Susan Tallman | The New York Review of Books

The Sneaky Sublime

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

Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective

an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, April 20–August 11, 2024; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, October 12, 2024–January 5, 2025; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, February 8–June 1, 2025

August 15, 2024 issue

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.

Trailblazing Women Printmakers: Virginia Lee Burton Demetrios and the Folly Cove Designers

by Elena M. Sarni

A Model Workshop: Margaret Lowengrund and The Contemporaries

an exhibition at the Print Center New York, September 21–December 23, 2023

Art for the Millions: American Culture and Politics in the 1930s

an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, September 7–December 10, 2023

The Women of Atelier 17: Modernist Printmaking in Midcentury New York

by Christina Weyl

May 9, 2024 issue

‘What Happens at the Edges?’

The artist William Kentridge is interested in who decides which people constitute the center and which the periphery, in finding meaning in the fragmentary and provisional.

William Kentridge: Prints and Posters 1974–1990

compiled by Warren Siebrits

Words: A Collation

by William Kentridge

William Kentridge

catalog of an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, by Stephen Clingman

William Kentridge: In Praise of Shadows

catalog of an exhibition at the Broad, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, organized by Ed Schad

December 21, 2023 issue

‘Everything Will Be Alright’

Widely acclaimed as a painter, Kerry James Marshall has long used printmaking as a field of play.

November 21, 2023

Ed Ruscha Bigger than Actual Size

Sassy, reverent, diffident, disarming: an unprecedented survey of the artist’s career is an enticement into looking at the unremarkable.

Ed Ruscha: Now Then

an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, September 10, 2023–January 13, 2024, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, April 7–October 6, 2024

November 23, 2023 issue

Invitation to a Dance

The early prints of Brazilian artist Lygia Pape enlivened the abstract geometries of Concrete Art with the social, improvisational ethos of a new movement.

May 24, 2023

Feeling Your Way in the Dark

“One of the things that concerns me at the moment (both inside and outside the art world) is our impatience with ambivalence and ambiguity.”

April 29, 2023

The Perpetual Provocateur

For generations, Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s prints of Roman views defined the popular image of the Eternal City. A profusion of new exhibitions and publications shows why he still speaks to us.

Sublime Ideas: Drawings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi

an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City, March 10–June 4, 2023

Piranesi and the Modern Age

by Victor Plahte Tschudi

Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Catalogue of the Complete Etchings

by Luigi Ficacci

May 11, 2023 issue

A Tip of the Hat

March 9, 2023 issue

Feinting Spells

The thesis of an exhibition on the inspiration a subset of Cubism took from trompe l’oeil is convincingly built with objects made across four centuries.

Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition

an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, October 20, 2022–January 22, 2023

January 19, 2023 issue

Letter

Ruth Rosenwasser

A Tip of the Hat

March 9, 2023 issue

Bring Up the Bodies

In "Exquisite Corpse," Kerry James Marshall makes enigmatic riffs on the Surrealist game.

December 12, 2022

Dynamism, Domesticated

The effervescent linocuts of Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power from the interwar years transformed the Futurist fascination with speed, rendering common pleasures in a way that would not be seen again until Pop Art.

Sibyl and Cyril: Cutting Through Time

by Jenny Uglow

Modern Times: British Prints, 1913–1939

an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, November 1, 2021–January 9, 2022

March 10, 2022 issue

The House That Johns Built

What has Jasper Johns done for us lately? As two exhibitions show, pretty much what he did for us in the first place: continually disrupt the mental shorthand that converts complex visual experience into simple mental categories.

Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror

an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, September 29, 2021–February 13, 2022

January 13, 2022 issue

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

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

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

What the Little Woman Was Up To

An exhibition of books, ephemera, and realia made by women over the past five hundred years makes tangible the kind of contributions that typically go ignored.

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

‘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