Hilton Als

Disastrous Surprises

Joan Didion taught me that family is always part of the story, along with place.

Godard’s Women

Cinema is a gift in that it allows for exposition—the betrayal of secrets—in frame after frame, actress by actress.

Remembrance of Things Past

Catherine Opie is interested in where her subjects are on the inside at the moment she’s taking a photograph.

The Art of Reggie Burrows Hodges

The painter equates blackness not only with depth of field, but depth of person.

An Awful and Beautiful Light

Joan Didion and the granite of the specific.

The Language of Diane Arbus

The Art of Difference

“If I stand in front of something,” Diane Arbus said, “instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.”

In Search of Agnes Martin

Peter Doig: The Transformer

The Good-bye Girl

Genius Breaking Through

Ghosts in Sunlight

The artist’s memory is a dangerous, necessary thing

Free Associations

Last winter, I came into possession of the papers of an émigré psychiatrist who practiced in New York in the late 1940s and 1950s. The archive included a collection of manila envelopes, around six by ten inches, stuffed with folded sheets of thin paper covered with single-spaced typing: the notes the psychiatrist made after seeing patients (many of them fellow émigrés) in his office. As I studied the sheets with their inky typewriting and 60-year-old paper clips holding them together and leaving rust marks on the surface, my collagist’s imagination began to stir. I began to “see” some version of the collages on view here.

The Art of Boscoe Holder

Last spring in Berlin, Peter Doig and Hilton Als co-curated an exhibition of portraits—mostly by young, unrecognized or forgotten artists—a show that included a rare look at the work of the remarkable but little known 20th-century Trinidadian painter Boscoe Holder (1921–2007).

‘The Strange, the Crazed, the Queer’

Cate Blanchett and Blanche Dubois

At one point during Blanche’s final mad scene in the Sydney Theater Company’s much discussed revival of Tennessee Williams’s modern-day masterwork, which just concluded its sold-out run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a woman sitting across the row from me began to sob uncontrollably. Despite her obvious pain, she could not look away from the stage’s brightly lit scene of daytime disaster. One wondered about the source of that spectator’s tears. Was it the sight of Blanche being led to her dark future, her sister Stella’s flush cheeked confusion, or both?

Michael

Revolutionary Road

Girls & Guns