Arts

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Ralph Ellison’s Alchemical Camera

The novelist’s photographs reveal an aestheticizing impulse that is difficult to reconcile with the relentless seriousness of his observations and critiques of American society.

November 7, 2024 issue

Simon Callow

Under the Spotlight

Richard Sennett’s new book, The Performer, ranges beyond acting to musical, political, social, and pictorial performance.

October 17, 2024 issue

Carolina A. Miranda

Mythic Chaps

Two recent exhibitions in Denver reveal how many legends and surprising realities coexist in the idea of the American cowboy.

October 17, 2024 issue

Peter E. Gordon

Music and Memory

After the Holocaust, classical composers explored music’s capacity to commemorate historical trauma without permitting horrific events to take on the allure of facile beauty.

October 17, 2024 issue

Beatrice Radden Keefe

Happy Island of Psalters and Cucumbers

Thirteen hundred years ago, the monks on the German lake island of Reichenau tended a rich meadow of wall painting, manuscript making, and Latin poetry. An exhibit celebrating the anniversary chronicles the monastery’s history and art.

October 17, 2024 issue

Daphne Merkin

The Bliss and the Risks

The painter Paula Modersohn-Becker’s ascension to greater visibility raises questions about how we assess artistic talent, how reputations are made, and how we reevaluate once-neglected artists, particularly women.

October 3, 2024 issue

Andrew Katzenstein

Fools in Love

Screwball comedies are among the most beloved films of Hollywood’s golden age, but for decades historians and critics have disagreed over what the genre is and which movies belong to it.

September 19, 2024 issue

Jed Perl

Succumbing to Spectacle

During the last half-century, artists, curators, and scholars have been increasingly preoccupied with the idea of spectacle and with how to embrace, critique, or co-opt the power of work that envelops and overwhelms the viewer.

September 19, 2024 issue

On Canvas

Jed Perl

Interpreting Nature

A transcendent exhibition of Cézanne’s drawings at MoMA reveals an artist who is drunk on sensation but always sober enough to pin it down.

July 22, 2021 issue

Florine Stettheimer: Asbury Park South, 1920

Christopher Benfey

The Bruegel of Bendel’s

The antic Jazz Age canvases of the painter, poet, and theatrical designer Florine Stettheimer can give the impression, at first glance, of a never-ending party.

May 16, 2017

Jean Strouse

Sargent & His People

An artist who was “at home everywhere, and belonged nowhere.”

October 8, 2015 issue

Ingrid D. Rowland

Irresistible El Greco

Throughout his career, in different materials, different styles, and different media, El Greco played two artistic traditions and two moods against each other: heavenly calm against earthly agitation as well as West against East.

June 19, 2014 issue

The Art of Ceramics

Christopher Benfey

Resistance Pottery

Two recent exhibitions of the work of Black potters find political acts in the placid history of nineteenth-century American stoneware.

May 11, 2023 issue

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

Andrew Raftery

Clay Genius

A master of the punishing mercy of the kiln, Josiah Wedgwood set his stamp on European decorative arts and changed ceramics forever with the clay and glazes he invented or perfected.

November 24, 2022 issue

The Latest

Martin Filler

A Cowboy in Winter

The artist Bruce Nauman’s latest exhibition reconfirms that he doesn’t believe in letting his viewers off easy.

December 3, 2024

Susan Tallman

The Occupation of Looking

The discipline of art history today is far more inclusive, more cognizant of social history, and less prone to normative aesthetic judgments—changes Svetlana Alpers helped bring about.

December 19, 2024 issue

Michael Chabon

The Midnight World

Glenn Fleishman’s history of the comic strip as a technological artifact vividly restores the world of newspaper printing—gamboge, Zip-A-Tone, flongs, and all.

December 19, 2024 issue

Jenny Uglow

Hallelujah!

In his book Every Valley, Charles King explains the enduring appeal of Handel’s Messiah since its premiere in Dublin nearly three hundred years ago.

December 19, 2024 issue

Carolina A. Miranda

Intimate Theatricality

Meticulously installed domestic spaces set the tone for Mickalene Thomas’s current exhibition, which features the work for which she is best known: sumptuous portraits of Black women in repose—the artist’s mother, lovers, and friends.

December 19, 2024 issue

Martin Filler

The Architect Who Unified America

H. H. Richardson invented a practical, adaptable style for American civic architecture that was used for decades after his death.

December 19, 2024 issue

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

As You Like It

Sam Barlow’s video games may be the first efforts at interactive cinema—by either a game designer or a filmmaker—that work.

December 19, 2024 issue

Adrian Nathan West

Under the Spanish Volcano

A recent exhibition at the Prado showcased artists engaging with the ferment and conflict of turn-of-the-century Spain.

November 24, 2024

Sam Huber

‘The Loudest, Brightest Thing’

The producer and DJ Sophie created a musical language with which to explore feelings too inchoate—too big, too raw—to be spoken.

November 24, 2024

Beatrice Loayza

‘The Look of Shame’

The French director Catherine Breillat has spent her career insisting on women’s agency and reclaiming taboo desires—sometimes with troubling implications.

November 21, 2024