporary Art from Germany” and “Tomás Saraceno: Cloud-Specific,” certainly keep with this tradition.

As we reach the end of January, as always, our New Year’s resolutions begin to falter. Remember those? The ideas you had about how to change for the year 2011? Although we may break them year after year, we continue to make the same promises to ourselves. The truth is there are several ways to keep from falling through on your pledges. None of them are hard to do, and each can make a huge difference in the way you live out the new year.

Now that we’ve all returned to St. Louis and the semester is officially underway, you might be feeling a little nostalgic for those fun-filled days of break. Let’s face it—St. Louis probably isn’t at the top of anyone’s list of places to be during these cold, snowy times. But in fact, St. Louis can be quite the winter wonderland. At first blush, your options may appear limited—but this is far from the truth. Here is a list of just a few things to keep you busy before classes get too strenuous.

Last year, with “Chance Aesthetics” and “Metabolics,” the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum chose to showcase artistic movements that relied heavily on chance. This year, in “Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other,” the museum takes it a step further.

What do Elad Lassry and Richard Artschwager have in common? Beyond their mutual occupations as artists working in the latter half of the 20th century—and into the 21st—almost nothing.

Upon stepping into “Gesture, Scrape, Combine, Calculate: Postwar Abstraction from the Permanent Collection,” the first thing you see is—you guessed it—empty space. There is certainly a lot of it: on the walls, on the floor, across the entire room. It makes sense because this is a small exhibition.

Since the 1980s, when it became commonplace to rank our schools, there have been deep disagreements about the relative value and validity of such endeavors. Though the most common example is college rankings—best exemplified by the infamous U.S.

Nestled within the heart of St. Louis, yet largely overlooked by both the city’s residents and Washington University students, lies St. Louis’ Union Station. The railroad station, formerly known as one of the preeminent train stations in the world, now mereley houses a mall and a hotel.

Washington University students, numbering in the hundreds, converged on the Swamp on Friday for the event known as Holi, put on by Ashoka, Washington University’s South Asian cultural student group. Beginning at 3 p.m.