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

Leanne Shapton

A New Leaf

A dispatch from the Art Editor

November 20, 2024

Peter Cole

‘A Window to the Word’

Joel Shapiro’s sculptures and works on paper pitch the viewer into a quietly sublime and kinesthetic experience.

November 16, 2024

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Friend of the Family

Jean Strouse’s Family Romance explores the relationship between the Anglo-Jewish Wertheimers and John Singer Sargent, who painted twelve portraits of them.

November 21, 2024 issue

Andrew Raftery

Rescuing the People’s Parchment

Fifty years after its signing, the Declaration of Independence had deteriorated distressingly. A new book traces its subsequent graphic elaborations and the commissioning of the iconic facsimile we know today.

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

Walker Mimms

Ted Lives!

The poet and visual artist Ted Joans found a kind of mystical power in jazz and surrealism alike.

October 2, 2024

Beatrice Radden Keefe

Happy Island of Psalters and Cucumbers

Thirteen hundred years ago, the monks on the German lake island of Reichenau tended a rich meadow of wall painting, manuscript making, and Latin poetry. An exhibit celebrating the anniversary chronicles the monastery’s history and art.

October 17, 2024 issue