Jed Perl Reimagining the Ordinary The French artist Jean Hélion approached painting with a philosophical precision, each style a hypothesis to be investigated and tested. July 18, 2024 issue
Kevin Power The Kitsch Abyss Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest puts all its faith in cinematic technique and forfeits much of the meaning in Martin Amis’s 2014 novel. July 18, 2024 issue
Brian Seibert ‘You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught’ Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, once kings of American culture, invented a new kind of musical theater in shows like Oklahoma!, Carousel, and South Pacific. But by the time of their final work together, a critical backlash had begun. June 20, 2024 issue
Martin Filler Up on the Roof Carlos de Beistegui’s Parisian penthouse apartment, designed by Le Corbusier, was the product of two supreme egotists squaring off against each other. June 20, 2024 issue
Colin B. Bailey Let There Be Light The new installation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s refurbished European Paintings galleries brings masterpieces of the collection into exhilarating juxtaposition with one another. June 6, 2024 issue
Mark O’Connell Neglecting Beckett James Marsh’s biopic Dance First runs into some predictable problems in adapting the life of a writer, especially one as recognizable as Samuel Beckett. June 6, 2024 issue
Martin Filler Supersize That? New supertall skyscrapers planned for Manhattan will reduce the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building to the scale of souvenir tchotchkes. With the current glut of unoccupied office space, they may be the last of their kind. May 23, 2024 issue
Matthew Aucoin Perpetual Expectation The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s operas have a pervasive aura of waiting for something just out of sight, shrouded in veil upon veil. May 23, 2024 issue
Eleanor Davis, introduction by Gabriel Winslow-Yost Sketching an Uncertain Future Eleanor Davis is one of the very best cartoonists working today. November 2, 2019
Elke Schulze He Ridiculed the Nazis The carefree world of Father and Son gives little hint of the fate that would be suffered by its creator, E. O. Plauen, who had become world-famous for his comic strips and was driven to take his own life. September 14, 2017
Chris Ware Saul Steinberg’s Universe Saul Steinberg’s images grow and even live on the page; somewhere in the viewing of a Steinberg drawing the reader follows not only his line, but also his line of thought. May 26, 2017
Lucy Sante Virtuoso of the Tiny Richard McGuire’s Sequential Drawings: The New Yorker Series is a tribute to the spot illustration, the unsung toiler of the magazine page. November 17, 2016
Sean Wilentz The Lost World of the Jazz Club It was an era when this milieu of popular music seemed to herald a now-distant promise of what American life might be. December 23, 2020
Accra Shepp An Interview with Archie Shepp My father, the saxophonist Archie Shepp, was a revolutionary, both musically and politically. September 29, 2020
Namwali Serpell Sun Ra: ‘I’m Everything and Nothing’ The photographer Ming Smith’s pictures of Sun Ra from 1978 beautifully capture his energy. July 23, 2020 issue
Adam Shatz The World of Cecil Taylor Cecil Taylor developed an exceptional finger dexterity, and a complete mastery of his attacks and releases. As the pianist Craig Taborn told me, “fingers don’t do that naturally.” May 16, 2018
Geoffrey O’Brien The Grandest Duke Of many artists it can be said that deep cultural currents can be read through their work; much rarer are those who, like Ellington, transformed those currents by their work. October 28, 2010 issue
E.J. Hobsbawm Some Like It Hot For jazz to go so far, it needed impresarios and entrepreneurs committed to a cause. And it required public relaxation of an apartheid far stronger than we can now imagine. April 13, 1989 issue
Alma Guillermoprieto Cuban Hit Parade Buena Vista Social Club may come nearest to being the perfect popular music record since Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. January 14, 1999 issue
Charles Simic Dizzy in the Daylight Jazz Festival is a thick book of black-and-white photographs by Jim Marshall, one of the best-known American rock photographers, who first became famous by taking pictures of jazz musicians. December 4, 2016
Jed Perl Succumbing to Spectacle During the last half-century, artists, curators, and scholars have been increasingly preoccupied with the idea of spectacle and with how to embrace, critique, or co-opt the power of work that envelops and overwhelms the viewer. September 19, 2024 issue
Andrew Katzenstein Fools in Love Screwball comedies are among the most beloved films of Hollywood’s golden age, but for decades historians and critics have disagreed over what the genre is and which movies belong to it. September 19, 2024 issue
J. W. McCormack ‘An Ass-Backward Sherlock Holmes’ Over seven seasons on NBC, Columbo put a charming, shambolic gloss on the crime show. Now it has a new generation of imitators. August 25, 2024
Victoria Baena Pitiless, Restless Brecht A recent show of Bertolt Brecht’s collages and ephemera suggested that he viewed all his work as forever in progress. August 22, 2024
Brian Seibert ‘Carefully Plotted Chaos’ For decades the choreographer Twyla Tharp has been drawing on her past successes and even returning to earlier failures, looking to get it right this time. August 21, 2024
Geoffrey Wheatcroft Lights, Camera, Royals! Portraitists of kings and queens have long struggled to address a paradox: royalties are different but ordinary, or ordinary but different. August 18, 2024
Hannah Zeavin ‘We Took Care of the Network’ The Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles imagined an asylum that could cure not only individual patients but society itself. August 17, 2024
Marisa Anne Bass Worldly van Eyck Was the Netherlandish master a painter of visionary experience or of life here on earth? August 14, 2024
Lucy Jakub Be Yourself In her debut film, Janet Planet, the playwright Annie Baker tells a story about how to live when you don’t know why living is so hard. August 11, 2024
Anahid Nersessian Refusing the Eye In Simone Leigh’s sculptures, strange and contingent details redirect the viewer’s gaze. August 8, 2024