Visual Arts

A Painter’s Performances

In Frank Auerbach’s paintings, we can see the mysterious and often ferocious bouts he seemed to have with his materials.

March 11, 2021 issue

Martin Filler

Life in a Glass House

What went wrong between Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Dr. Edith Farnsworth over the six years they worked to create the Farnsworth house?

February 11, 2021 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

Susan Tallman

Philip Guston’s Discomfort Zone

How is it that the artist, dead these forty years, is still pushing our buttons?

January 14, 2021 issue

Valeria Luiselli

Things as They Are

Dorothea Lange created a vast archive of the twentieth century’s crises in America. For years her work was censored, misused, impounded, or simply rejected.

November 19, 2020 issue

Julian Bell

The Body in Swooping Close-Up

The National Gallery’s Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition foregrounds the will and charisma of the painter’s female figures.

December 17, 2020 issue

Gerhard Richter: Group of People, 66 15/16 x 78 3/4 inches, 1965

Susan Tallman

The Master of Unknowing

Gerhard Richter is contemporary art’s great poet of uncertainty; his work sets the will to believe and the obligation to doubt in perfect oscillation.

May 14, 2020 issue

Anna Shapiro

A Revolution of Mexican Art in America

The Whitney’s show, “Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art,” is a study in revisionism, recasting the standard story so that those formerly disregarded and excluded from the canon of modern American art are instead given a place in it.

July 20, 2020

The Latest

Ingrid D. Rowland

See Rome and Feel Alive

“The city itself is an artistic treasure, so there was always something to see even when museums were closed.”

May 1, 2021

Carole Naggar

Marc Riboud’s Roving Lens

A retrospective conveys the breadth and close attention of this Magnum photographer as he traveled the world.

May 1, 2021

J. Hoberman

Fantastic Fixation in ‘Photo Brut’

Ingenuity and obsession characterize this disquieting and uplifting exhibition of self-taught photographers.

April 25, 2021

Willa Glickman

A Park Apart

In Irina Rozovsky’s In Plain Air, Brooklyn’s Prospect Park is an oasis of recreation.

April 23, 2021

Ingrid D. Rowland

Light in the Palazzo

Hidden away and neglected for decades, works from the world’s greatest private collection of ancient sculptures are finally on public display in Rome.

May 13, 2021 issue

John Banville

His Own Worst Enemy

In Van Gogh’s letters, his tone is consistently that of a man still aflame after a violent argument.

May 13, 2021 issue

Jed Perl

See More, Think More

The art historian Leo Steinberg tried in his writings to reconcile a passion that was inarguably subjective with a desire for something like objectivity.

May 13, 2021 issue