Arts

Society & Culture

Catching the Moment

John Singer Sargent saw into the souls of his models, whether they were society women, nude men, or lower-class Venetians. How did he do it?

May 9, 2024 issue

Darryl Pinckney

‘Who Shall Describe Beauty?’

The Met’s Harlem Renaissance exhibition reveals the eclecticism of black artistic practices and styles.

May 9, 2024 issue

Jenny Uglow

The Volcano Lovers

For travelers in the Romantic period, Mount Vesuvius was an object of scientific curiosity, a political allegory, and a touchstone of the sublime.

April 18, 2024 issue

Peter Brown

Charged Wonders

An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art aims to give voice and density to the Christian cultures in Africa with which Byzantium interacted over the many centuries of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

February 8, 2024 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

A Craving for Crime

Perhaps only after a lifetime of immersion in crime fiction can one begin to wonder what all those stories have really imparted.

February 8, 2024 issue

J. Hoberman

‘Kish Mir in Tuchus!’

Before his violent early death at twenty-five, the Jewish Belgian artist Stéphane Mandelbaum assembled a body of confrontational drawings.

February 25, 2024

Elaine Blair

Uninhibited Questions

In Porn: An Oral History, Polly Barton argues that after decades of exhaustive debate there is still something lacking in the discourse on pornography.

December 21, 2023 issue

Jenny Uglow

In Search of the Rare and Strange

In Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece, Ulinka Rublack traces the global connections of the merchants who were the creative agents of the European art market in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

February 22, 2024 issue

On Old New York

Susannah Jacob, photographs by Radcliffe Roye

What Happened to the West Village?

The neighborhood became the epicenter of what the remorseless rise of rents will do to a once mixed and diverse city, rich foremost in its peoples and cultures.

October 9, 2019

A postcard showing the St. Denis Hotel at Broadway and 11th Street, New York City, circa 1908

Jeremiah Moss

The Death and Life of a Great American Building

As affordable rents disappear, the mental health of New Yorkers increasingly becomes yet another tale of two cities. Imagine a future Manhattan without shrinks. What will happen to the psyche of that city?

March 7, 2018

Jason Epstein

New York: The Prophet

“The war over the monstrous Lower Manhattan Expressway, a projected ten-lane elevated link…connecting the Holland Tunnel to the East River bridges, would be long and painful. Jacobs and the neighborhood coalition prevailed. But the nine-year struggle…convinced Jacobs that if she wanted to write other books she must leave New York.”

August 13, 2009 issue

Lucy Sante

My Lost City

“Aside from the matter of actual violence, drugs, and squalor, there was the fact that in the 1970s New York City was not a part of the United States at all. It was an offshore interzone with no shopping malls, few major chains, very few born-again Christians who had not been sent there on a mission, no golf courses, no subdivisions.”

November 6, 2003 issue

The Latest

Daphne Merkin

The Bliss and the Risks

The painter Paula Modersohn-Becker’s ascension to greater visibility raises questions about how we assess artistic talent, how reputations are made, and how we reevaluate once-neglected artists, particularly women.

October 3, 2024 issue

Sarah Schulman

Ahead of the Diminishing World

Most of the bohemians Alice Neel painted were far from my own queer milieu in downtown New York—but when she turned to that world she captured it with energy and defiance.

September 8, 2024

Andrew Katzenstein

Mode for Joe

The tenor saxophonist Joe Henderson was at once a vessel of tradition and a Romantic individualist, a consummate professional in an art form that lionized rebels.

September 6, 2024

Jed Perl

Succumbing to Spectacle

During the last half-century, artists, curators, and scholars have been increasingly preoccupied with the idea of spectacle and with how to embrace, critique, or co-opt the power of work that envelops and overwhelms the viewer.

September 19, 2024 issue

Victoria Baena

Pitiless, Restless Brecht

A recent show of Bertolt Brecht’s collages and ephemera suggested that he viewed all his work as forever in progress.

August 22, 2024

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Lights, Camera, Royals!

Portraitists of kings and queens have long struggled to address a paradox: royalties are different but ordinary, or ordinary but different.

August 18, 2024

Hannah Zeavin

‘We Took Care of the Network’

The Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles imagined an asylum that could cure not only individual patients but society itself.

August 17, 2024

Anahid Nersessian

Refusing the Eye

In Simone Leigh’s sculptures, strange and contingent details redirect the viewer’s gaze.

August 8, 2024

Adam Thirlwell

A Sternly Witty Sensualist

Karl Lagerfeld used reference and precise technique to elevate decoration to the level of a principle.

August 15, 2024 issue

Colin Grant

Yearning for Redemption

Kingsley Ben-Adir’s performance as Bob Marley in One Love is seductive, but in treating the singer as a savior, the film loses sight of his complexity.

August 15, 2024 issue