Books
How Cy Twombly Spliced Poetry into His Art
In Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint, Mary Jacobus offers a fresh and intricate study of Twombly’s citations and overall engagement with verse.
Review
Art
Revisiting America’s Dead in Posthumous Portraits from the 19th Century
The 19th century saw the rise of the posthumous portrait when, through photographs and paintings, people preserved the faces of departed loved ones.
Performance
In a New Staging of the Tale of William Tell, the Only Flaw Is the Audience
Musically and visually, the Metropolitan Opera’s first staging of Gioachino Rossini's Guillaume Tell in over 80 years is a tremendous success.
Books
Death by Wallpaper: The Alluring Arsenic Colors that Poisoned the Victorian Age
Lucinda Hawksley's book Bitten by Witch Fever chronicles the rise of poisonous pigments in the 19th century through the burgeoning British wallpaper trade.
Art
Confronting the Contradictions of Our Tech-Obsessed Culture
In her solo exhibition at Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel, Addie Wagenknecht boils down the experiences of postinternet life and then alchemizes them.
Books
Reader’s Diary: David Beech's ‘Art and Value’
What in the world is art worth?
Music
Singer-Songwriters Confess Their Feelings: Mitski, Nick Cave, Jamila Woods, Angel Olsen
When personal expression is your aesthetic mode, then aesthetic quality depends on quality of personality.
Art
Scrap Master
Imagine the wayward progeny of the textile artist and printmaker Anni Albers and the Mexican geometric artist Gunther Gerzso, experimenting with the wild palette generated by a computer, and you get a glimpse into what Martha Clippinger is up to.
Art
Crowd Control
Robert Birmelin’s paintings and drawings of a world going haywire bring together all sorts of visual possibilities, including multiple focal points, compressed juxtapositions of near and far, clearly defined details beside blurred and partially transparent passages.
Art
“A Chance, A Voice”: Daniel Heyman Reimagines American Narratives
Daniel Heyman’s layered paintings, prints, and portraits possess an almost decorative lightness that often belies a more crucial and devastating truth.
Art
Kate Levant's Chicago Witches
Formally, Kate Levant’s work has become more rigorous and complex since Blood Drive, and the art-activism of that show has given way to encoded references touching on sociopolitical issues.
Art
The Political Abstractions of Beverly Buchanan
The argument driving this engrossing show is that Buchanan was actually a thematically ambitious and multi-faceted artist who participated in the avant-garde movements of her day, bringing to them a distinct perspective informed by her sense of identity as black and female.