Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Visual Arts

Tausif Noor

Faith Ringgold’s American Dream

In her indelible images of the civil rights era, the artist understood that Black liberation has multiple fronts.

November 10, 2022

Jed Perl

Between Abstraction and Representation

Artists today think they no longer have to choose between two opposed artistic traditions. But what is being lost in this eclecticism?

November 24, 2022 issue

Andrew Raftery

Clay Genius

A master of the punishing mercy of the kiln, Josiah Wedgwood set his stamp on European decorative arts and changed ceramics forever with the clay and glazes he invented or perfected.

November 24, 2022 issue

Jed Perl

The Power of Ornament

An exhibition at the Drawing Center explores the astonishing variety that the ornamental impulse has inspired across centuries and continents but never grapples with the aesthetic questions it raises.

August 18, 2022 issue

James Romm

Pure Color

At the Met, replicas of classical sculptures in their original bright colors aim to shift the public’s sterile notions of antiquity.

October 20, 2022

Joe Bucciero

Clear but Not Cold

An exhibition at the Centre Pompidou explores the contradictions of a Weimar-era cultural movement that strove for fidelity “to positive palpable reality.”

August 25, 2022

Tiana Reid

‘I Was Mobile’

In her photographs of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, held in Lagos in 1977, Marilyn Nance captured moments of reprieve amid the spectacle.

November 4, 2022

J. Hoberman

Fuzz! Junk! Rumble!

A show at the Jewish Museum surveys three eventful years of art, film, and performance in New York City—and the political upheavals that defined them.

October 10, 2022

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

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

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

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

Jed Perl

Going to Extremes

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

February 9, 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

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

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

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