Book Review
John Berger in His Own Bruised Time
The late novelist and art critic asked Tom Overton to wait to write his biography until after his death. The result is deeply informative, deferential, and perceptive, sometimes lyrically so.
Book Review
Book Review
The Trafficker Who Furnished the Museums of LA
A team of researchers excavates the story of Earl Stendahl, a mid-century gallerist who shamelessly stole ancient Mesoamerican objects and marketed them to the institutional art world.
Book Review
Finding Vermeer in Unexpected Places
Artists, filmmakers, poets, and the art market itself still bear traces of the Dutch painter’s influence, writes historian Ruth Bernard Yeazell in “Vermeer’s Afterlives.”
Books
Dorothea Tanning Beyond Max Ernst’s Shadow
A new biography attempts to make the case for Tanning’s independence and artistic strength in her own right, but remains frustratingly tethered to her husband.
Book Review
“Thinking From Black” Is a Glossary of Possibility
Artists, poets, and scholars mull over words of their choosing in this book, offering new definitions of phrases from which Blackness proliferates: “world,” “water,” “care.”
Book Review
Turning Turner’s Legacy
“Turner and the Slave Trade” recasts Romanticism’s relationship to nature and landscape painting as a vehicle for colonial propaganda.
Book Review
The Unsung Craftspeople Who Built Ancient Egypt
A new publication reflects a growing interest in the lives of the makers behind the civilization’s arts and crafts, long marginalized and erased by mythologized depictions of the ancient world.
Book Review
What “The Book of Genocides” Teaches Us
Dana Mashoian Walrath’s work of graphic nonfiction points to historical patterns across 10 genocides, from Germany and Turkey to Gaza.
Book Review
For Sophie Lewis, Femininity Is Not the Enemy of Feminism
In “Femmephilia,” the author reclaims femininity, sexual pleasure, and adornment from patriarchal narratives in art and theorizes their liberatory powers.
Book Review
In “Whistler,” Ann Patchett Tackles Loss and Art
The beloved author’s new novel tells a story of familial loss and reconnection, beginning with a chance encounter at The Met. But why does it seem to imply that grief and art are at odds?
Book Review
Jennifer Higgie’s Empathetic Elegy for Richard Dadd
In “Bedlam,” the author and art critic does not describe the English painter’s often-sensationalized mental deterioration. Instead, she writes the novel in his voice.
Book Review
Can We Stop Calling South Asian Painting "Miniature"?
A book on 18th-century Pahari painting warns against thinking of these works as “miniatures,” a Western term, instead illuminating the artistic collaboration and ways of life at their heart.