Depraved, a soulful indie take on Frankenstein, proves the perennial relevance of Mary Shelley’s monstrous creation.

Thomas Micchelli
Thomas Micchelli is an artist and writer.
The Alternate Modernism of a Modernist Pioneer
Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern takes a close look at a period when patriotism was distinct from nationalism, populism did not equal demagoguery, and left-wing radicalism was the coin of the aesthetic realm.
Painting Paradoxes of Family, Race, and Prison
Through his father’s profession as a corrections officer, Pat Phillips has found a pictorial strategy for probing the racial chasms of the justice system, and by inference, everyday life.
Egon Schiele’s Impudent Offspring
Tracing Egon Schiele’s lineage, forward and backward in time.
What Freedom Costs
Two exhibitions in Vienna take on the fragility of democratic structures.
Louise Lawler’s Quiet Melancholy
If Lawler’s works were originally read as art about art, they now feel like art for art’s sake.
The Pursuit of Art, 2018
The creation and interpretation of art remains an anchor and a refuge, a sanctuary for vanishing ideals.
Kara Walker Invites You to a Public Hanging
Walker’s installation “Virginia’s Lynch Mob” evokes a latter-day Saturnalia, turning the world upside-down.
Hoarding and Spending at Art Basel Miami Beach
After Safariland, if you need to convince yourself that the art world isn’t entirely in money’s thrall, you’d want to be anywhere but here.
The Anti-Caravaggio
Pontormo’s figures, though illuminated in godliness, are invariably human in their proportions and hushed in their emotions.
The Brutalist Invasion of Phyllida Barlow
Barlow’s sculptures may be abstract, but they feel rife with heads, teeth, legs, and orifices of every stripe.
Italian Painting, Before the Fall
Metaphysical Painting offered a philosophical refuge for Italian artists shaking off their Futurist sugar high.