Visual Arts | The New York Review of Books

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 Durer’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 Bara?czak

Vermeer

a poem

November 11, 2010 issue

The Latest

Martin Filler

Up on the Roof

Carlos de Beistegui’s Parisian penthouse apartment, designed by Le Corbusier, was the product of two supreme egotists squaring off against each other.

June 20, 2024 issue

Lucy Scholes

Entwined for Life

For decades, the painter Dorothy Hepworth and her partner Patricia Preece carried out an elaborate artistic deception.

May 26, 2024

Colin B. Bailey

Let There Be Light

The new installation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s refurbished European Paintings galleries brings masterpieces of the collection into exhilarating juxtaposition with one another.

June 6, 2024 issue

Danny Lyon

Photographing a Lost New York

When I moved to Lower Manhattan in 1967, I decided to make a picture of every building in the neighborhood before the city knocked it down.

April 25, 2024

Julian Bell

The Must-Also-Haves

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

May 9, 2024 issue

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.

May 9, 2024 issue