Arts

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The Hunter

Björk has always been a techno-utopian, and the environmentalist strain in her music has only grown more pronounced over time.

December 22, 2022 issue

Martin Filler

Whips and Vines

Recent books and exhibitions reveal that behind its undulating lines and swirling excesses, Art Nouveau was far more complex and nuanced than we once believed.

December 22, 2022 issue

Simon Callow

Ol’ Blue Eyes

Paul Newman’s posthumous memoir is a many-sided self-interrogation by a man who was a mystery to himself.

December 22, 2022 issue

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

No Surprises

The comedian Nathan Fielder’s new HBO show is an expensive, painstakingly constructed machine for managing uncertainty.

December 22, 2022 issue

William Dalrymple

Missionaries, Merlins, and Merchants

Recent scholarship illuminates how medieval Southeast Asia transformed Indian cultural and religious ideas brought to the region by monks and traders.

December 22, 2022 issue

Stephen Greenblatt

‘Competitive Consumption’

An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art displays the extravagant Tudor taste for jewels, artworks, tapestries, and other finery.

December 22, 2022 issue

Jennifer Wilson

The Agony of Sophia Tolstoy

Frederick Wiseman resurrects the wife of the famed Russian writer only to reduce her to the sum of her grievances.

November 22, 2022

Luke Parker

‘Our Anonymous Shadows’

During his Berlin exile, Vladimir Nabokov developed a fascination with silent and early sound cinema—as a writer, as a moviegoer, and, like many of his fellow émigrés, as an extra.

November 14, 2022

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

Colm Tóibín

Cut, Mold, Reshape, Tear

From an early age, Picasso worked with anything that was to hand—including, often, scissors and paper.

December 6, 2022

Dan Chiasson

Road Maps for the Soul

The Philosophy of Modern Song can be read as a tour journal, refracted through one lonely song after another.

December 8, 2022 issue

David Salle

Who Am I? What Am I?

Charles Ray’s ambitious, technologically sophisticated sculptures allow viewers to enjoy figurative realism without the taint of kitsch.

December 8, 2022 issue

Tausif Noor

Faith Ringgold’s American Dream

In her indelible images of the civil rights era, the artist understood that Black liberation has multiple fronts.

November 10, 2022

Tiana Reid

‘I Was Mobile’

In her photographs of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, held in Lagos in 1977, Marilyn Nance captured moments of reprieve amid the spectacle.

November 4, 2022

Jed Perl

Between Abstraction and Representation

Artists today think they no longer have to choose between two opposed artistic traditions. But what is being lost in this eclecticism?

November 24, 2022 issue

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