Visual Arts

Body Awareness

The mercurial Austrian artist Maria Lassnig made extreme, unsparing paintings that attempt to translate corporeal sensations and ephemeral perceptions onto the canvas, but her films reveal a gentler side of her work.

December 16, 2021 issue

Robert Pogue Harrison

Labors of Love

Inspired new translations of Dante’s Purgatorio are faithful to its message of rehabilitation, reconciliation, and redemption.

December 16, 2021 issue

Andrew Martin

Castle’s Kingdom

James Castle’s drawings and constructions seem to have been beamed in from a parallel universe of art-making and do not easily yield their meanings.

January 13, 2022 issue

Martin Filler

A Garden City in Queens

After nearly a century Sunnyside Gardens remains a model of how to create and sustain affordable urban housing.

November 18, 2021 issue

Ben Lerner

Force of Gravity

Steffani Jemison’s videos activate questions of visibility and knowability, of the relation between exterior and interior, with an astonishing economy of means.

December 16, 2021 issue

Susan Tallman

The House That Johns Built

What has Jasper Johns done for us lately? As two exhibitions show, pretty much what he did for us in the first place: continually disrupt the mental shorthand that converts complex visual experience into simple mental categories.

January 13, 2022 issue

Jarrett Earnest

Landscapes of the Imagination

Jesse Murry’s abstract seascapes enabled him to explore the inner world of the mind while infusing his art with his life as a gay Black man.

December 2, 2021 issue

Jed Perl

Colors in Conversation

Joan Mitchell was a Romantic whose paintings join nature and feelings with an operatic lyricism.

November 4, 2021 issue

The Latest

Colm Tóibín

Picasso’s Obsessions

The last volume of John Richardson’s biography documents the rivalry between Dora Maar and Marie-Thérèse Walter for the painter’s attention and his intense engagement with depicting them.

February 10, 2022 issue

John Broadley

A Whiff of Toner and Lead

“I never have the confidence to make large pieces with a single, stark image, but have this desire to bombard people with lots of details.”

December 24, 2021

Nicole Rudick

Tethered Histories

Mayer’s fabric art and ephemeral installations were both feminist and humanist, linking great spans of time with individual experience.

December 9, 2021

J. Hoberman

A Conceptual Artist of Cinema

Now ninety-two, the Canadian filmmaker Michael Snow is receiving a retrospective of a career that brought a playful avant-garde sensibility to the moving image.

December 3, 2021

Matthew Aucoin

The More Fraught the Better

Throughout The Rake’s Progress, the steady friction between Stravinsky’s music and Auden’s poetry creates a musico-poetic compound that brims with energy and life.

October 21, 2021 issue

Carolina A. Miranda

‘Who Designs Your Race?’

At a time when Latino identity is in flux, El Museo del Barrio’s triennial embraces its fragmented nature.

October 21, 2021 issue

Martin Filler

Hollywood’s Master Builder

The African-American architect Paul R. Williams channeled the glamorous but breezy spirit of the Golden Age of Hollywood in designs that allowed his clients and the public to imagine themselves in fantasies akin to those spun out by the great movie studios.

October 21, 2021 issue

Jenny Uglow

Napoleon’s Greatest Trophy

How a Venetian masterpiece ended up in the Louvre.

October 21, 2021 issue

Ed Park

A Poet’s-Eye View

Yi Sang, Korean literature’s perpetual enfant terrible, was not only a cutting-edge writer but a working architect, and his oeuvre teems with dark rooms, mirror worlds, and other uncanny spaces.

October 21, 2021 issue

Susan Tallman

The Uses of Portraiture

As three exhibitions show, portraiture can be an argument, a celebration of surfaces, an occasion to play with historical tropes, or a form of resistance on behalf of the normally unpictured.

October 7, 2021 issue