Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Visual Arts

Jed Perl

Colors in Conversation

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

November 4, 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

Ingrid D. Rowland

Light in the Palazzo

Hidden away and neglected for decades, works from the world’s greatest private collection of ancient sculptures are finally on public display in Rome.

May 13, 2021 issue

Sanford Schwartz

Young and in Love

Salman Toor’s absorbing show at the Whitney depicts the pleasures, tensions, and small moments of gay life.

April 8, 2021 issue

Martin Filler

Life in a Glass House

What went wrong between Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Dr. Edith Farnsworth over the six years they worked to create the Farnsworth house?

February 11, 2021 issue

Susan Tallman

Philip Guston’s Discomfort Zone

How is it that the artist, dead these forty years, is still pushing our buttons?

January 14, 2021 issue

Valeria Luiselli

Things as They Are

Dorothea Lange created a vast archive of the twentieth century’s crises in America. For years her work was censored, misused, impounded, or simply rejected.

November 19, 2020 issue

Julian Bell

The Body in Swooping Close-Up

The National Gallery’s Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition foregrounds the will and charisma of the painter’s female figures.

December 17, 2020 issue

The Latest

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

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

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

James Quandt

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

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

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

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

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