Susan Tallman

The Uses of Portraiture

As three exhibitions show, portraiture can be an argument, a celebration of surfaces, an occasion to play with historical tropes, or a form of resistance on behalf of the normally unpictured.

The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570

an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, June 26–October 11, 2021

Alice Neel: People Come First

an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, March 22–August 1, 2021

The Political Portrait: Leadership, Image and Power

edited by Luciano Cheles and Alessandro Giacone

The Obama Portraits

by Taína Caragol, Dorothy Moss, Richard J. Powell, and Kim Sajet

The Obama Portraits Tour

an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum

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October 7, 2021 issue

Knowing How

Taking different approaches, two new books tell the story of how expressions of mind have gained hegemony over manipulations of matter, and what has been damaged in the process.

Craft: An American History

by Glenn Adamson

Art Isn’t Fair: Further Essays on the Traffic in Photographs and Related Media

by Allan Sekula, edited by Sally Stein and Ina Steiner

Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019

an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, November 22, 2019–February 2022

August 19, 2021 issue

Philip Guston’s Discomfort Zone

How is it that the artist, dead these forty years, is still pushing our buttons?

Philip Guston: A Life Spent Painting

by Robert Storr, with a chronology compiled by Amanda Renshaw

Philip Guston

by Musa Mayer

Philip Guston Now

Catalog of an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art and three other museums in 2022–2024, by Harry Cooper, Mark Godfrey, Alison de Lima Greene, and Kate Nesin, with essays by Tacita Dean, Peter Fischli, Trenton Doyle Hancock, William Kentridge, Glenn Ligon, David Reed, Dana Schutz, Amy Sillman, Art Spiegelman, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, and a chronology by Jennifer Roberts and Harry Cooper

Poor Richard

by Philip Guston, with an afterword by Harry Cooper

Resilience: Philip Guston in 1971

an exhibition at Hauser and Wirth, Los Angeles, September 14, 2019–January 5, 2020

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January 14, 2021 issue

Willem van Haecht: Apelles Painting Campaspe, circa 1630

Who Decides What’s Beautiful?

A History of Art History

by Christopher S. Wood

The Barbarian Invasions: A Genealogy of the History of Art

by Éric Michaud, translated from the French by Nicholas Huckle

September 24, 2020 issue

Gerhard Richter: Group of People, 66 15/16 x 78 3/4 inches, 1965

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.

Gerhard Richter: Painting After All

an exhibition at the Met Breuer, New York, March 4–closing date to be announced; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, August 15, 2020–January 18, 2021

Gerhard Richter

an exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York City, February 28–April 25, 2020

May 14, 2020 issue

One half of a stereographic souvenir card from the 1876 Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia showing a display of the naturalist Martha Maxwell’s wildlife specimens, with Maxwell seated at the center

What the Little Woman Was Up To

Five Hundred Years of Women’s Work: The Lisa Unger Baskin Collection

an exhibition at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, February 28–June 15, 2019; and the Grolier Club, New York City, December 11, 2019–February 8, 2020

March 26, 2020 issue

Vija Celmins: Untitled (Ocean), 12 3/4 x 17 1/2 inches, 1970

‘I Just Look, and Paint’

Vija Celmins’s bewitching retrospective at the Met Breuer

Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory

an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, December 15, 2018–March 31, 2019; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, May 4–August 4, 2019; and the Met Breuer, New York City, September 24, 2019–January 12, 2020

Vija Celmins: Selected Prints

an exhibition at the Senior and Shopmaker Gallery, New York City, September 12–November 2, 2019

Vija Celmins: Ocean Prints

an exhibition at the Matthew Marks Gallery, New York City, September 13–October 26, 2019

December 5, 2019 issue

Paula Modersohn-Becker: Self-Portrait on Her Sixth Wedding Anniversary, 1906

Now You See Me, Now You Don’t

The Self-Portrait: From Schiele to Beckmann

an exhibition at the Neue Galerie, New York City, February 28–June 24, 2019

July 18, 2019 issue

Hilma af Klint: Group IV, The Ten Largest, No. 2, Childhood, 1907

Painting the Beyond

Hilma af Klint channeled spirit-masters who she claimed moved her hand and planted images in her mind.

Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future

an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, October 12, 2018–April 23, 2019

World Receivers: Georgiana Houghton, Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz

an exhibition at the Lenbachhaus, Munich, November 6, 2018–March 10, 2019

Hilma af Klint: Notes and Methods

edited by Christine Burgin

April 4, 2019 issue

Artist Larry Poons walking to his studio in East Durham, New York, from Kahn’s The Price of Everything, 2018

Poons v. Koons: The Art of ‘The Price of Everything’

Though the art market is often described as capricious, it has a clear logic: the art that commands the most money at a given moment is that which best reflects its collectors’ view of themselves—pious or powerful, beautiful or deep.

January 19, 2019