Arts

Visual Arts

One Cubit at a Time

Medieval theologians produced ornate architectural drawings in their efforts to comprehend divine instructions. A recent book recovers their contributions to the form.

May 24, 2025

Sam Needleman

‘On the Brink of Erasure’

Tacita Dean’s mesmerizing, elegiac drawing and filmmaking spring from both broad exploration and acute focus.

May 15, 2025 issue

Christopher Benfey

Anecdote of the Teapot

A teapot made in South Carolina during the 1760s by an enigmatic English émigré potter named John Bartlam provides an allegory for porcelain’s journey from the East.

June 12, 2025 issue

Susan Tallman

String Theory

Two exhibitions focused on weaving go beyond the functional, the folkloric, and the feminine, tracking fiber’s escape from the connotations of the grid.

May 15, 2025 issue

David Salle

‘Why Not All These Things at Once?’

The sculptor Arlene Shechet’s work is held together by a combination of stand-up shtick, fairy tales, strong nerves, and high modernist sobriety.

May 15, 2025 issue

Ingrid D. Rowland

Vitruvius & the Warlords

Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture was not only a manual of the building arts but a treatise on how to extend and consolidate the Roman Empire, and lent itself all too well to the autocratic ambitions of Renaissance princes.

May 15, 2025 issue

Nina Siegal

The Spy in the Jeu de Paume

The detailed information gathered by the French curator Rose Valland about the Nazis’ looting of artworks made it possible for the Allies to recover tens of thousands of them after World War II.

May 29, 2025 issue

Jed Perl

A Century of Surrealism

One hundred years after André Breton launched the Surrealist movement, we’re still trying to make sense of its aims and effects.

May 15, 2025 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

The Latest

Martin Filler

Candid Cameron

The British Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron put her personal imprint on art’s newest medium to indelible effect.

June 13, 2025

Carolina A. Miranda

Close to the Punches

Vincent Valdez has made an unlikely career portraying human figures, especially underdogs and antiheroes.

June 26, 2025 issue

John-Baptiste Oduor

An Obstinate Commitment to Defeat

The conceptual artist Mike Kelley considered the creative expression of ordinary people to be beautiful, pathetic, and fascinatingly bizarre.

June 4, 2025

Will Simpson

Sovereign Wager Fascinator

Photographs from the 2025 Kentucky Derby

May 28, 2025

Chris Ware

Pure Thought on Paper

Olivier Schrauwen’s graphic novel Sunday is, like Ulysses, an attempt to capture the thoughts, experiences, memories, musings, and mania of one man over a single day. It is also, like Ulysses, a masterpiece.

May 29, 2025 issue

Martin Filler

The Frick Reinvigorated

In an ambitious and long-overdue renovation, the architect Annabelle Selldorf attempted to harmonize with the Frick’s Classical aesthetic while asserting her Modernist credentials.

May 15, 2025 issue

Jarrett Earnest

Art to Sit On

For the past forty years people have enjoyed chairs, tables, and benches in public places across North America without realizing they are part of Scott Burton’s radical artistic vision.

May 15, 2025 issue

Coco Fusco

The Portraitist

By using unlikely objects to represent people he had loved and lost, Felix Gonzalez-Torres created the most unforgettable artistic expressions of mourning to emerge from the AIDS crisis.

May 15, 2025 issue

Joe Bucciero

In the Cut

The painter Walter Price keeps returning to a personal lexicon of images, as if hoping both to wear them out and make them new.

April 16, 2025

Lucy Scholes

The Weight of Their Art

A new retrospective of the British artist and designer Tirzah Garwood—long overshadowed by her more famous husband—recovers the full scope of her life and work.

April 15, 2025