Art
The Surreal Pathos of Charles Steffen’s Portraits
After suffering a nervous breakdown, the late Chicago artist began to make his surreal graphite and colored pencil portraits on found paper.
Review
Books
How a Gauguin Painting Went From Real, to Lost, to Fake
A new book is an art detective mystery, a behind-the-scenes look at provenance research, a psychological analysis, and a critical commentary on the art market.
Art
An Art Inhabited by Higher Spirits
In his paintings, Joshua Hagler seems to follow a path where logic and convention are left behind in favor of visions and dreams.
Art
All the Ways Elephants Are Amazing
The Secret World of Elephants is filled with interactive activities about our gargantuan cousins that are as much fun for grown-ups as they are for kids.
Art
Art as the Mother of Invention
No Prior Art at the Los Angeles Public Library shows off inventions and patents from unlikely creators and allows audiences to become inventors.
Art
Lee Bul’s Synthetic Angels of History
Her sculptures for The Met’s facade commission look like they’ve always been there, Frankensteined in the bowels of the museum’s ethnographic collections.
Art
Dorothea Tanning Explored New Worlds Through Collage
Tanning’s practice shows that there is always another door to open, a new world to explore, and that art offers us another possible existence.
Art
London’s National Gallery Celebrates Its Birthday With Van Gogh
Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers boasts some curatorial firsts and delights in the artist’s explosion of experimental color and expressive, urgent feeling.
Books
When Artists Take the Law Into Their Own Hands
Novelist and scholar Yxta Maya Murray elucidates how the most rigorous critiques of the law often emerge from artistic practice.
Art
The Artifacts of Austin’s Past Come Tumbling Back
The giant video projection of artifacts in Past Deposits is in constant conversation with the pedestrians, roadways, and architecture that surround it.
Art
Spirit House Manifests the Ghosts of Asian-American History
The artists in this exhibition know that we cannot simply “get over” the history of racialization, as well as the destructive legacy of US imperialism.
Art
The Last Roar of the Lion of Punjab
Rather than his military prowess or finely crafted weapons, it was Sikhism that sustained Ranjit Singh’s empire.