Art Review
Howard Hodgkin Was Best in the Dark Spaces
Five paintings in a print-focused show on the late artist, fiercely spot-lit against much surrounding darkness, look and feel like the real thing.
Michael Glover
Art Review
Take a Trip Through Ursula K. Le Guin’s Conjured Worlds
The fantasy and science fiction writer found her way into her invented worlds by making maps and then mentally exploring them.
Art Review
Life’s Hidden Dramas in the Art of Walter Sickert
Sickert didn’t go in for glamour or flattery and the subjects of many of his best works are things seen off to the side, a bit inconsequential.
Book Review
The Poetry of van Gogh’s Montmartre Years
Miles J. Unger’s new study on the artist is in part a critical biography and in part an impressive and sensitive account of his creation of some key paintings.
Art Review
A No Kings Movement for 19th-Century Art
Jean-François Millet was a hero to van Gogh for the way he drew attention to the nobility and heroism of the seldom howling underdog.
Art Review
Edward Burra’s Satirical Surrealism
The painter wanted to experience the shock of strangeness, to embrace the allure of the louche, the forbidden, the disapproved of.
Art Review
The Private Calligraphy of Henri Michaux
The poet turned to psychedelics to discover the nature of his own consciousness, producing inscrutable drawings that alternately vibrate until they blur, or wash gently to and fro.
Art Review
When Modernity Grabbed Poetry By Its Heels
Feeling, intuiting the swing, sway, and pressures of life, with all its tumult, its blare, its bounce, and its heave, were what really counted in modern poetry.
Art
The Visions of Parmigianino
The artist’s career in Rome was curtailed by the sacking of the city in 1527 by the armies of Charles V but they were so impressed by his visionary painting that they spared his life.
News
Painter Frank Auerbach Dies at 93
The artist rendered portraits and scenes of the streets of north London with a life-affirming spirit and no evidence of frivolousness.
Art
Phyllida Barlow’s Irreverent Objects
The late British artist certainly had no sympathy for the idea — or perhaps the misplaced ideal — of the perfectly crafted sculptural object.
Books
Five Poems for Vincent
What started as a catalog essay about van Gogh’s little-known passion for poetry became a suite of poems for the Dutch painter.