Arts

Visual Arts Performing Arts Film & Television Music Society & Culture

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

Christopher Benfey

Shaggy Allies

It’s comforting to know that Melville, isolated in an old farmhouse in Pittsfield, had the company of a dog.

June 29, 2022

Anna Shechtman

Crimes Against Humanity

The precondition for making it with anyone in David Cronenberg’s cinema is making it new.

June 28, 2022

Nawal Arjini

Democracy in Concrete

An exhibition of postcolonial architecture in South Asia looks back with nostalgia at modernism’s promise of social progress.

June 26, 2022

Erica Getto

Choreographed Uncertainty

Even the most rigorous viewing of a Trisha Brown dance will never quite reveal the springs and levers that hold it together.

June 22, 2022

Victoria Baena

Altars of Novelty and Profit

Xavier Giannoli’s new adaptation of Balzac’s Lost Illusions follows an aspiring poet in post-Revolutionary Paris and his precarious alliance with an unruly press.

June 16, 2022

Lucas Adams

Wegman’s World

William Wegman’s dry humor, evident in his iconic video art, also found expression in a private decades-long practice of absurdist text and images.

June 14, 2022

Erica X Eisen

Memories of the Metaverse

Was Chris Marker’s romance with the online platform Second Life a departure from his creative and political aims, or the consummation of them?

June 7, 2022

Dennis Zhou

‘Poet of the Camera’

What made the Hollywood cinematographer James Wong Howe a consummate artist was his ability to cohere his experiences into a visual style.

June 3, 2022

Jarrett Earnest

A Proliferation of Beauties

The critic Dave Hickey almost single-handedly remade the practice of writing about art in the 1980s and 1990s, even as he provoked outrage in the institutional art world.

June 23, 2022 issue

George B. Stauffer

Alban Berg’s Dissonances

Berg’s music, with its lyrical combination of tonal and atonal techniques, is closer to late Romanticism than to the strict modernism of his contemporaries Schoenberg and Webern.

June 23, 2022 issue