Arts

Society & Culture

Catching the Moment

John Singer Sargent saw into the souls of his models, whether they were society women, nude men, or lower-class Venetians. How did he do it?

May 9, 2024 issue

Darryl Pinckney

‘Who Shall Describe Beauty?’

The Met’s Harlem Renaissance exhibition reveals the eclecticism of black artistic practices and styles.

May 9, 2024 issue

Jenny Uglow

The Volcano Lovers

For travelers in the Romantic period, Mount Vesuvius was an object of scientific curiosity, a political allegory, and a touchstone of the sublime.

April 18, 2024 issue

Peter Brown

Charged Wonders

An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art aims to give voice and density to the Christian cultures in Africa with which Byzantium interacted over the many centuries of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

February 8, 2024 issue

Geoffrey O’Brien

A Craving for Crime

Perhaps only after a lifetime of immersion in crime fiction can one begin to wonder what all those stories have really imparted.

February 8, 2024 issue

J. Hoberman

‘Kish Mir in Tuchus!’

Before his violent early death at twenty-five, the Jewish Belgian artist Stéphane Mandelbaum assembled a body of confrontational drawings.

February 25, 2024

Elaine Blair

Uninhibited Questions

In Porn: An Oral History, Polly Barton argues that after decades of exhaustive debate there is still something lacking in the discourse on pornography.

December 21, 2023 issue

Jenny Uglow

In Search of the Rare and Strange

In Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece, Ulinka Rublack traces the global connections of the merchants who were the creative agents of the European art market in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

February 22, 2024 issue

On Old New York

Susannah Jacob, photographs by Radcliffe Roye

What Happened to the West Village?

The neighborhood became the epicenter of what the remorseless rise of rents will do to a once mixed and diverse city, rich foremost in its peoples and cultures.

October 9, 2019

A postcard showing the St. Denis Hotel at Broadway and 11th Street, New York City, circa 1908

Jeremiah Moss

The Death and Life of a Great American Building

As affordable rents disappear, the mental health of New Yorkers increasingly becomes yet another tale of two cities. Imagine a future Manhattan without shrinks. What will happen to the psyche of that city?

March 7, 2018

Jason Epstein

New York: The Prophet

“The war over the monstrous Lower Manhattan Expressway, a projected ten-lane elevated link…connecting the Holland Tunnel to the East River bridges, would be long and painful. Jacobs and the neighborhood coalition prevailed. But the nine-year struggle…convinced Jacobs that if she wanted to write other books she must leave New York.”

August 13, 2009 issue

Lucy Sante

My Lost City

“Aside from the matter of actual violence, drugs, and squalor, there was the fact that in the 1970s New York City was not a part of the United States at all. It was an offshore interzone with no shopping malls, few major chains, very few born-again Christians who had not been sent there on a mission, no golf courses, no subdivisions.”

November 6, 2003 issue

The Latest

Sam Huber

‘The Loudest, Brightest Thing’

The producer and DJ Sophie created a musical language with which to explore feelings too inchoate—too big, too raw—to be spoken.

November 24, 2024

Beatrice Loayza

‘The Look of Shame’

The French director Catherine Breillat has spent her career insisting on women’s agency and reclaiming taboo desires—sometimes with troubling implications.

November 21, 2024

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

I, Coppola

Megalopolis, the director’s first film in thirteen years, is a useful reminder of how inimical extreme wealth is to democratic thinking—and to clear thinking in general.

November 3, 2024

Anna Shechtman and D. A. Miller

Anora’s Honor

The title character in Sean Baker’s new film is sharp-tongued and invulnerable—until a marriage plot catches up with her.

November 1, 2024

Jenny Uglow

The Legacy of Red Vienna

From 1919 to 1934, socialist Vienna was guided by the “critical rationalism” and the pluralist, collaborative ethos of its thinkers and planners, whose influence endured long after they lost power.

November 21, 2024 issue

Anahid Nersessian

A Living Requiem

In her new installation, the sculptor Nour Mobarak transforms the hymns of the powerful into the complaints of the weak.

October 25, 2024

Gabriel Winslow-Yost

A ‘Primal Paper Forest’

In the first decade of his career, the artist CF seemed to be reinventing comics from first principles, assembling strange new worlds only to smash them into pieces.

October 24, 2024

Jed Perl

Ralph Ellison’s Alchemical Camera

The novelist’s photographs reveal an aestheticizing impulse that is difficult to reconcile with the relentless seriousness of his observations and critiques of American society.

November 7, 2024 issue

J. Hoberman

The Beatles Effect

A new documentary treats the Fab Four’s Shea Stadium concert as a window into the dreams and nightmares of the summer of 1965.

October 12, 2024

Peter E. Gordon

Music and Memory

After the Holocaust, classical composers explored music’s capacity to commemorate historical trauma without permitting horrific events to take on the allure of facile beauty.

October 17, 2024 issue