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

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

Carson Ellis, interviewed by Leanne Shapton

Nature Doing Its Thing

“I’ve always been drawn to the microcosmic worlds of bugs and tiny creatures; the scenes you discover when you turn over a log or look into a tide pool.”

April 23, 2022

The Latest

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

Jeet Heer

The Racing Brain of Martin Vaughn-James

In the 1970s Canadian comics scene, The Projector made dizzying leaps in the development of the graphic novel form.

April 29, 2022

Martin Filler

Burkina Faso’s Master Builder

Africa’s first Pritzker Prize winner, Francis Kéré, has a small yet remarkably original and cohesive body of work and a commitment to fostering social and democratic values through architecture.

May 12, 2022 issue

Colin B. Bailey

A Master at Work

The Met’s exhibition of Jacques Louis David’s drawings demonstrates the ways he developed and refined the ideas expressed in his large paintings of classical history and contemporary events.

May 12, 2022 issue

David Salle

Going on Her Nerve

The idiosyncratic English artist Rose Wylie makes the process of importing things in the world to the realm of the painted feel exhilarating and new.

May 12, 2022 issue

Elvia Wilk

Corpus Meets Corpse

The intricate and densely referential video work of Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley confronts standard history with the fact of the body.

April 7, 2022 issue

Jenny Uglow

A Master of Ambiguity

Hans Holbein evoked his subjects with uncanny verisimilitude, but leaves us to guess at his opinions of them.

March 24, 2022 issue

Jed Perl

Proud of His Conundrums

The midcentury art critic Harold Rosenberg skewered his fellow New York intellectuals as a “herd of independent minds,” but his own work has more striking provocations than deep conclusions.

March 24, 2022 issue

Orville Schell

The Uncompromising Ai Weiwei

Ai Weiwei’s memoir is a father-and-son story of devotion to free expression and resistance to state pressure.

March 10, 2022 issue

Nick Laird

Partial Reports

Whatever You Say, Say Nothing, Gilles Peress’s collection of photographs from the Troubles, presents an overwhelming narrative of Republican heroics.

March 10, 2022 issue