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Subjects of Considerable Gossip

Greta Garbo craved protection, and one such guardian was Salka Viertel, a nearly forgotten screenwriter who nurtured a community of fellow émigrés in postwar Hollywood.

June 9, 2022 issue

Julian Bell

An Impulse Felt Round the World

A recent show and catalog on Surrealism proposes that the thoughts expressed in André Breton’s 1924 manifesto were latent in disparate urban centers, only awaiting his coining of a movement identity.

May 26, 2022 issue

Sam Huber

The Boundaries of Kinship

In her plays, Alice Childress revealed how vulnerable even the most private, self-enclosed spaces are to history’s incursions.

May 17, 2022

Julian Lucas

The Yeehaw Papyrus

In his 1969 satire Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Ishmael Reed married the Western to the Afrocentric vogue for Ancient Egypt.

May 15, 2022

Jeet Heer

The Racing Brain of Martin Vaughn-James

In the 1970s Canadian comics scene, The Projector made dizzying leaps in the development of the graphic novel form.

April 29, 2022

Carolina A. Miranda

Tomorrow Is Today

It is impossible to write about Prospect.5, New Orleans’s citywide art triennial, without considering the reason for its existence: Katrina.

May 12, 2022 issue

David Salle

Going on Her Nerve

The idiosyncratic English artist Rose Wylie makes the process of importing things in the world to the realm of the painted feel exhilarating and new.

May 12, 2022 issue

Ingrid D. Rowland

The Spell of Marble

Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s immense artistic authority was based on his theatrical skill with the chisel.

May 12, 2022 issue

Conversations with Artists

Salamishah Tillet

‘I Wanted to Paint What I Know’: An Interview with Jordan Casteel

Casteel’s first solo exhibition in New York City, ‘Within Reach,’ is a collection of large-scale oil portraits, on view at the New Museum for just one more week.

December 26, 2020

Art Spiegelman in his studio, New York City, February 3, 2018

Claudia Dreifus

An Interview with Art Spiegelman

If you were drawing Donald Trump as an animal, who would he be? A very conventional part of my brain goes, “He’s a… wild boar.” Except that pigs are intelligent. Now I have drawn him as bloated frog. More recently, I drew him as a large turd.

April 13, 2018

Emily Raboteau

An Interview with Artist Chloë Bass

I first encountered the work of conceptual artist Chloë Bass when I came upon a reflective billboard—a giant mirror—planted in the grass of Harlem’s St. Nicholas Park, with the words “How much of love is attention?” written across it.

August 19, 2020

The Latest

Walker Mimms

At Saul Steinberg’s Table

The artist known for his playful, philosophical drawings also had a rich practice in sculpture, fashioning everyday objects in wood and paint.

April 27, 2022

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Painting Herself

From the beginning, female self-portraitists have chosen to show themselves at work, as if to demonstrate that they could handle a brush as well as male artists.

May 12, 2022 issue

Julian Barnes

What Are You Looking At?

No fin-de-siècle artist was more fascinated by the artistic relevance of gawkers on the streets of Paris than Félix Vallotton.

May 12, 2022 issue

Martin Filler

Burkina Faso’s Master Builder

Africa’s first Pritzker Prize winner, Francis Kéré, has a small yet remarkably original and cohesive body of work and a commitment to fostering social and democratic values through architecture.

May 12, 2022 issue

Colin B. Bailey

A Master at Work

The Met’s exhibition of Jacques Louis David’s drawings demonstrates the ways he developed and refined the ideas expressed in his large paintings of classical history and contemporary events.

May 12, 2022 issue

Brian Seibert

Never the Same Step Twice

Where the previous generation of dancers arranged their steps into tidy, regular phrases, John Bubbles enjambed over the bar lines, multiplying, twisting, tilting, turning.

May 12, 2022 issue