Arts

Visual Arts

Andrew Butterfield

A Half-Century of Artistic Genius

For two generations Sienese painters and sculptors engaged in a nonstop flurry of experimentation and innovation.

February 13, 2025 issue

Leo Rubinfien

Chaos and Treasure

No artist has tried harder to get photographs and text to bring each other urgently to life than Jim Goldberg.

January 16, 2025 issue

Claudio Lomnitz

Risky, Ephemeral, Revolutionary Prints

A survey of Mexican printmaking shows how enduringly the country’s illustrators blurred the boundary between art and the world of the working poor.

January 1, 2025

Martin Filler

The Architect Who Unified America

H. H. Richardson invented a practical, adaptable style for American civic architecture that was used for decades after his death.

December 19, 2024 issue

Sanjay Kak

‘Wonderful and Vicious Things’

In his constant urge to renew himself, the photographer Sohrab Hura comes across as an artist committed to tilling hard ground.

December 18, 2024

Carolina A. Miranda

Intimate Theatricality

Meticulously installed domestic spaces set the tone for Mickalene Thomas’s current exhibition, which features the work for which she is best known: sumptuous portraits of Black women in repose—the artist’s mother, lovers, and friends.

December 19, 2024 issue

Susan Tallman

The Occupation of Looking

The discipline of art history today is far more inclusive, more cognizant of social history, and less prone to normative aesthetic judgments—changes Svetlana Alpers helped bring about.

December 19, 2024 issue

Michael Chabon

The Midnight World

Glenn Fleishman’s history of the comic strip as a technological artifact vividly restores the world of newspaper printing—gamboge, Zip-A-Tone, flongs, and all.

December 19, 2024 issue

‘A Little Patch of Yellow Wall’

Johannes Vermeer: The Lacemaker, 9 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches, circa 1669–1670

Joseph Leo Koerner

First Among Equals

“Vermeer prompts us to look at his handiwork. In the foreground, white and red paint—conjuring threads escaping from the woman’s sewing cushion—appears as if dribbled on the canvas.”

February 7, 2019 issue

Johannes Vermeer: The Music Lesson, circa 1662–1663

Julian Bell

The Mysterious Women of Vermeer

Vermeer has a mind-boggling technique for transferring visual sensations from eye to canvas as if without the hand’s intervention. Color has somehow wafted down, as leaves might on water, and cohered automatically into threads and ringlets and cushions.

December 22, 2011 issue

Sanford Schwartz

Camera Work

“To read about Johannes Vermeer and to look at his pictures is sometimes to think you have entered a fairy-tale domain. There’s an Arabian Nights flavor about a painter who leaves so few traces of himself.”

May 31, 2001 issue

Wisława Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak

Vermeer

a poem

November 11, 2010 issue

The Latest

Joe Bucciero

In the Cut

The painter Walter Price keeps returning to a personal lexicon of images, as if hoping both to wear them out and make them new.

April 16, 2025

Lucy Scholes

The Weight of Their Art

A new retrospective of the British artist and designer Tirzah Garwood—long overshadowed by her more famous husband—recovers the full scope of her life and work.

April 15, 2025

Ben Mauk

A Nation Deranged

Matt Eich’s photobook series, “The Invisible Yoke,” is an exorcism of the country’s demons.

March 23, 2025

Michael Gorra

Lost in the Landscape

The Met’s Caspar David Friedrich exhibition offers an introduction to an artist whose work—luminous, disturbing, serene—reveals an all-encompassing physical realm.

April 10, 2025 issue

Jean Dykstra

‘Routine, Ordinary Care’

The photographs in Carmen Winant’s latest book remind us how unsensational abortion access is, and how necessary.

March 8, 2025

Martin Filler

Build, Britannia!

As one of England’s foremost authorities on architecture, Gavin Stamp distinguished himself by focusing on how buildings are lived in, rather than how they look.

March 27, 2025 issue