Growing Up in Wartime France

The Reflected Glory of Victorian Art

Why do mirrors appear so often in Victorian paintings? “Reflections: Van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites” suggests an answer.

April 8, 2018

Grown Men Reading ‘Nancy’

As Bill Griffith wrote of the famous comic strip, “Nancy doesn’t tell us much about what it’s like to be a kid. What Nancy tells us is what it’s like to be a comic strip.”

March 17, 2018

The Art of Love

Why art? What is it? What is it for?

March 10, 2018

A Magician in Pigment

Titian was a painter of astonishing versatility, a master of landscape, of portraiture, of sacred painting, historical painting, mythology, a magician who could turn a dab of pigment into a flame, a pleat, a thunderbolt, a twinkle in the eye, a Cupid’s wing.

November 8, 2013

Luc Tuymans: A Retrospective

In “Gray Magic,” from the February 11 issue of The New York Review, Sanford Schwartz writes about the Luc Tuymans retrospective, which will be on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from February 6 to May 2. (It originated at the Wexner Center for the Arts in…

January 22, 2010

Houdon’s Sensuous Sculpture

In “The Best Faces of the Enlightenment,” from the April 8 issue of The New York Review, Willibald Sauerländer writes about a new exhibition of the work of Jean-Antoine Houdon, whom he calls “the last and probably greatest French sculptor of the eighteenth century.” In his works—a selection of which…

March 19, 2010