Arts

Visual Arts

How American Eyes Got Modern

The midcentury ideal of art as a departure into the unknown was not the exclusive property of heroic painters. Printmakers made cutting-edge art on a homier scale—and it was affordable.

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

Susie Linfield

What’s in a Face?

The longstanding obsession with Jewish looks has always been essentially political—and never more so than now.

May 9, 2024 issue

James Fenton

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

Ingrid D. Rowland

Nature’s Rival

Antonio Canova’s clay models reveal the creative struggle behind the classical perfection of his marble sculptures.

May 9, 2024 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

Sam Needleman

Games We Play

The Dutch painter Jacqueline de Jong extracts raw drama from scenes of leisure and crime.

April 6, 2024

Ratik Asokan

Saint Josef

Josef Koudelka’s photographs register the weight of history.

March 24, 2024

‘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

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

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

Marisa Anne Bass

Worldly van Eyck

Was the Netherlandish master a painter of visionary experience or of life here on earth?

August 14, 2024

Anahid Nersessian

Refusing the Eye

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

August 8, 2024

Susan Tallman

The Sneaky Sublime

The Chicago artist Christina Ramberg recontextualized things built for another purpose, transforming the unremarkable into funny, stately, and transgressive forms.

August 15, 2024 issue