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Christopher Benfey

Buildings Come to Life

In Edward Hopper’s paintings of New York, human figures often seem outgrowths of their architectural surroundings.

February 23, 2023 issue

Matthew Aucoin

Performance as Immolation

The conductor Carlos Kleiber’s aesthetic was founded on the interplay between voluptuous refinement and an impulse to violence.

February 23, 2023 issue

Coco Fusco

The Other Cuba

An exhibition of Cuban art from the past decade charts the emergence of a group of artists who have broken the state’s monopoly on public discourse.

February 9, 2023 issue

Andrew Butterfield

A ‘Magic Mirror’ of Venice

The first-ever exhibition outside Italy of the works of Vittore Carpaccio is a bracing introduction to the artist who best captured the imaginative grandeur and the ceremonial refinement of early-sixteenth-century Venice.

February 23, 2023 issue

Francesca Wade

‘The Sanctuary of Pure Expression’

A new biography of Mina Loy shows that the roving modernist saw artistic genius as a means to self-reinvention.

February 9, 2023 issue

Jed Perl

Going to Extremes

For Matisse art was a perpetual emergency, a matter of testing boundaries, breaking through.

February 9, 2023 issue

Austin Gilkeson

The Lore of the Rings

J.R.R. Tolkien’s fiction is suffused with the pleasures of scholarship and study. Amazon’s new franchise The Rings of Power can’t sit still.

January 24, 2023

Robyn Creswell

‘Endless Organic Growth’

The recent drawings of the Sudanese artist Ibrahim El-Salahi, now ninety-two, derive their energy from the tension between suffering and pleasure.

January 5, 2023

On Photography

Ela Bittencourt

Brazil’s Fotoclubistas in Focus

A show at MoMA showcases the Modernist heyday of a vibrant, largely amateur avant-garde photography movement.

June 11, 2021

Anna Atkins: Dictyota dichotoma, in the young state and in fruit, from Part
XI of Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, 1849–1850,

Megan N. Liberty

Anna Atkins’s Blue Photographs

Exposed to her father’s scientific research and colleagues at a young age, Anna Atkins documented specimens of British algae in what is now considered the first book to be fully illustrated with photography and the first use of photography for scientific documentation.

November 24, 2018

Sam Wagstaff (left) and Robert Mapplethorpe, 1974; photograph by Francesco Scavullo

Martin Filler

Falling for Photography

A new biography of Sam Wagstaff gives us a closer look at the curator, tastemaker, and pioneering collector of photography who launched Robert Mapplethorpe’s career.

November 15, 2014

Adam Kirsch

Arias of Despair

What can opera elicit from The Hours that the page and the screen cannot?

February 9, 2023 issue

Regina Marler

Behind the Mask

After rejecting the gendered fixations of the Surrealist movement, Meret Oppenheim embraced an androgynous art of the unconscious.

January 14, 2023

Victoria Baena

A Great Variety of Selves

In a new play based on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Emma Corrin plays a young aristocrat who swaps milieus, costumes, countries, and genders.

January 10, 2023

Alastair Macaulay

The Encyclopedia of the Dance

The first full-length biography of Bronislava Nijinska does long-overdue justice to one of the twentieth century’s great women artists.

January 19, 2023 issue

Zadie Smith

The Instrumentalist

At the heart of Todd Field’s new film is a conductor who cannot see beyond her generation’s field of vision.

January 19, 2023 issue

Susan Tallman

Feinting Spells

The thesis of an exhibition on the inspiration a subset of Cubism took from trompe l’oeil is convincingly built with objects made across four centuries.

January 19, 2023 issue

Matthew Aucoin

Save the ENO!

The Arts Council’s decision to cut off annual funding for the English National Opera and other flagship London arts institutions will be devastating for audiences and artists.

December 27, 2022