The photographs Henri Cartier-Bresson took in India between 1947 and 1980 are quiet, self-effacing, and resolutely static. Even when he shoots in crowds, as he does at a cattle sale, there is little sense of movement or noise.
Three outstanding exhibitions in England—and two more shows to come—suggest the richness and range of the Royal Collection.
A new show at the National Portrait gallery tracks Sylvia Plath's obsession with divided selves, from her Smith senior thesis on the double in Dostoevsky, to the many masks she wore during her short lifetime.
Simon Rattle's last year as the head of the Berlin Philharmonic—he has been conducting the orchestra to great acclaim since 2002—is the last chance to see his energetic conducting style at work in the orchestra's acoustically superb concert hall.
Rachel Whiteread's work is calmly paradoxical, domestic but monumental, tactile but detached, nostalgic but austere: objects and dwellings from everyday lives are lifted to a different sphere, a dance in space.
Like many of his peers, Modigliani became fascinated by primitivism, African masks, Egyptian statues, and the 'Khmer' Buddhas of Cambodia. At the Jewish Museum in New York, an array of caryatid sketches are accompanied by stylized drawings of heads whose facial geometry seems almost obsessively serene, an unobtainable ideal.
Grayson Perry's show at Arnolfini in Bristol features pots, woodcuts, and tapestries that display Perry's ebullient combination of wit, silliness, seriousness, anger, insight, and compassion.
To call MoMA's Louise Bourgeois retrospective a print show would be a little misleading. Bourgeois was forever altering her work, making additions and adjustments to printing proofs as they occurred to her in the moment, and the majority of the prints in the exhibition exist in several different states, or stages of development.
The "modern" in the title of MoMA's ambitious new survey of 20th and 21st-century clothing refers less to a period of time than to a way of relating to time itself—of dealing with and mingling the past, present, and future.
Although Simon Rattle is now conducting at the Barbican and the Royal Opera season is in full swing, some of the best music in England this autumn can be found west of London.
Whether they exude brio or meekness, the boys in these portraits are very much alive. One wonders just how posed these subjects are, whether Soutine purposely encouraged their postural repetition.
The career-spanning survey of Carolee Schneemann's paintings, films, and performances at MoMA PS1 is the first comprehensive retrospective in the US of this unpredictable and enormously influential artist.
Furniture, glassware, ceramics, metalwork, jewelry, wallpaper, fabrics, graphic design, and artists’ postcards are on view in the Neue Galerie's survey of the Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese Workshops), which makes a wholly convincing case for this brief efflorescence of incomparably exquisite high-style design.
November brings us 1945; The Terminator; adaptations both classic and obscure of Stanisław Lem and the Strugatsky Brothers; black soldiers in the fight against fascism; and the lost films of postwar Germany.
The wealthy Gilded Age Philadelphia lawyer John G. Johnson chiefly collected medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque painting, but the glorious eye-opener of the show turns out to be his discerning response to the art of his own time.
The Guggenheim's new presentation of the art that emerged from Josef Albers's numerous road trips to Mexico showcases his appreciation for the country, juxtaposing his studies, typically drawn on graph paper, with both his finished artwork (mostly paintings, one lithograph) and his fastidious arrangements of tiny on-site photographs.
Edward Mendelson, Lionel Trilling Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and a regular contributor to The New York Review, will deliver the twenty-fourth series of Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures at Columbia on Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.
The Metropolitan Museum's vast Michelangelo exhibition covers the entire career of the artist, from his first extant drawings made while he was a teenager to works created shortly before his death at eighty-eight in 1564. The heart of the exhibition is a selection of 133 of his drawings, the largest group of them ever displayed at one time.
Confined interiors bursting out in rebellious shades of yellow, orange, and red: the selection of fifty-one of Edvard Munch's paintings at the Met Breuer puts all the artist’s early angst in full view.
On November 15, Daniel Mendelsohn—a regular contributor to the Review and a professor at Bard College—will discuss his recently published book 'An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic' with Rebecca Mead at the New York Public Library.