Arts

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Picasso’s Transformations

Pablo Picasso reconceived everything he touched, but fifty years after his death his transformative art has been eclipsed by Andy Warhol’s art of appropriation and replication.

November 2, 2023 issue

Martin Filler

The Neotraditionalist

The architect Robert A. M. Stern is America’s most vociferous and successful exponent of a Classicism that would be considered anachronistic in much of the rest of the world.

November 2, 2023 issue

Catherine Nicholson

Theater for a New Audience

From the beginning, the First Folio helped to fashion Shakespeare’s work into a canon of vernacular drama.

November 2, 2023 issue

Ingrid D. Rowland

‘A Great Glory to Wealth’

Like so many of the Tuscan banker Agostino Chigi’s undertakings, the Villa Farnesina burst through all the old categories—social, architectural, and cultural—for a merchant’s house.

November 2, 2023 issue

Stacy Schiff

‘Hallucinatory Spitballs’

Arthur Miller wrote that The Crucible should not pass as a true story. Why has the play become ubiquitous in American high schools? What have we done with the actual greatest witch hunt in American history?

November 2, 2023 issue

Simon Callow

Mozart the Modernist

In his new biography, Patrick Mackie conjures a vertiginous version of Mozart as the quintessential artist of the modern world.

November 2, 2023 issue

Jenny Uglow

‘A Haughty Independence’

The early-twentieth-century painter Gwen John struggled to forge her own place in an art world dominated by men.

October 19, 2023 issue

Emmanuel Ordóñez Angulo

‘Give Me All the Power’

Did Latin rock meaningfully challenge authoritarian politics in Central and South America during the twentieth century, or was it music for rebels without a cause?

October 19, 2023 issue

Cave Paintings and Cosmic Eggs

William Dalrymple

Garum Masala

Dramatic archaeological discoveries—including a marble Buddha in Egypt and jars of Mediterranean garum (fish sauce) and olive oil in India—have led scholars to radically reassess the size and importance of the trade between ancient Rome and India.

April 20, 2023 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

William Dalrymple

Painting the Cosmic Ocean

“Mountain fortresses suddenly blossomed with artists, many of whom had been trained in the now-defunct Mughal ateliers, each family of painters competing with and inspiring one another in a manner comparable to the rival city-states of Renaissance Italy.”

June 6, 2019 issue

William Dalrymple

The Greatest Ancient Picture Gallery

One of the great wonders of India: the painted caves of Ajanta

October 23, 2014 issue

‘A Little Patch of Yellow Wall’

Johannes Vermeer: The Lacemaker, 9 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches, circa 1669–1670

Joseph Leo Koerner

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

Johannes Vermeer: The Music Lesson, circa 1662–1663

Julian Bell

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

Sanford Schwartz

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

Wisława Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak

Vermeer

a poem

November 11, 2010 issue

The Latest

Adam Shatz

Cries and Whispers

Throughout her long career, Meredith Monk has pushed beyond verbal language to explore the full potential of the human voice.

November 22, 2023

Susan Tallman

‘Everything Will Be Alright’

Widely acclaimed as a painter, Kerry James Marshall has long used printmaking as a field of play.

November 21, 2023

Zoe Hu

Child’s Play

Sofia Coppola’s film about Priscilla Presley feels like a document less of romance than of the comforts and dangers of fantasy.

November 18, 2023

Daniel M. Lavery

Three Men and a Shark

In Ian Shaw’s play about the making of Jaws, the movie’s stars suffer crises of masculinity over long weeks at sea.

November 14, 2023

Martin Filler

Before the Wrecking Ball Swung

A new volume of photographs taken for the Historic American Buildings Survey captures the program’s wide influence on architectural culture.

November 9, 2023

Geoff Mann

Whose Country?

It is impossible to talk about the blues, country, or where the two might overlap without talking about race, authenticity, and contemporary America’s relationship to its past.

November 23, 2023 issue