Visual Arts

Opulence and Humility

An exhibition devoted to Saint Francis forms a doorway between artistic tradition and the wider terrain of spirituality.

August 17, 2023 issue

Ingrid D. Rowland

‘A Great Glory to Wealth’

Like so many of the Tuscan banker Agostino Chigi’s undertakings, the Villa Farnesina burst through all the old categories—social, architectural, and cultural—for a merchant’s house.

November 2, 2023 issue

Martin Filler

The Neotraditionalist

The architect Robert A. M. Stern is America’s most vociferous and successful exponent of a Classicism that would be considered anachronistic in much of the rest of the world.

November 2, 2023 issue

Jed Perl

Picasso’s Transformations

Pablo Picasso reconceived everything he touched, but fifty years after his death his transformative art has been eclipsed by Andy Warhol’s art of appropriation and replication.

November 2, 2023 issue

Jenny Uglow

‘A Haughty Independence’

The early-twentieth-century painter Gwen John struggled to forge her own place in an art world dominated by men.

October 19, 2023 issue

Andrew Durbin

Reverent Vulgarity

Isa Genzken’s sculptures—precision-engineered, playfully assembled, or readymade—show a winkingly subversive artist engaged in a dire Dadaist game.

October 26, 2023

Raven Leilani

Meaning It

Good sex writing embraces the moral difficulty of not knowing.

October 22, 2023

Sam Needleman

Broomstrokes

The American painter Ed Clark took his medium to its limits and back again.

October 5, 2023

The Art of Ceramics

Christopher Benfey

Resistance Pottery

Two recent exhibitions of the work of Black potters find political acts in the placid history of nineteenth-century American stoneware.

May 11, 2023 issue

Adam Thirlwell

House of Delft

In a recreated eighteenth-century home in London’s East End, the ceramicist Simon Pettet and his partner Dennis Severs created a world both elegant and deliriously contemporary.

May 25, 2023

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

The Latest

Colin B. Bailey

A New Language of Modern Art

An ambitious exhibition of the work of Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas demonstrates their affinities and their shared ambition to revolutionize painting.

December 21, 2023 issue

Susan Tallman

‘What Happens at the Edges?’

The artist William Kentridge is interested in who decides which people constitute the center and which the periphery, in finding meaning in the fragmentary and provisional.

December 21, 2023 issue

Kathryn Hughes

Jane Austen Gets Dressed

Sifting through the trove of well-preserved garments that belonged to Jane Austen, a new study offers a surprising new glimpse of the novelist’s life.

December 21, 2023 issue

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

Out of Time

Bill Watterson’s first book since Calvin and Hobbes envisions a medieval world on the brink of extinction.

December 21, 2023 issue

Julian Bell

The Emptied Cosmos

Bringing readers on a walking tour of Rome’s churches, Gabriel Pihas argues in a new book that for over a millennium, nature was God’s chief display board.

December 21, 2023 issue