Arts

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‘The Real World Is Not Here’

Balanchine’s dances often gladden our hearts in order to break them, whereupon they tell us that we have to go on living anyway.

June 8, 2023 issue

Joan Acocella

From Russia, with Love

In her monumental new biography of Balanchine, Jennifer Homans tells the story of the choreographer whose modernist extension of classicism forever altered American dance.

May 25, 2023 issue

Yasmine El Rashidi

A Life of Sheer Will

The Lebanese writer and painter Etel Adnan’s urgent need to see and document and create in every form earned her a cultlike status around the world.

June 8, 2023 issue

Edward Ball

‘Tell Your Story, Omar’

A new, Pulitzer Prize–winning opera adapts the memoir of Omar ibn Said, an African Muslim who spent much of his life enslaved in North Carolina.

May 25, 2023 issue

Martin Filler

The Gilder Age

The architecture of the American Museum of Natural History’s new addition is as oppressively weighty as its exhibitions are spellbinding.

May 22, 2023

Judith Levine

Name the Lost!

A memorial in Green-Wood Cemetery for New Yorkers who have died of Covid-19 is intended to be ephemeral.

May 21, 2023

Joe Bucciero

A Sea of Forms

In his exuberantly colored, idiosyncratic paintings, Bob Thompson at once drew on the medium’s past and pushed its vanguard.

May 20, 2023

Tausif Noor

Kelly Akashi’s Ecology of Craft

With a mastery of diverse materials and traditions from glassblowing to stone carving, the sculptor blends natural history and family history.

May 13, 2023

The Comics Page

Dan Nadel

Clean Lines, Messy Lives

“The Hernandez brothers’ recurring characters have aged and sprawled out into baroque, visionary stories that alternate between near-anthropologic detail, fantastical pulp, and sexual fetishes.”

July 23, 2020 issue

Chris Ware

Guston’s Graphic Novel

In the summer of 1971, the painter Philip Guston, one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, began a series of drawings under the working title of “Poor Richard” that grew out of his disgust and fascination with Richard Nixon.

February 6, 2018

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

A Triumph of the Comic-Book Novel

“The smooth, geometric forms in Chris Ware’s comics are icons and symbols as much as pictures, ‘a sort of symbolic typography’ meant to be read and understood, ‘not scrutinized individually as one might carefully peruse a painting or a drawing.’”

December 20, 2012 issue

J. Hoberman

Gerhard Richter’s Cartoons

Before the blurry “photo paintings”—large images based on family snapshots or magazine ads—that would establish his preeminence, Gerhard Richter experimented with another form of Pop: cartoon drawings.

February 5, 2017

Sarah Boxer

His Inner Cat

Nearly a century after George Herriman started Krazy Kat, the endlessly perplexing, energetic, deep, and playful comic strip still feels new.

June 14, 2007 issue

David Hajdu

Comics for Grown-Ups

“Joe Sacco, a Malta-born writer and artist who lives in New York, has taken nonfiction comics onto untested ground. He is doing journalism—first-hand depth reporting on hard-news subjects—in ink drawings and word balloons.”

August 14, 2003 issue

The Latest

J. Hoberman

The Dank Underground

In the late Sixties, countercultural media was distributed by the Underground Press Syndicate and bankrolled by marijuana.

May 26, 2023

Adam Thirlwell

House of Delft

In a recreated eighteenth-century home in London’s East End, the ceramicist Simon Pettet and his partner Dennis Severs created a world both elegant and deliriously contemporary.

May 25, 2023

Susan Tallman

Invitation to a Dance

The early prints of Brazilian artist Lygia Pape enlivened the abstract geometries of Concrete Art with the social, improvisational ethos of a new movement.

May 24, 2023

Anna Shechtman

Wages for Housewives

The Real Housewives’ work is to produce drama, and to keep their jobs they must be prolific.

May 14, 2023

Yasmine El Rashidi

Stories Adrift

The crux of Netflix’s melodrama The Swimmers, a biopic of two Syrian refugees who pursued Olympic stardom, is everything it leaves unsaid.

May 9, 2023

Ian Johnson

Loot Under the Lindens

The museums in Berlin’s new Humboldt Forum fall short in their efforts to explain that many of the objects on display were plundered.

May 25, 2023 issue

Elaine Blair

The Limits of Language

In the newsroom and in Hollywood, a new vernacular is emerging to describe sexual assault.

May 25, 2023 issue

Andrew Martin

Every Man His Own Hipster

A new production of Lorraine Hansberry’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window retains the play’s sense of imperfect community and teeming life.

May 3, 2023

Alice Kaplan

Seeing Baya Anew

An exhibition of the Algerian painter’s work liberates it from the political symbolism of late colonialism.

May 11, 2023 issue

Susan Tallman

The Perpetual Provocateur

For generations, Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s prints of Roman views defined the popular image of the Eternal City. A profusion of new exhibitions and publications shows why he still speaks to us.

May 11, 2023 issue