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.

The Clamor of Ornament: Exchange, Power, and Joy from the Fifteenth Century to the Present

an exhibition at the Drawing Center, New York City, June 15–September 18, 2022

August 18, 2022 issue

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.

Harold Rosenberg: A Critic’s Life

by Debra Bricker Balken

The Loft Generation: From the de Koonings to Twombly, Portraits and Sketches, 1942–2011

by Edith Schloss, edited by Mary Venturini, with photo editing by Jacob Burckhardt

March 24, 2022 issue

Colors in Conversation

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

Joan Mitchell

an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, September 4, 2021–January 17, 2022; the Baltimore Museum of Art, March 6–August 14, 2022; and the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, October 5, 2022–February 27, 2023

November 4, 2021 issue

Interpreting Nature

A transcendent exhibition of Cézanne’s drawings at MoMA reveals an artist who is drunk on sensation but always sober enough to pin it down.

Cézanne Drawing

an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, June 6–September 25, 2021

July 22, 2021 issue

See More, Think More

The art historian Leo Steinberg tried in his writings to reconcile a passion that was inarguably subjective with a desire for something like objectivity.

Michelangelo’s Sculpture: Selected Essays

by Leo Steinberg, edited by Sheila Schwartz

Michelangelo’s Painting: Selected Essays

by Leo Steinberg, edited by Sheila Schwartz

Renaissance and Baroque Art: Selected Essays

by Leo Steinberg, edited by Sheila Schwartz

After Michelangelo, Past Picasso: Leo Steinberg’s Library of Prints

an exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas, February 7–May 9, 2021

May 13, 2021 issue

Cubism’s Poet

Writer, painter, and a close friend of Picasso, Max Jacob was part of the glory of interwar bohemian Paris.

Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters

by Rosanna Warren

February 25, 2021 issue

Richard Wagner; illustration by Joanna Neborsky

The Cults of Wagner

Alex Ross’s ‘Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music’

Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music

by Alex Ross

October 8, 2020 issue

‘Almost Certain’

Did Félix Fénéon plant a bomb at the Restaurant Foyot?

June 11, 2020 issue

Paul Signac: Opus 217. Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones, and Tints, Portrait of M. Félix Fénéon in 1890, 1890

A Rage for Clarity

Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde—From Signac to Matisse and Beyond

an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, through July 25, 2020

May 14, 2020 issue

Letter

Mitchell Abidor

‘Almost Certain’

Did Félix Fénéon plant a bomb at the Restaurant Foyot?

June 11, 2020 issue

Jess: If All the World Were Paper and All the Water Sink, 1962

Spirits of San Francisco

The Householders: Robert Duncan and Jess

by Tara McDowell

Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus

by Lisa Jarnot, with a foreword by Michael Davidson

Collected Essays and Other Prose

by Robert Duncan, edited and with an introduction by James Maynard

The Collected Early Poems and Plays

by Robert Duncan, edited and with an introduction by Peter Quartermain

The Collected Later Poems and Plays

by Robert Duncan, edited and with an introduction by Peter Quartermain

The H.D. Book

by Robert Duncan, edited and with an introduction by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman

An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle

by Michael Duncan and Christopher Wagstaff

See all reviewed works

See less

March 26, 2020 issue

Lola Álvarez Bravo: Landscapes of Mexico, circa 1954

Made in Mexico

In a Cloud, in a Wall, in a Chair: Six Modernists in Mexico at Midcentury

an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, September 6, 2019–January 12, 2020

January 16, 2020 issue

The Tower of Satellite City, designed by Mathias Goertiz and Luis Barragán, Naucalpan de Juárez, Mexico, 1957; photograph by Hans Namuth, circa 1964

Hell-Bent Idealists

Mathias Goeritz: Modernist Art and Architecture in Cold War Mexico

by Jennifer Josten

Gyorgy Kepes: Undreaming the Bauhaus

by John R. Blakinger

October 10, 2019 issue

Lucian Freud: Portrait of Lincoln Kirstein, 19 3/4 x 15 1/2 inches, 1950

Yearning for the Absolute

Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern

an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, March 17–June 15, 2019

The Young and Evil

an exhibition at the David Zwirner Gallery, New York City, February 21–April 13, 2019

May 9, 2019 issue

Sophie Taeuber-Arp with her Dada Head, 1920

A Master of Mute Forms

The story of twentieth-century art is crowded with chastened and disabused idealists. How could it be otherwise?

Sophie Taeuber-Arp and the Avant-Garde: A Biography

by Roswitha Mair, translated from the German by Damion Searls

March 7, 2019 issue

Eugène Delacroix: Ovid Among the Scythians, 1859

Romanticism’s Unruly Hero

Delacroix’s art remains a gorgeous enigma.

Delacroix

an exhibition at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, March 29–July 23, 2018; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, September 17, 2018–January 6, 2019

Devotion to Drawing: The Karen B. Cohen Collection of Eugène Delacroix

an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, July 17–November 12, 2018

November 22, 2018 issue

Pablo Picasso: Three Bathers by the Shore, 1920

The Universal Eye

Obsession: Nudes by Klimt, Schiele, and Picasso from the Scofield Thayer Collection

an exhibition at the Met Breuer, New York City, July 3–October 7, 2018

The Psychology of an Art Writer

by Vernon Lee

August 16, 2018 issue

The Art of Elsewhere

The worlds of Edward Gorey

Gorey’s Worlds

an exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, February 10–May 6, 2018; and the Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, Washington, June 23–September 30, 2018

May 10, 2018 issue

Peter Hujar: Daniel Schook Sucking Toe, 1981

Peter and His Kind

Peter Hujar: Speed of Life

an exhibition at the Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona, January 27–April 30, 2017; Fotomuseum The Hague, June 17–October 15, 2017; the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City, January 26–May 20, 2018; and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, July 11–October 7, 2018

April 5, 2018 issue