Arts

Visual Arts

Explosions in the Mind

Fusing religious subjects with unerring technique, the Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbarán discovered a zone in oil paint that might well be called “sacred.”

August 20, 2026 issue

Andrew Raftery

When India Reinvented Prints

Two forceful exhibitions have shown how Indian artists and presses met the cultural upheaval of the nineteenth century with lithographic prints that rendered Hindu gods more approachable and helped to galvanize national identity.

July 23, 2026 issue

Sanford Schwartz

The Fairy-Tale Hour

An exhibition of Paul Klee’s late works focuses on his depictions of the atmosphere of violence and intimidation in Germany after the Nazis came to power.

June 11, 2026 issue

Clair Wills

Mighty Real

Tracey Emin’s art has often tackled taboo subjects, including rape, abortion, and sexual abuse, but her multifarious works are always bracingly antitherapeutic.

June 11, 2026 issue

Nicole Rudick

Seeing by Hand

“I feel my fingers have eyes,” June Leaf once said. The need to literally feel her way through her work is a primary subject of her art.

May 14, 2026 issue

Dan Chiasson

Where the Meanings Are

Fairfield Porter was an insider among the East Coast elite, but his own portraits of life in Southampton and Maine give the charming impression of an outsider looking in.

August 20, 2026 issue

Coco Fusco

A Vital Unconscious

Wifredo Lam’s paintings spring from a unique synthesis of European modernism and Afro-Cuban consciousness.

May 14, 2026 issue

Susan Tallman

Manet and Morisot: Game On

An important exhibition showcases a painterly repartee that altered the trajectory of the two artists’ work and, by extension, modern art itself.

May 14, 2026 issue

At the Galleries

Coco Fusco

The Grand Master of Abjection

Pope.L, best known for his performance art, also made drawings and paintings animated by his sense of the absurd and his concern for the marginalized.

August 20, 2026 issue

Gabriella Angeleti

Along the Ucayali River

Sara Flores adapts the ancient designs of the Shipibo-Conibo tribe of Peru into large, pattern-based paintings.

August 20, 2026 issue

Jarrett Earnest

The Eyes Have It

Carol Rama’s abstractions from the late 1960s conjure burned, brutalized bodies.

July 23, 2026 issue

‘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

Essays by Ingrid D. Rowland

Ingrid D. Rowland

The Spell of Marble

Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s immense artistic authority was based on his theatrical skill with the chisel.

May 12, 2022 issue

Olafur Eliasson: The weather project, 2003

Ingrid D. Rowland

Filling Our Eyes with Sunshine

No one who saw Olafur Eliasson’s The weather project has ever forgotten it.

September 26, 2019 issue

Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi holding Silvio Berlusconi's hand as he speaks next to a Roman statue of the goddess Venus, Benghazi, Libya, August 30, 2008

Ingrid D. Rowland

Berlusconi: Will Someone Please Pull the Plug?

The scandals that buzz ever more insistently around Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi are hardly the first that old Rome has ever seen.

November 10, 2010

Funerary stela of Lady Taperet, Third Intermediate Period, circa 850–690 BCE. Lady Taperet is praying to Atum, god of the setting sun, in the hope of eternally accompanying him on his daily journey. The hieroglyphs above her exhort the god to grant her everything she will need in the afterlife. The sky is represented by the blue body of the goddess Nut, who swallows the sun every night and gives birth to it every morning.

Ingrid D. Rowland

The Charms of Ancient Egypt

“The Egyptians, far from being obsessed with death, were captivated by life in all its forms: animal, vegetable, human, and cosmic.”

July 2, 2009 issue

Sam Huber

‘The Silent Art’

In her parallel career as a sculptor, the feminist theorist Kate Millett returned again and again to the image of the cage.

August 13, 2026

Chris Ware

Jerry Survives

Jerry Moriarty’s “paintoons” were not exactly comic strips, but something like picture-poems with a punchline.

August 12, 2026

Alma Guillermoprieto

Fridas for Everyone

The face that sold a million mugs returned to museums and the operatic stage this spring, as if there was a yearning to reconnect with the real Frida Kahlo.

August 20, 2026 issue

Coco Fusco

The Grand Master of Abjection

Pope.L, best known for his performance art, also made drawings and paintings animated by his sense of the absurd and his concern for the marginalized.

August 20, 2026 issue