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Cintra Wilson

The Pleasure Crafts

A new history of pornography before it became commercial.

December 17, 2020 issue

Julian Bell

The Body in Swooping Close-Up

The National Gallery’s Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition foregrounds the will and charisma of the painter’s female figures.

December 17, 2020 issue

Colin B. Bailey

Suffering, Unfaltering Manet

Even in ill health, the painter continued to shock his audience.

December 3, 2020 issue

Valeria Luiselli

Things as They Are

Dorothea Lange created a vast archive of the twentieth century’s crises in America. For years her work was censored, misused, impounded, or simply rejected.

November 19, 2020 issue

Sanford Schwartz

The Revolutionary Jacob Lawrence

‘Struggle: From the History of the American People’ charts the strife of early US history in a fierce Cubist/Expressionist style.

November 5, 2020 issue

Pierre Boulez; illustration by Tom Bachtell

Matthew Aucoin

The Fury of Pierre Boulez

A collection of his lectures on music reveals the composer’s narrow-mindedness and disdain.

November 5, 2020 issue

Sonia Delaunay: Danseuse, deuxieme version, 1916

Clair Wills

Stepping Out

The joy of dancing as a follower is to listen for the barely said—to interpret signs almost before they have been given, to read messages in the moment they are being sent.

August 20, 2020 issue

Gerhard Richter: Group of People, 66 15/16 x 78 3/4 inches, 1965

Susan Tallman

The Master of Unknowing

Gerhard Richter is contemporary art’s great poet of uncertainty; his work sets the will to believe and the obligation to doubt in perfect oscillation.

May 14, 2020 issue

The Latest

Stephanie LaCava

‘This Planet is Our Spaceship’: An Interview with Cauleen Smith

“Art at its best gives much and demands little in return. Wouldn’t it be marvelous if we applied that ethic to every other aspect of life?”

November 28, 2020

Elaine Blair

Designing Women

Making space for women to behave badly in ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ and ‘The Favourite.’

December 17, 2020 issue

Nicholas Kenyon

What Matters in Music?

The musicologist Richard Taruskin has lost none of his zest for controversy.

December 17, 2020 issue

David Salle

Object Lessons

Has there ever been an artist more sure of himself than Donald Judd?

December 17, 2020 issue

Lewis Hyde

The Powerful Reticence of Felix Gonzalez-Torres

Rather than presenting himself overtly as a gay artist in the age of AIDS, he preferred to work as a secret agent in the house of culture.

November 22, 2020

Greil Marcus

The Devil Had Nothing to Do With It

“Robert Johnson was one of the most inventive geniuses of all time,” wrote Bob Dylan. “We still haven’t caught up with him.”

December 3, 2020 issue

Boyd Tonkin

Turner, Critic of the Anthropocene

A new show at Tate Britain foregrounds the painter’s tragic, if beguilingly beautiful vision of a world marred by cruel industrial might.

November 11, 2020

Jehad al-Saftawi

The Gaza I Grew Up In

Working as a photojournalist there is like walking barefoot in a field of thorns. You must always watch where you step.

November 6, 2020

J. Hoberman

Fall Films to Stream

William Greaves’s documentary about the 1972 National Black Political Convention, Werner Schroeter’s Malina, and a caper by King Hu.

November 5, 2020

Andrew Delbanco

Rod Serling’s Night Terrors

The creator of ‘The Twilight Zone’ dramatized isolation and fear but still believed in the best of humanity.

November 19, 2020 issue

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Richard Howard Loves Henry James

Richard Howard

The Last Libertines

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