Arts

Visual Arts

How American Eyes Got Modern

The midcentury ideal of art as a departure into the unknown was not the exclusive property of heroic painters. Printmakers made cutting-edge art on a homier scale—and it was affordable.

May 9, 2024 issue

Darryl Pinckney

‘Who Shall Describe Beauty?’

The Met’s Harlem Renaissance exhibition reveals the eclecticism of black artistic practices and styles.

May 9, 2024 issue

Susie Linfield

What’s in a Face?

The longstanding obsession with Jewish looks has always been essentially political—and never more so than now.

May 9, 2024 issue

James Fenton

Catching the Moment

John Singer Sargent saw into the souls of his models, whether they were society women, nude men, or lower-class Venetians. How did he do it?

May 9, 2024 issue

Ingrid D. Rowland

Nature’s Rival

Antonio Canova’s clay models reveal the creative struggle behind the classical perfection of his marble sculptures.

May 9, 2024 issue

Jenny Uglow

In Search of the Rare and Strange

In Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece, Ulinka Rublack traces the global connections of the merchants who were the creative agents of the European art market in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

February 22, 2024 issue

Sam Needleman

Games We Play

The Dutch painter Jacqueline de Jong extracts raw drama from scenes of leisure and crime.

April 6, 2024

Ratik Asokan

Saint Josef

Josef Koudelka’s photographs register the weight of history.

March 24, 2024

‘A Little Patch of Yellow Wall’

Johannes Vermeer: The Lacemaker, 9 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches, circa 1669–1670

Joseph Leo Koerner

First Among Equals

“Vermeer prompts us to look at his handiwork. In the foreground, white and red paint—conjuring threads escaping from the woman’s sewing cushion—appears as if dribbled on the canvas.”

February 7, 2019 issue

Johannes Vermeer: The Music Lesson, circa 1662–1663

Julian Bell

The Mysterious Women of Vermeer

Vermeer has a mind-boggling technique for transferring visual sensations from eye to canvas as if without the hand’s intervention. Color has somehow wafted down, as leaves might on water, and cohered automatically into threads and ringlets and cushions.

December 22, 2011 issue

Sanford Schwartz

Camera Work

“To read about Johannes Vermeer and to look at his pictures is sometimes to think you have entered a fairy-tale domain. There’s an Arabian Nights flavor about a painter who leaves so few traces of himself.”

May 31, 2001 issue

Wisława Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak

Vermeer

a poem

November 11, 2010 issue

The Latest

Susan Tallman

The Sneaky Sublime

The Chicago artist Christina Ramberg recontextualized things built for another purpose, transforming the unremarkable into funny, stately, and transgressive forms.

August 15, 2024 issue

Adam Thirlwell

A Sternly Witty Sensualist

Karl Lagerfeld used reference and precise technique to elevate decoration to the level of a principle.

August 15, 2024 issue

James Romm

Frozen

For centuries explorers risked their lives seeking passage through the Arctic. A recent exhibition and book juxtapose the region’s mythologized past with its uncertain future.

July 20, 2024

Robert Chandler

The Sculptor of Flight

With deep respect for his subjects—from birds to borders—Constantin Brâncuși got to the essence of their movement.

July 16, 2024

Celeste Marcus

The Real Thing

The energy in Chaïm Soutine’s portraits, landscapes, and still lifes is evident to even the most casual viewer.

July 10, 2024

Jennifer Krasinski

Taking the Performance Apart

A retrospective of the artist Joan Jonas displays her will of steel, her porosity before the world, and her ways of playing with perception.

June 30, 2024

Jed Perl

Reimagining the Ordinary

The French artist Jean Hélion approached painting with a philosophical precision, each style a hypothesis to be investigated and tested.

July 18, 2024 issue

Martin Filler

A Long Exposure

The pioneering French photographer Hippolyte Bayard has lived in the shadows of his more famous peers. A new exhibition brings him into the light.

June 22, 2024

Martin Filler

Up on the Roof

Carlos de Beistegui’s Parisian penthouse apartment, designed by Le Corbusier, was the product of two supreme egotists squaring off against each other.

June 20, 2024 issue