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
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
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 Lucas The Yeehaw Papyrus In his 1969 satire Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Ishmael Reed married the Western to the Afrocentric vogue for Ancient Egypt. May 15, 2022
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
Carolina A. Miranda Tomorrow Is Today It is impossible to write about Prospect.5, New Orleans’s citywide art triennial, without considering the reason for its existence: Katrina. May 12, 2022 issue
David Salle Going on Her Nerve The idiosyncratic English artist Rose Wylie makes the process of importing things in the world to the realm of the painted feel exhilarating and new. May 12, 2022 issue
Ingrid D. Rowland The Spell of Marble Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s immense artistic authority was based on his theatrical skill with the chisel. May 12, 2022 issue
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
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
James Romm Kings of the Universe Two exhibitions at the Getty Villa explore the links between the Assyrian and the Persian Empires, which both revolved around powerful monarchs. July 21, 2022 issue
Namwali Serpell ‘She’s Capital!’ The figure of the Whore is everywhere in art, her beauty to be gazed upon and admired. With the Internet, has she finally found her own artistic terrain? July 21, 2022 issue
Christopher Benfey Shaggy Allies It’s comforting to know that Melville, isolated in an old farmhouse in Pittsfield, had the company of a dog. June 29, 2022
Anna Shechtman Crimes Against Humanity The precondition for making it with anyone in David Cronenberg’s cinema is making it new. June 28, 2022
Nawal Arjini Democracy in Concrete An exhibition of postcolonial architecture in South Asia looks back with nostalgia at modernism’s promise of social progress. June 26, 2022
Erica Getto Choreographed Uncertainty Even the most rigorous viewing of a Trisha Brown dance will never quite reveal the springs and levers that hold it together. June 22, 2022
Victoria Baena Altars of Novelty and Profit Xavier Giannoli’s new adaptation of Balzac’s Lost Illusions follows an aspiring poet in post-Revolutionary Paris and his precarious alliance with an unruly press. June 16, 2022
Lucas Adams Wegman’s World William Wegman’s dry humor, evident in his iconic video art, also found expression in a private decades-long practice of absurdist text and images. June 14, 2022
Erica X Eisen Memories of the Metaverse Was Chris Marker’s romance with the online platform Second Life a departure from his creative and political aims, or the consummation of them? June 7, 2022
Dennis Zhou ‘Poet of the Camera’ What made the Hollywood cinematographer James Wong Howe a consummate artist was his ability to cohere his experiences into a visual style. June 3, 2022