Arts

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A Brief Efflorescence

The early Aughts were a period when New York became the center of the world both politically and musically, the city itself the subject of songs and romance.

September 21, 2023 issue

James Quandt

Jean Eustache’s Vehement Realism

The French director Jean Eustache used his films to examine his ravaged life and relationships with merciless accuracy.

September 21, 2023 issue

William Dalrymple

Vibrant, Cacophonous Buddhism

A groundbreaking show at the Metropolitan Museum displays, among other treasures from India, works of Buddhist art that bear the mark of ancient animist cults that long preceded the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama.

September 21, 2023 issue

Jed Perl

The Modern Hephaestus

David Smith was an expressionist with an all-or-nothing approach to art who reveled in the violent acts of metalworking that created new forms of permanence.

September 21, 2023 issue

Liza Batkin

Not All Men

The sitcom Jury Duty exploits the controversial tactics of the prank show to make us feel good about mankind.

September 5, 2023

J. Hoberman

Jammin’ in the Panoram

During World War II, proto–music videos called “soundies” blared pop patriotism from visual jukeboxes across American bars.

September 2, 2023

Lauren Michele Jackson

Humorless Barbie

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie finds its comedy in the inflexibility both of plastic and of modern womanhood.

August 27, 2023

Ted Reichman

Wind in the Nave

Medna Roso documents a revelatory encounter between improvising musicians and Balkan vocalists in a Cologne church.

August 23, 2023

On Songwriting

Mark Ford

She Shampooed & Renewed Us

For those who dreamed upward in the late 1960s, there was not only Woodstock, there was also its commemoration by Mitchell in her optimistic paean to the festival’s significance in her song of the same name.

October 26, 2017 issue

Lucy Sante

Dylan’s Time

Dylan, through his ambiguity, his ability to throw down puzzles that continue to echo and to generate interpretations, almost singlehandedly created a climate in which lyrics were taken seriously.

October 13, 2016

Paul Simon with his son Harper, June 7, 1973

Daniel Drake

Paul Simon: Fathers, Sons, Troubled Water

Paul Simon’s emotive, androgynous tenor and sensitive, imagistic songwriting have sustained a sixty-year career in American pop music that came to a close in September with three farewell concerts.

October 13, 2018

Bruce Springsteen performing at the Bottom Line, New York City, August 1975

Jon Pareles

Swept Away by Springsteen

For a generation or two of listeners, Springsteen has been rock’s steadfast working-class hero, the self-made superstar who never forgot where he came from and a flesh-and-blood affirmation of tenacity against long odds.

December 22, 2016 issue

‘A Little Patch of Yellow Wall’

Johannes Vermeer: The Lacemaker, 9 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches, circa 1669–1670

Joseph Leo Koerner

First Among Equals

“Vermeer prompts us to look at his handiwork. In the foreground, white and red paint—conjuring threads escaping from the woman’s sewing cushion—appears as if dribbled on the canvas.”

February 7, 2019 issue

Johannes Vermeer: The Music Lesson, circa 1662–1663

Julian Bell

The Mysterious Women of Vermeer

Vermeer has a mind-boggling technique for transferring visual sensations from eye to canvas as if without the hand’s intervention. Color has somehow wafted down, as leaves might on water, and cohered automatically into threads and ringlets and cushions.

December 22, 2011 issue

Sanford Schwartz

Camera Work

“To read about Johannes Vermeer and to look at his pictures is sometimes to think you have entered a fairy-tale domain. There’s an Arabian Nights flavor about a painter who leaves so few traces of himself.”

May 31, 2001 issue

Wisława Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak

Vermeer

a poem

November 11, 2010 issue

The Latest

Jenny Uglow

‘A Haughty Independence’

The early-twentieth-century painter Gwen John struggled to forge her own place in an art world dominated by men.

October 19, 2023 issue

Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo

‘Give Me All the Power’

Did Latin rock meaningfully challenge authoritarian politics in Central and South America during the twentieth century, or was it music for rebels without a cause?

October 19, 2023 issue

Megan O’Grady

Art as Action

Lucy Lippard is a canonical figure who held no truck with canons, who disdained art history only to become art history.

October 19, 2023 issue

Adam Kirsch

Intolerable Freedoms

The Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s “Three Colors” trilogy darkly anticipated some of the central conflicts of the post–cold war period.

October 19, 2023 issue

Philip Clark

The Transgressor

RJ Smith’s biography of Chuck Berry examines his subject’s instinct for crossing the line musically, racially, and morally.

October 19, 2023 issue

Adam Shatz

Feel-Ins, Know-Ins, Be-Ins

A newly reissued recording proves that the late saxophonist Pharoah Sanders could get the grandest of effects from the humblest of riffs.

September 19, 2023

George B. Stauffer

Where Are the Women Composers?

An engaging multiple biography draws the reader deep into the lives of four British women who attempted to forge careers in the male-dominated field of music composition.

October 5, 2023 issue

Daniel M. Lavery

Coq au Pépin

More than almost any other public figure, Jacques Pépin has followed the trajectory of twentieth-century cuisine, from the Hôtel Plaza Athénée to Howard Johnson’s, and from his Burgundy backyard to national television.

October 5, 2023 issue

Christopher Benfey

Constable’s Quiet Tumult

John Constable’s lifelong struggle was to convey his deep feelings for his native countryside to a reluctant public, which preferred escapist historical tableaux and portraits of grandees.

October 5, 2023 issue