Music
Big Thief's Haunting Musical Dreamworld
The Brooklyn folk-rock band’s two 2019 albums invent an imagined environment with its own internal logic, a densely wooded forest with strange, benevolent creatures lurking in the shadows.
Review
Books
A Daily Commute Frames an Author's Reflections
Over the course of her graphic memoir, Commute, Erin Williams acknowledges the lives of people she encounters in her day, but she maintains a steady gaze on herself.
Art
Jessica Dismorr Is Getting Her Due, 80 Years Too Late
There is much to praise about Radical Women: Jessica Dismorr and her Contemporaries, and there is not a little to regret.
Art
The Endlessly Inventive Jörg Immendorff
Imagine Gustave Courbet’s materialism joined to Max Beckmann’s aggressive color, with a dash of Caspar David Friedrich’s visionary panoramas thrown in.
Art
The Unsparing Pages of Francis Bacon
Almost 30 years after his death, the unabated edginess of Bacon’s paintings, and the dark literary sources informing them, put the lie to our self-mythologizing.
Art
The Pursuit of Art, 2019
MoMA’s recognition of modernism’s multiverse, alongside artist-led drives for greater transparency on the part of museums and their boards, brought a twinge of optimism to the close of the year.
Books
This Be the Verse 2019
John Yau and Albert Mobilio select a few of their favorite poetry books from the past year.
Books
A Tantalizing, If Flawed Reinterpretation of Picasso’s “Demoiselles d’Avignon”
In her new book, Suzanne Preston Blier seduces the reader with a reinterpretation of the painting, based on sources she claims no Picasso scholars have addressed before.
Books
“The Hardest Story I Have Ever Done”: Autobiographical Comics Illustrated by Sexual Abuse and Harassment Survivors
Some of the contributors to Drawing Power: Women's Stories of Sexual Violence, Harassment, and Survival maintain a “straightforward” style of testimony, while others employ creative license to convey the lasting psychological effects of sexual violence.
Art
Joy Labinjo’s Dynamic Process in Painting Her Family
Joy Labinjo’s intimate family portraits are based on her archive of photographs, as well as Instagram and Flickr, straddling online and offline worlds and forging links between past and present.
Art
The Transcendent, Spiritual Fiber Art of Lenore Tawney
More than 40 textile works dating from the 1950s to her death in 2007, at age 100, float in the artist’s retrospective at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.
Art
Technological Invention Is Not Necessarily the Answer to a Sustainable Future
An exhibition at the Royal Academy suggests that technology is our main hope for a better future, generally ignoring the current discourse around natural climate solutions.