Visual Arts

Lear’s Lyrical Coasts

The seascapes that Edward Lear sketched on his travels around the Mediterranean are thresholds and boundaries that ask: To stay, or go?

September 8, 2022

Martin Filler

Xanadu’s Architect

Despite designing over seven hundred buildings, the pioneering female architect Julia Morgan is now best known for a single, extremely eccentric commission: San Simeon, the estate of the legendary newspaper proprietor William Randolph Hearst.

September 22, 2022 issue

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

Sarah Blackwood

Spiritual Exercises

In her most recent graphic novel, Alison Bechdel explores her lifelong obsession with fitness.

July 21, 2022 issue

James Romm

Kings of the Universe

Two exhibitions at the Getty Villa explore the links between the Assyrian and the Persian Empires, which both revolved around powerful monarchs.

July 21, 2022 issue

Jarrett Earnest

A Proliferation of Beauties

The critic Dave Hickey almost single-handedly remade the practice of writing about art in the 1980s and 1990s, even as he provoked outrage in the institutional art world.

June 23, 2022 issue

Joe Bucciero

Clear but Not Cold

An exhibition at the Centre Pompidou explores the contradictions of a Weimar-era cultural movement that strove for fidelity “to positive palpable reality.”

August 25, 2022

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

The Latest

Janique Vigier

His Dreaminess Had Will

In the last three years of his life, the elusive New York artist Ray Johnson picked up what he called a “new career as a photographer.” His late pictures were a final message, prank, secret, or gift.

September 26, 2022

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

Christopher Benfey

Shaggy Allies

It’s comforting to know that Melville, isolated in an old farmhouse in Pittsfield, had the company of a dog.

June 29, 2022

Lucas Adams

Wegman’s World

William Wegman’s dry humor, evident in his iconic video art, also found expression in a private decades-long practice of absurdist text and images.

June 14, 2022

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

Julian Bell

An Impulse Felt Round the World

A recent show and catalog on Surrealism proposes that the thoughts expressed in André Breton’s 1924 manifesto were latent in disparate urban centers, only awaiting his coining of a movement identity.

May 26, 2022 issue