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Simon Callow

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Pianist

Jeremy Denk’s memoir is not just about piano lessons but about life lessons—how the artist creates a self.

April 21, 2022 issue

John Banville

The Imaginative Imperative

Jed Perl’s Authority and Freedom is a defense of the autonomy of the arts against the stranglehold of relevance.

April 21, 2022 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

Verdi’s Decentered Epic

The six principal characters of Don Carlos grasp at separate ends, but nothing is finally to be attained.

April 21, 2022 issue

Erin Maglaque

‘Monstrous’ or ‘Prudente’?

A new feminist history asks us to reconsider early modern queenship.

April 21, 2022 issue

Emily Raboteau

The Stories of the Bronx

How did the South Bronx of the 1970s and 1980s come to symbolize slumdom all over the world when its problems could be found in any other deindustrializing American city?

April 7, 2022 issue

Colin B. Bailey

A Compulsive Perfectionist

The intensely private Edgar Degas reveals himself intermittently in his voluminous correspondence, in moments of unexpected self-awareness and candor.

April 7, 2022 issue

Jenny Uglow

A Master of Ambiguity

Hans Holbein evoked his subjects with uncanny verisimilitude, but leaves us to guess at his opinions of them.

March 24, 2022 issue

J. Hoberman

Framing Babyn Yar

Sergei Loznitsa’s documentaries, sourced from archival propaganda, have drawn criticism for what they do not show.

March 29, 2022

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

Cathleen Schine

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

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 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

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

Walker Mimms

At Saul Steinberg’s Table

The artist known for his playful, philosophical drawings also had a rich practice in sculpture, fashioning everyday objects in wood and paint.

April 27, 2022

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Painting Herself

From the beginning, female self-portraitists have chosen to show themselves at work, as if to demonstrate that they could handle a brush as well as male artists.

May 12, 2022 issue

Julian Barnes

What Are You Looking At?

No fin-de-siècle artist was more fascinated by the artistic relevance of gawkers on the streets of Paris than Félix Vallotton.

May 12, 2022 issue

Martin Filler

Burkina Faso’s Master Builder

Africa’s first Pritzker Prize winner, Francis Kéré, has a small yet remarkably original and cohesive body of work and a commitment to fostering social and democratic values through architecture.

May 12, 2022 issue

Colin B. Bailey

A Master at Work

The Met’s exhibition of Jacques Louis David’s drawings demonstrates the ways he developed and refined the ideas expressed in his large paintings of classical history and contemporary events.

May 12, 2022 issue