Visual Arts

A Revolution of Mexican Art in America

The Whitney’s show, “Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art,” is a study in revisionism, recasting the standard story so that those formerly disregarded and excluded from the canon of modern American art are instead given a place in it.

July 20, 2020

Francisco Goya: The Pilgrimage to San Isidro, 1820–1823

Julian Bell

‘Teeming with Things Unknown’

October 8, 2020 issue

Panels from Count Screwloose of Tooloose by Milt Gross, April 5, 1931

Art Spiegelman

Foolish Questions

The subversive joy and nonsense of comics

March 12, 2020 issue

Susan Tallman

The Master of Unknowing

Gerhard Richter is contemporary art’s great poet of uncertainty; his work sets the will to believe and the obligation to doubt in perfect oscillation.

May 14, 2020 issue

Ingrid D. Rowland

The Master’s Master

Andrea del Verrocchio epitomizes what the Renaissance of art in Florence was all about.

December 19, 2019 issue

Martín Ramírez: Untitled, 45 1/2 x 31 inches, circa 1948–1952

Sanford Schwartz

Band of Outsiders

“Memory Palaces: Inside the Collection of Audrey B. Heckler” at the American Folk Art Museum

December 5, 2019 issue

Jacopo Tintoretto: The Last Supper, 87 x 162 5/8 inches, circa 1563–1564

Colm Tóibín

Tintoretto’s Wildness

‘Tintoretto: Artist of Renaissance Venice’ at the National Gallery of Art, through July 7, 2019

May 9, 2019 issue

Charline von Heyl: Dunesday, 62 x 60 inches, 2016

David Salle

Houdini with a Brush

May 9, 2019 issue

The Latest

Jacob Lawrence: Massacre in Boston, 12 x 16 inches, 1954–1955; panel 2 from Struggle: From the History of the American People

Sanford Schwartz

The Revolutionary Jacob Lawrence

‘Struggle: From the History of the American People’ charts the strife of early US history in a fierce Cubist/Expressionist style.

November 5, 2020 issue

Dawit L. Petros's 12. Untitled (Epilogue II), Catania, Italy

Emmanuel Iduma

Italy's History in Africa Reframed

By juxtaposing photographs from Catania and Nefasit, artist Dawit L. Petros suggests a connection between the migration of East Africans to Italy and the legacy of colonialism.

October 3, 2020

Joseph Giovannini

The Demolition of LACMA

Asked recently at a dinner party what he thought of the new building design, Frank Gehry simply draped a napkin over his head.

October 2, 2020

Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik performing John Cage’s 26'1.1499'' for a String Player, 1965; photograph by Peter Moore

Brian Dillon

Chaos and Cathode Rays

October 22, 2020 issue

Amir Ahmadi Arian

Soleimani and the Propaganda Art of Iran

This commemoration of Soleimani as the ultimate martyr is the latest manifestation of the Islamic Republic’s long history of communicating political messages in graphic media—a particular cultural tradition of propaganda.

September 30, 2020

Imogen Greenhalgh

An Interview with Chantal Joffe

Chantal Joffe’s signature quicksilver strokes are tender, yet devoid of sentimentality. With each sweeping stroke, she charts life on the point where things change—adolescence, pregnancy, grief, old age.

September 19, 2020

Buku Sarkar

Sharmila, the Chaiwalla, and Me

I began to visit the women in the Basti almost every day. I promised I would make a book about them. I called them my Saturday Morning Laundry Ladies. They called me Photowali Didi.

September 14, 2020

Winslow Homer: Sunlight on the Coast, 1890

Lucy Jakub

Maine's Sublime Canvas

I grew up attuned to the strange contradictions of life in the rural yet cosmopolitan towns of Down East Maine, studded with galleries, where well-known writers hide out in old farmhouses.

September 12, 2020