Arts

Visual Arts Performing Arts Film & Television Music Society & Culture

The Uses of Portraiture

As three exhibitions show, portraiture can be an argument, a celebration of surfaces, an occasion to play with historical tropes, or a form of resistance on behalf of the normally unpictured.

October 7, 2021 issue

Sophie Pinkham

Designs for Living

Svetlana Kana Radević’s architecture adapted modernism to the peculiarities of history and politics in Communist Yugoslavia.

September 23, 2021 issue

Sanford Schwartz

Daydream Kingdoms

Susan Te Kahurangi King’s art presents a visual, psychological, and expressive upside-down world.

July 22, 2021 issue

Matthew Aucoin

A Dance to the Music of Death

Thomas Adès turns fleetingly recognizable musical elements into unstable, volatile substances tending toward evanescence and escape.

May 13, 2021 issue

Max Nelson

Alone Together in Taipei

Intimacy in Tsai Ming-liang’s films is an elusive possession, but the desire for it is constant and always particular.

June 10, 2021 issue

John Banville

His Own Worst Enemy

In Van Gogh’s letters, his tone is consistently that of a man still aflame after a violent argument.

May 13, 2021 issue

Ingrid D. Rowland

Light in the Palazzo

Hidden away and neglected for decades, works from the world’s greatest private collection of ancient sculptures are finally on public display in Rome.

May 13, 2021 issue

Sanford Schwartz

Young and in Love

Salman Toor’s absorbing show at the Whitney depicts the pleasures, tensions, and small moments of gay life.

April 8, 2021 issue

The Latest

Jed Perl

Colors in Conversation

Joan Mitchell was a Romantic whose paintings join nature and feelings with an operatic lyricism.

November 4, 2021 issue

Larry Wolff

A Halo of Nostalgia

The frivolous charms of Viennese operetta helped preserve a sense of Habsburg identity after the breakup of the empire.

November 4, 2021 issue

Adam Shatz

Coltrane’s New ‘Love Supreme’

The studio version has long been recognized as the jazz saxophonist’s masterwork. But a recently unearthed live recording is nothing short of a revelation.

October 7, 2021

Matthew Aucoin

The More Fraught the Better

Throughout The Rake’s Progress, the steady friction between Stravinsky’s music and Auden’s poetry creates a musico-poetic compound that brims with energy and life.

October 21, 2021 issue

Carolina A. Miranda

‘Who Designs Your Race?’

At a time when Latino identity is in flux, El Museo del Barrio’s triennial embraces its fragmented nature.

October 21, 2021 issue

Martin Filler

Hollywood’s Master Builder

The African-American architect Paul R. Williams channeled the glamorous but breezy spirit of the Golden Age of Hollywood in designs that allowed his clients and the public to imagine themselves in fantasies akin to those spun out by the great movie studios.

October 21, 2021 issue

Christopher Benfey

‘Such a Lovely Turmoil’

Albert Pinkham Ryder was described as the American Van Gogh; Jackson Pollock called him “the only American master who interests me.” Why has his reputation waned?

October 7, 2021 issue

Claudia Dreifus

‘I Walk Through My Fear’

The artist became known for her images of a circle that would be decimated by AIDS. Today, she’s using ACT UP-style activism to highlight the Sacklers’ part in the opioid crisis—and stop museums taking their money.

September 13, 2021

Edwidge Danticat

Remembering Michael Richards

The young artist was among those killed in the September 11, 2001 attack on the Twin Towers, where he had a studio. Now, twenty years on, his work is enjoying its first major retrospective.

September 11, 2021