Faience and Light
/Vermeer is the name we all know, but a new exhibition demonstrates the charm and beauty of his contemporaries in 17th-century Dutch genre painting.
Read MoreThe Atrium Effect: Museums Under Glass
/Big slabs of glass may look impressive, but they have a serious effect on our interaction with art. Museums are changing, and it isn't always a good thing.
Read MoreBook Review: The Collector of Lives
/Giorgio Vasari, the author of a fundamental and beloved collection of the lives of Renaissance artists, here gets a lively and readable biography of his own.
Read MoreBook Review: Calder
/The legendary avant-garde sculptor Alexander Calder gets his very first biography, written by art critic Jed Perl
Read MoreBook Review: Hamlet Globe to Globe
/A terrific new book tells the story of what happens when a hardy company takes the world's most famous play to every country on Earth.
Read MoreBook Review: John Singer Sargent - Figures and Landscapes
/The magnificent catalogue from Yale University Press of the paintings and drawing of John Singer Sargent comes to its conclusion with volume IX
Read MoreLooking Back: Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin, and Robert Frank in New York City
/Diane Arbus’s photographs are weird. Their subjects are weird. She herself was weird. A new exhibit takes us back to the origins of that strangeness –and asks what it says to us now.
Read MoreAnother Way To See
/John Berger's writing on art often feels more dramatic than analytic, a passionate study of the unspoken transaction between artist and viewer. Robert Minto looks at Portraits.
Read MoreBanksy’s World
/An insurgent graffiti artist becomes an art house favorite and recognized brand; Jared Pollen explores the many-layered ironies of Banksy's world.
Read MoreBook Review: Keeping An Eye On Art
/Novelist Julian Barnes takes readers on a tour of some of his favorite French artists
Read MoreTurning Points: Jane Avril in Paris
/For the woman who became dancer Jane Avril, life was transformed when she realized that what had been called mental illness she could claim for herself as art.
Read MoreAn Impressionistic Outlier
/Lesser-known - and perhaps just plain lesser? - French Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte gets his first major American retrospective.
Read MoreCaved-in and Chopfallen
/The brutal realities of the urban landscape are both indicted and illuminated in the paintings of Jerome Witkin. Brett Busang examines the life and work of this inner city Canaletto.
Read MoreOne Encounter: John Koch's Figure on a Bed
/In his painting "Figure on a Bed," John Koch immortalizes the kind of private moment that's usually lost in an instant - Brett Busang muses on one arresting piece of art.
Read MoreThe Art of Socialist America
/The Works Progress Administration did more than set thousand of Americans to building bridges and roads in the 1930s; it also fostered art, as an exhibit at the Smithsonian's National Art Gallery lavishly illustrates.
Read MoreFlowers of Prison
/Controversial Chinese artist and activist Ai WeiWei set an art installation inside the walls of America's most notorious prisons - with surreal and sometimes beautiful results.
Read MoreAprès moi, le déluge
/Charles Marville’s extraordinary photographs of 19th-century Paris are like a cautionary tale, urging us to preserve the best of what is left in our own cities.
Read MoreI Am Almost a Camera
/As the Smithsonian's new exhibit confirms, Richard Estes is the preeminent photo-realist painter of our time or--most likely--of any time. But to what extent is photo-realism an art worth practicing? And what does it do?
Read More#NotAllNazis
/What would you do if your artistic survival suddenly depended on the whims of a brutal dictatorship? How far would you compromise? How much would you risk? A new book studies artists in the Third Reich.
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