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Subjects of Considerable Gossip

Greta Garbo craved protection, and one such guardian was Salka Viertel, a nearly forgotten screenwriter who nurtured a community of fellow émigrés in postwar Hollywood.

June 9, 2022 issue

Julian Bell

An Impulse Felt Round the World

A recent show and catalog on Surrealism proposes that the thoughts expressed in André Breton’s 1924 manifesto were latent in disparate urban centers, only awaiting his coining of a movement identity.

May 26, 2022 issue

Sam Huber

The Boundaries of Kinship

In her plays, Alice Childress revealed how vulnerable even the most private, self-enclosed spaces are to history’s incursions.

May 17, 2022

Julian Lucas

The Yeehaw Papyrus

In his 1969 satire Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Ishmael Reed married the Western to the Afrocentric vogue for Ancient Egypt.

May 15, 2022

Jeet Heer

The Racing Brain of Martin Vaughn-James

In the 1970s Canadian comics scene, The Projector made dizzying leaps in the development of the graphic novel form.

April 29, 2022

Carolina A. Miranda

Tomorrow Is Today

It is impossible to write about Prospect.5, New Orleans’s citywide art triennial, without considering the reason for its existence: Katrina.

May 12, 2022 issue

David Salle

Going on Her Nerve

The idiosyncratic English artist Rose Wylie makes the process of importing things in the world to the realm of the painted feel exhilarating and new.

May 12, 2022 issue

Ingrid D. Rowland

The Spell of Marble

Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s immense artistic authority was based on his theatrical skill with the chisel.

May 12, 2022 issue

Conversations with Artists

Salamishah Tillet

‘I Wanted to Paint What I Know’: An Interview with Jordan Casteel

Casteel’s first solo exhibition in New York City, ‘Within Reach,’ is a collection of large-scale oil portraits, on view at the New Museum for just one more week.

December 26, 2020

Art Spiegelman in his studio, New York City, February 3, 2018

Claudia Dreifus

An Interview with Art Spiegelman

If you were drawing Donald Trump as an animal, who would he be? A very conventional part of my brain goes, “He’s a… wild boar.” Except that pigs are intelligent. Now I have drawn him as bloated frog. More recently, I drew him as a large turd.

April 13, 2018

Emily Raboteau

An Interview with Artist Chloë Bass

I first encountered the work of conceptual artist Chloë Bass when I came upon a reflective billboard—a giant mirror—planted in the grass of Harlem’s St. Nicholas Park, with the words “How much of love is attention?” written across it.

August 19, 2020

The Latest

Lucy Scholes

Made Alone and Imperatively

The British painter Maeve Gilmore found her muse in family and the home—but that refuge was not an idyll.

August 5, 2022

Sheila Liming

Old Story, New Money

The Gilded Age plunders Edith Wharton’s books for period-appropriate ideas but revels in all the surfaces Wharton sought to puncture.

August 3, 2022

Cintra Wilson

Downtown Confessional

John Lurie’s memoir is a tell-all that settles old accounts and names names, a cantankerous lament over his many existential and terrestrial irritations.

August 18, 2022 issue

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

Exhausting All Possibilities

The video game The Stanley Parable is about what it means to be free in a tightly constrained simulated world.

August 18, 2022 issue

Jed Perl

The Power of Ornament

An exhibition at the Drawing Center explores the astonishing variety that the ornamental impulse has inspired across centuries and continents but never grapples with the aesthetic questions it raises.

August 18, 2022 issue

Simon Callow

Shape-Shifters

In The Method Isaac Butler traces the evolution of an acting theory that was both ferociously denounced and fanatically embraced.

August 18, 2022 issue

Nicole Rudick

Both Sides Now

Shirley Gorelick arrived at her striking, psychologically suggestive portraiture by way of Cubism.

July 27, 2022

Hannah Zeavin

In the Flickering Light

Posing for photographs with one’s television used to be a surprisingly common practice.

July 26, 2022

J.W. McCormack

Kafka’s Inkblots

What can be read in the trove of sketches and doodles saved by Franz Kafka’s literary executor?

July 19, 2022

Lucy Ives

A Line that Wants to Speak

The Beat artist Rick Barton, a fixture of the San Francisco café scene, filled notebooks with expressive line drawings that are only now getting their due.

July 12, 2022