Arts

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

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

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

Vermeer

a poem

November 11, 2010 issue

Interpreting Nature

A transcendent exhibition of Cézanne’s drawings at MoMA reveals an artist who is drunk on sensation but always sober enough to pin it down.

July 22, 2021 issue

The Bruegel of Bendel’s

The antic Jazz Age canvases of the painter, poet, and theatrical designer Florine Stettheimer can give the impression, at first glance, of a never-ending party.

May 16, 2017

Sargent & His People

An artist who was “at home everywhere, and belonged nowhere.”

October 8, 2015 issue

Irresistible El Greco

Throughout his career, in different materials, different styles, and different media, El Greco played two artistic traditions and two moods against each other: heavenly calm against earthly agitation as well as West against East.

June 19, 2014 issue

Resistance Pottery

Two recent exhibitions of the work of Black potters find political acts in the placid history of nineteenth-century American stoneware.

May 11, 2023 issue

House of Delft

In a recreated eighteenth-century home in London’s East End, the ceramicist Simon Pettet and his partner Dennis Severs created a world both elegant and deliriously contemporary. 

May 25, 2023

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