Art
Francis Picabia’s Prescient, Painterly Promiscuousness
Thirty years ago, viewers may have found the dramatic shifts in his work bewildering; today it’s obvious that he was an artistic driving force of the 20th century.
Review
Art
American Artists' Fraught Responses to the First World War
From critical to patriotic and everything in between, a vast exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts displays the full range of US artists' reactions to World War I.
Art
Guerrilla Girls Find — Surprise! — that European Museum Collections Are Heavily White and Male
The Whitechapel Gallery has recently commissioned the feminist collective to create a new artwork that resurrects the 1986 Guerrilla Girls campaign “It’s Even Worse in Europe.”
Art
New Art from China Renders Local Histories Fantastic, Futuristic, and Bloody
Each of these thoughtful, well-realized works offers an investigation into global politics, the contemporary as historical, and environmental collapse, with room to laugh, rest, and think in between.
Film
Elizabeth Murray's and Carmen Herrera's Diverging Routes to Artistic Success
Recent documentaries about two well-known female painters make for a potent double bill at Film Forum.
Performance
An Opera Revisits the Grisly Public Dissections of the 18th Century
An anatomical theater and its dissected murderess are the subjects of a bloody opera on the physical nature of evil.
Art
Training to Be a Spy at the Brooklyn Museum
Top Secret International (State I), part of the Public Theater’s annual Under the Radar Festival, is an immersive play that reframes espionage through art.
Art
In New Drawings, Kara Walker Traces American Histories of Christianity and Racism
Her tumultuous charcoal drawings enshrine an unresolved US narrative filled with racism, martyrdom, and political violence.
Art
An Exclusive Glimpse of a Gilded Salon of Presidential Power
For his elegant new film, Laurent Grasso was allowed to film in the Salon Doré, the golden-hued office of the President of France.
Books
An Atlas for the Mythical Places that Have Populated Our Maps
The Phantom Atlas chronicles centuries of fictional locations that were included on maps of the world.
Art
When You Want to Be Part of the Nation, but It Won't Let You In
What is a nation, and who gets to belong?
Art
An Artist Reinvents Herself to Mine the Fictions of America
Genevieve Gaignard makes the personal political while also creating new American mythologies.