Visual Arts

Tomorrow Is Today

It is impossible to write about Prospect.5, New Orleans’s citywide art triennial, without considering the reason for its existence: Katrina.

May 12, 2022 issue

Christopher Alessandrini

Occasional Residences of the Gods

The artist Gala Porras-Kim has become an eloquent advocate for sacred objects in ethnographic collections. Will museums listen?

June 1, 2022

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Painting Herself

From the beginning, female self-portraitists have chosen to show themselves at work, as if to demonstrate that they could handle a brush as well as male artists.

May 12, 2022 issue

Walker Mimms

At Saul Steinberg’s Table

The artist known for his playful, philosophical drawings also had a rich practice in sculpture, fashioning everyday objects in wood and paint.

April 27, 2022

Ingrid D. Rowland

The Spell of Marble

Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s immense artistic authority was based on his theatrical skill with the chisel.

May 12, 2022 issue

Regina Marler

The Bucolic Heroic

Catherine Hewitt’s Art Is a Tyrant is a full depiction of the nineteenth-century painter Rosa Bonheur’s unconventional life.

May 12, 2022 issue

Julian Barnes

What Are You Looking At?

No fin-de-siècle artist was more fascinated by the artistic relevance of gawkers on the streets of Paris than Félix Vallotton.

May 12, 2022 issue

Colin B. Bailey

A Compulsive Perfectionist

The intensely private Edgar Degas reveals himself intermittently in his voluminous correspondence, in moments of unexpected self-awareness and candor.

April 7, 2022 issue

The Latest

Lucy Scholes

Made Alone and Imperatively

The British painter Maeve Gilmore found her muse in family and the home—but that refuge was not an idyll.

August 5, 2022

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

Nicole Rudick

Both Sides Now

Shirley Gorelick arrived at her striking, psychologically suggestive portraiture by way of Cubism.

July 27, 2022

Hannah Zeavin

In the Flickering Light

Posing for photographs with one’s television used to be a surprisingly common practice.

July 26, 2022

J.W. McCormack

Kafka’s Inkblots

What can be read in the trove of sketches and doodles saved by Franz Kafka’s literary executor?

July 19, 2022

Lucy Ives

A Line that Wants to Speak

The Beat artist Rick Barton, a fixture of the San Francisco café scene, filled notebooks with expressive line drawings that are only now getting their due.

July 12, 2022