May 15, 2025 Issue

Susan Tallman

String Theory

Two exhibitions focused on weaving go beyond the functional, the folkloric, and the feminine, tracking fiber’s escape from the connotations of the grid.

Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction

an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, April 20–September 13, 2025

Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art

an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Ben Lerner

National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program

a poem

Ingrid D. Rowland

Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture was not only a manual of the building arts but a treatise on how to extend and consolidate the Roman Empire, and lent itself all too well to the autocratic ambitions of Renaissance princes.

All the King’s Horses: Vitruvius in an Age of Princes

by Indra Kagis McEwen

Jerome Groopman

Measles Gone Wild

During a burgeoning measles outbreak, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has continued to make contradictory remarks, publicly endorsing the measles vaccine while raising doubts about its safety.

Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children’s Health

by Adam Ratner

So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs—and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease

by Thomas Levenson

Martin Filler

The Frick Reinvigorated

In an ambitious and long-overdue renovation, the architect Annabelle Selldorf attempted to harmonize with the Frick’s Classical aesthetic while asserting her Modernist credentials.

Julian Bell

Internalizing the Crises

Joseph Leo Koerner’s latest book considers what art becomes when politics has been stripped down to relations of force.

Art in a State of Siege

by Joseph Leo Koerner

Lisa Halliday

A More Perfect Truth

Claire Messud’s exhilarating new novel spans four generations of a French Algerian family reckoning with their place as failed colonists.

This Strange Eventful History

by Claire Messud

Heather O’Donnell

Ambition, Discipline, Nerve

The qualities that enabled Belle da Costa Greene to cross the color line were the same ones that made her a formidable negotiator and collector for J. P. Morgan’s library, which she led for over twenty years.

Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy

an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City, October 25, 2024–May 4, 2025

The Personal Librarian

by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

Belle Greene

by Alexandra Lapierre, translated from the French by Tina Kover

Becoming Belle da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian Through Her Letters

by Deborah Parker

Geoffrey O’Brien

Eddying Toward Doom

Any adaptation of Moby-Dick must pick and choose from the novel’s many themes and tones; Jake Heggie’s opera tends toward a frequency attuned to sorrow.

Moby-Dick

an opera with music by Jake Heggie and a libretto by Gene Scheer, directed by Leonard Foglia, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, March 3–29, 2025

David Salle

‘Why Not All These Things at Once?’

The sculptor Arlene Shechet’s work is held together by a combination of stand-up shtick, fairy tales, strong nerves, and high modernist sobriety.

Arlene Shechet: Girl Group

an exhibition at Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York, May 4–November 10, 2024. Catalog of the exhibition by Eric Booker, Nora Lawrence, Kate Nesin, Anne Reeve, Arlene Shechet, John P. Stern, and Sheena Wagstaff

Noah Feldman

The Last Bulwark

The fate of our democracy today depends on the judiciary’s commitments to liberty, constitutionalism, and legality.

Jarrett Earnest

Art to Sit On

For the past forty years people have enjoyed chairs, tables, and benches in public places across North America without realizing they are part of Scott Burton’s radical artistic vision.

Scott Burton: Shape Shift

an exhibition at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, September 6, 2024–February 2, 2025, and Wrightwood 659, Chicago, October 3, 2025–January 31, 2026

Álvaro Urbano: Tableau Vivant

an exhibition at SculptureCenter, Long Island City, September 19, 2024–March 24, 2025

Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance, 1965–1975

edited by David J. Getsy

Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art

by David J. Getsy

Madeleine Thien

Killing Memories

The Chinese writer Fang Fang’s novel Soft Burial probes traumatic national memories across several generations, even as her Covid diary in 2020 made her the target of a relentless disinformation campaign in China.

Soft Burial

by Fang Fang, translated from the Chinese by Michael Berry

Translation, Disinformation, and Wuhan Diary: Anatomy of a Transpacific Cyber Campaign

by Michael Berry

Sam Needleman

‘On the Brink of Erasure’

Tacita Dean’s mesmerizing, elegiac drawing and filmmaking spring from both broad exploration and acute focus.

Tacita Dean: Blind Folly

an exhibition at the Menil Collection, Houston, October 11, 2024–April 19, 2025

Blind Folly, or How Tacita Dean Draws

by Michelle White

Tacita Dean

edited by George Baker and Annie Rana

Base Matter and Uncommon Solvent: Drawings, Prints, Collages and Objects, 1986–2024

by Tacita Dean

Nathaniel Rich

Writing Like a Mountain

In the novels of the Swiss writer Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, people become ants and mountains become menacing gods.

Great Fear on the Mountain

by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz, translated from the French by Bill Johnston

Carmen Boullosa,
Samantha Schnee

Dead Calm

a poem

Coco Fusco

The Portraitist

By using unlikely objects to represent people he had loved and lost, Felix Gonzalez-Torres created the most unforgettable artistic expressions of mourning to emerge from the AIDS crisis.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return

an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery and the Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C., October 18, 2024–July 6, 2025

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

Justice for Chagos?

Decades after the Indian Ocean island colony’s inhabitants were forcibly deported to accommodate an American military base, the ICJ has ruled that they be allowed to return. But is international law sufficient to bring them justice?

The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice, and Courage

by Philippe Sands

Diego Garcia

by Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams

Jed Perl

A Century of Surrealism

One hundred years after André Breton launched the Surrealist movement, we’re still trying to make sense of its aims and effects.

Surrealism

an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, September 4, 2024–January 13, 2025, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, November 8, 2025–February 6, 2026

Manifestoes of Surrealism

by André Breton, translated from the French by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane

Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, Revised and Updated Edition

by Mark Polizzotti

Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School

by Martica Sawin

Surrealism and Painting

by André Breton, translated from the French by Simon Watson Taylor, with an introduction by Mark Polizzotti

Magic Art

by André Breton, edited by Robert Shehu-Ansell and Marlin Cox, and translated from the French by Michael Richardson, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, and Dawn Ades

Why Surrealism Matters

by Mark Polizzotti

Les Portes du rêve, 1924–2024: Surrealism Through Its Journals

edited by Franca Franchi

Surrealism and Anti-fascism

edited by Karin Althaus, Adrian Djukić, Ara H. Merjian, Matthias Mühling, and Stephanie Weber

Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes

an exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire, England, November 23, 2024–April 21, 2025; The Box, Plymouth, England, May 24–September 7, 2025; and the Museum Arnhem, the Netherlands, October 3, 2025–February 1, 2026

Surrealism Beyond Borders

edited by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale

The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde

by Alyce Mahon

L’Atelier de André Breton: Mur Mondes

edited by Aurélie Verdier

Symbolism, Dada, Surrealisms

by Mary Ann Caws

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Issue Details

Cover art
Tacita Dean: Hamlet, 2018
(Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris, Los Angeles/Frith Street Gallery, London)
Series art
Zack Rosebrugh: Arrangements, 2025