Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Arts

Visual Arts Performing Arts Film & Television Music Society & Culture

Zadie Smith

The Instrumentalist

At the heart of Todd Field’s new film is a conductor who cannot see beyond her generation’s field of vision.

January 19, 2023 issue

Susan Tallman

Feinting Spells

The thesis of an exhibition on the inspiration a subset of Cubism took from trompe l’oeil is convincingly built with objects made across four centuries.

January 19, 2023 issue

Colin Thubron

Remainders

Two recent books explore the complex pleasure we take in ruins and the rediscovery of long-forgotten objects.

January 19, 2023 issue

Alastair Macaulay

The Encyclopedia of the Dance

The first full-length biography of Bronislava Nijinska does long-overdue justice to one of the twentieth century’s great women artists.

January 19, 2023 issue

Anahid Nersessian

The Hunter

Björk has always been a techno-utopian, and the environmentalist strain in her music has only grown more pronounced over time.

December 22, 2022 issue

Martin Filler

Whips and Vines

Recent books and exhibitions reveal that behind its undulating lines and swirling excesses, Art Nouveau was far more complex and nuanced than we once believed.

December 22, 2022 issue

Simon Callow

Ol’ Blue Eyes

Paul Newman’s posthumous memoir is a many-sided self-interrogation by a man who was a mystery to himself.

December 22, 2022 issue

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

No Surprises

The comedian Nathan Fielder’s new HBO show is an expensive, painstakingly constructed machine for managing uncertainty.

December 22, 2022 issue

On Photography

Ela Bittencourt

Brazil’s Fotoclubistas in Focus

A show at MoMA showcases the Modernist heyday of a vibrant, largely amateur avant-garde photography movement.

June 11, 2021

Anna Atkins: Dictyota dichotoma, in the young state and in fruit, from Part
XI of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, 1849–1850,

Megan N. Liberty

Anna Atkins’s Blue Photographs

Exposed to her father’s scientific research and colleagues at a young age, Anna Atkins documented specimens of British algae in what is now considered the first book to be fully illustrated with photography and the first use of photography for scientific documentation.

November 24, 2018

Sam Wagstaff (left) and Robert Mapplethorpe, 1974; photograph by Francesco Scavullo

Martin Filler

Falling for Photography

A new biography of Sam Wagstaff gives us a closer look at the curator, tastemaker, and pioneering collector of photography who launched Robert Mapplethorpe’s career.

November 15, 2014

Austin Gilkeson

The Lore of the Rings

J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction is suffused with the pleasures of scholarship and study. Amazon’s new franchise The Rings of Power can’t sit still.

January 24, 2023

Coco Fusco

The Other Cuba

An exhibition of Cuban art from the past decade charts the emergence of a group of artists who have broken the state’s monopoly on public discourse.

February 9, 2023 issue

Jed Perl

Going to Extremes

For Matisse art was a perpetual emergency, a matter of testing boundaries, breaking through.

February 9, 2023 issue

Adam Kirsch

Arias of Despair

What can opera elicit from The Hours that the page and the screen cannot?

February 9, 2023 issue

Regina Marler

Behind the Mask

After rejecting the gendered fixations of the Surrealist movement, Meret Oppenheim embraced an androgynous art of the unconscious.

January 14, 2023

Victoria Baena

A Great Variety of Selves

In a new play based on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Emma Corrin plays a young aristocrat who swaps milieus, costumes, countries, and genders.

January 10, 2023

Robyn Creswell

‘Endless Organic Growth’

The recent drawings of the Sudanese artist Ibrahim El-Salahi, now ninety-two, derive their energy from the tension between suffering and pleasure.

January 5, 2023

Matthew Aucoin

Save the ENO!

The Arts Council’s decision to cut off annual funding for the English National Opera and other flagship London arts institutions will be devastating for audiences and artists.

December 27, 2022