May 9, 2024 Issue

Julian Bell

The Must-Also-Haves

In Nicole Eisenman’s paintings and sculptures, a system’s impending demise may reveal itself in feverish hilarity.

Nicole Eisenman: What Happened

an exhibition at the Museum Brandhorst, Munich, March 24–September 10, 2023; the Whitechapel Gallery, London, October 11, 2023–January 14, 2024; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, April 6–September 22, 2024

David Shulman

Israel: The Way Out

If Israel is to survive, physically and spiritually, it needs to undergo, collectively, a sea change in its vision of reality and face some unpleasant though obvious facts.

Ingrid D. Rowland

Nature’s Rival

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

Canova: Sketching in Clay

an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., June 11–October 9, 2023, and the Art Institute of Chicago, November 19, 2023–March 18, 2024

Anahid Nersessian

Wanting for Nothing

Constance Debré’s novels, whose sensibility is minimalist and at times even desolate, reject the expectations of personal growth that animate much feminist literature.

Playboy

by Constance Debré, translated from the French by Holly James

Darryl Pinckney

‘Who Shall Describe Beauty?’

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

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism

an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, February 25–July 28, 2024

Marina Harss

The Passion of Martha Graham

In a new biography, Deborah Jowitt meticulously describes Graham’s pioneering dances, but brushes lightly over Graham’s fervid, turbulent personal relationships, and the importance she ascribed to passion and sexual pleasure.

Errand into the Maze: The Life and Works of Martha Graham

by Deborah Jowitt

Jarrett Earnest

Tom’s Men

Tom of Finland’s work has transformed from midcentury gay pornography to twenty-first-century art, but its troubling dimensions, as well as the ways it has creatively shaped the desires of a diverse range of queer people, cannot be ignored.

Tom of Finland: Bold Journey

an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, April 28–October 29, 2023

Tom of Finland: The Official Life and Work of a Gay Hero

by F. Valentine Hooven III

Tom of Finland: Made in Germany

edited by Juerg Judin and Pay Matthis Karstens

Tom of Finland: Threesome

three exhibitions at the David Kordansky Gallery, 2015–2021

Ariel Dorfman

Clamoring for Life

Though exceptional, fully developed female characters abound in Gabriel García Márquez’s work, only in his last novel, Until August, is a woman the uncontested protagonist on her own journey of self-discovery.

Until August

by Gabriel García Márquez, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean and edited by Cristóbal Pera

Susan Tallman

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.

Trailblazing Women Printmakers: Virginia Lee Burton Demetrios and the Folly Cove Designers

by Elena M. Sarni

A Model Workshop: Margaret Lowengrund and The Contemporaries

an exhibition at the Print Center New York, September 21–December 23, 2023

Art for the Millions: American Culture and Politics in the 1930s

an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, September 7–December 10, 2023

The Women of Atelier 17: Modernist Printmaking in Midcentury New York

by Christina Weyl

Susie Linfield

What’s in a Face?

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

What Does a Jew Look Like?

by Keith Kahn-Harris and Robert Stothard, with a foreword by Stephen Bush

צלם משוטט [Wandering Photographer]

by David Serry

Thomas A. Clark

Flight Across the Heather

a poem

John Washington

Burning Up

Reading John Vaillant’s Fire Weather and Jeff Goodell’s The Heat Will Kill You First, you may wonder if civilization is getting so hot that we’re no longer thinking straight.

Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World

by John Vaillant

The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

by Jeff Goodell

Emily Skillings