Arts

Visual Arts

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.

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

Susie Linfield

What’s in a Face?

The longstanding obsession with Jewish looks has always been essentially political—and never more so than now.

May 9, 2024 issue

James Fenton

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

Ingrid D. Rowland

Nature’s Rival

Antonio Canova’s clay models reveal the creative struggle behind the classical perfection of his marble sculptures.

May 9, 2024 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

Sam Needleman

Games We Play

The Dutch painter Jacqueline de Jong extracts raw drama from scenes of leisure and crime.

April 6, 2024

Ratik Asokan

Saint Josef

Josef Koudelka’s photographs register the weight of history.

March 24, 2024

‘A Little Patch of Yellow Wall’

Johannes Vermeer: The Lacemaker, 9 5/8 x 8 1/4 inches, circa 1669–1670

Joseph Leo Koerner

First Among Equals

“Vermeer prompts us to look at his handiwork. In the foreground, white and red paint—conjuring threads escaping from the woman’s sewing cushion—appears as if dribbled on the canvas.”

February 7, 2019 issue

Johannes Vermeer: The Music Lesson, circa 1662–1663

Julian Bell

The Mysterious Women of Vermeer

Vermeer has a mind-boggling technique for transferring visual sensations from eye to canvas as if without the hand’s intervention. Color has somehow wafted down, as leaves might on water, and cohered automatically into threads and ringlets and cushions.

December 22, 2011 issue

Sanford Schwartz

Camera Work

“To read about Johannes Vermeer and to look at his pictures is sometimes to think you have entered a fairy-tale domain. There’s an Arabian Nights flavor about a painter who leaves so few traces of himself.”

May 31, 2001 issue

Wisława Szymborska, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak

Vermeer

a poem

November 11, 2010 issue

The Latest

Sanjay Kak

‘Wonderful and Vicious Things’

In his constant urge to renew himself, the photographer Sohrab Hura comes across as an artist committed to tilling hard ground.

December 18, 2024

Anahid Nersessian

Acts of Self-Erasure

A new exhibition of the conceptual artist Christine Kozlov shows how she worked by concealing her own tracks.

December 13, 2024

Martin Filler

A Cowboy in Winter

The artist Bruce Nauman’s latest exhibition reconfirms that he doesn’t believe in letting his viewers off easy.

December 3, 2024

Susan Tallman

The Occupation of Looking

The discipline of art history today is far more inclusive, more cognizant of social history, and less prone to normative aesthetic judgments—changes Svetlana Alpers helped bring about.

December 19, 2024 issue

Michael Chabon

The Midnight World

Glenn Fleishman’s history of the comic strip as a technological artifact vividly restores the world of newspaper printing—gamboge, Zip-A-Tone, flongs, and all.

December 19, 2024 issue

Carolina A. Miranda

Intimate Theatricality

Meticulously installed domestic spaces set the tone for Mickalene Thomas’s current exhibition, which features the work for which she is best known: sumptuous portraits of Black women in repose—the artist’s mother, lovers, and friends.

December 19, 2024 issue