Jed Perl | The New York Review of Books

Succumbing to Spectacle

During the last half-century, artists, curators, and scholars have been increasingly preoccupied with the idea of spectacle and with how to embrace, critique, or co-opt the power of work that envelops and overwhelms the viewer.

Jenny Holzer: Light Line

an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, May 17–September 29, 2024

Tricks of the Light: Essays on Art and Spectacle

by Jonathan Crary

The Avant-Gardists: Artists in Revolt in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, 1917–1935

by Sjeng Scheijen

September 19, 2024 issue

Reimagining the Ordinary

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

Jean Hélion: La Prose du monde

an exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, March 22–August 18, 2024

July 18, 2024 issue

Picasso’s Transformations

Pablo Picasso reconceived everything he touched, but fifty years after his death his transformative art has been eclipsed by Andy Warhol's art of appropriation and replication.

Picasso: A Cubist Commission in Brooklyn

an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, September 14, 2023–January 14, 2024

Picasso in Fontainebleau

an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, October 8, 2023–February 17, 2024

It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby

an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, June 2–September 24, 2023

Picasso and the Spanish Classics

an exhibition at the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, New York City, November 2, 2023–February 4, 2024

Andy Warhol: Thirty Are Better Than One

an exhibition at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center, New York City, May 10–July 30, 2023

Looking at Picasso

by Pepe Karmel

Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma

by Claire Dederer

Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America

by Hugh Eakin

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November 2, 2023 issue

The Modern Hephaestus

David Smith was an expressionist with an all-or-nothing approach to art who reveled in the violent acts of metalworking that created new forms of permanence.

David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor

by Michael Brenson

David Smith Sculpture: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1932–1965

edited by Christopher Lyon

September 21, 2023 issue

‘Art’ or ‘Research’?

June 22, 2023 issue

The Chilliest Mystique

Two exhibitions of computer and video art demonstrate that technological savvy and artistic naiveté all too often go hand in hand.

Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982

an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, February 12–July 2, 2023

Signals: How Video Transformed the World

an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, March 5–July 8, 2023

May 11, 2023 issue

Letter

A. Michael Noll

‘Art’ or ‘Research’?

June 22, 2023 issue

Going to Extremes

For Matisse art was a perpetual emergency, a matter of testing boundaries, breaking through.

Matisse: The Red Studio

an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, May 1–September 10, 2022; and SMK–National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, October 13, 2022–February 26, 2023

Matisse in the 1930s

an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, October 20, 2022–January 29, 2023; the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, March 1–May 29, 2023; and the Musée Matisse Nice, June 23–September 24, 2023

February 9, 2023 issue

Between Abstraction and Representation

Artists today think they no longer have to choose between two opposed artistic traditions. But what is being lost in this eclecticism?

November 24, 2022 issue

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

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

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

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

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March 26, 2020 issue

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

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