Arts

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Reckoning with a Troubled Past

Two European museum exhibitions made good-faith efforts to bear witness to their towns’ early libels against Jews, while not always avoiding the pitfalls of historically loaded discourse.

March 23, 2023 issue

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Laughs and Smiles

Frans Hals’s animated paintings allow viewers to feel the presence of an artist whose life is largely unknown.

March 23, 2023 issue

Clare Bucknell

Cannibals and Guillotines

Far from a straightforward propagandist, the caricaturist James Gillray preferred pleasing, or irritating, many different kinds of customers.

March 9, 2023 issue

Andrew O’Hagan

Bigger, Deeper, and More ‘Fucked Up’

When asked why HBO took such bold risks on shows that were darker, more libidinal, and more surreal than those on other networks, a company executive replied, “Because we can.”

March 23, 2023 issue

Lucy Ives

What You Don’t Know Your Mind Knows

Renee Gladman’s drawings trouble the eye’s desire for cut-and-dried distinctions between word and image.

March 4, 2023

Maya Binyam

Hiding in Plain Sight

The filmmaker Garrett Bradley uses archival material—home movies, fragments of early black cinema—to reimagine the present.

February 13, 2023

Christopher Benfey

Buildings Come to Life

In Edward Hopper’s paintings of New York, human figures often seem outgrowths of their architectural surroundings.

February 23, 2023 issue

Ted Reichman

A Sketchbook in Sound

Charles Stepney’s avant-garde production fused Chicago’s blues, soul, and R&B traditions with psychedelic pop.

February 21, 2023

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

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

Love’s Body Count

In HBO’s The Last of Us, violence never implicates the viewer as it did the player.

March 29, 2023

James Fenton

Here’s Looking at Yew

In the English garden, eccentricity and variety went hand in hand.

April 6, 2023 issue

Martin Filler

The Architect of Subtraction

Adolf Loos’s radical designs pared down architecture to its most basic elements.

April 6, 2023 issue

Sam Needleman

Michaelina’s Boys

In “The Five Senses,” the long-forgotten Flemish painter Michaelina Wautier shows her vision of vision.

March 12, 2023

Regina Marler

‘Joan Doesn’t Give a Damn’

The San Francisco painter Joan Brown snubbed success at every turn.

March 9, 2023

Daniel Drake

Present Imperfect

Aftersun captures the loss of a parent, a story for which there are no spoilers.

February 19, 2023

Matthew Aucoin

Performance as Immolation

The conductor Carlos Kleiber’s aesthetic was founded on the interplay between voluptuous refinement and an impulse to violence.

February 23, 2023 issue

Andrew Butterfield

A ‘Magic Mirror’ of Venice

The first-ever exhibition outside Italy of the works of Vittore Carpaccio is a bracing introduction to the artist who best captured the imaginative grandeur and the ceremonial refinement of early-sixteenth-century Venice.

February 23, 2023 issue