Art
Caravaggio’s Fascination with Death
The artist's last two paintings are as impetuous, violent, and racked with guilt as Caravaggio was himself.
Weekend
Art
When Parisians Took to the Barricades
In 1848 and 1871, the working-class citizens of Paris rose up and took over sections of the city, governing themselves in what would briefly become a large-scale experiment in an alternative society.
Art
Minoru Onoda, Circle Master from Japan's Gutai Group
Onoda daydreamed about the power of his dots and circles to poke a defiant thumb in the eye of “the world we are now living in."
Art
At the Venice Biennale, Pinocchio Is a Trojan Horse for Capitalist Critique
In the Scottish Pavilion, Rachel Maclean’s film Spite Your Face lays bare how greed corrupts so deeply that even helpless souls are turned savage.
Books
Photographs Document Arctic Change on Our Frozen Seas
Pictures like Diane Tuft's and Stefan Hunstein's eventually may be all that remains to remind us of the Arctic’s terrible beauty.
Art
Required Reading
This week, the earliest humans, an enjoyable Bernadette Corporation takedown, feminist craftivism, Afrosurrealism, Arizona's strange Confederate monuments, and more.
Art
Weekend Words: Stink
"Life is a God-damned, stinking, treacherous game and nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand are bastards."
Books
How Not to Look at Pictures
Robert Walser was likely to find in images a reason to look into his own fervent imagination.
Art
Will Someone Please Give Ellen Berkenblit a Museum Show Already?
It is as if each of Berkenblit's distinctive works is an isolated, oversized panel from an unknown cartoon strip: we have no idea what happened before or what will happen next.
Art
Storms of Sea, Sky, and Paint
The driving force behind Peder Balke’s painting is his desire to harness paint’s capacious materiality, from impasto to liquidity, to evoke the changing, often tumultuous physicality of his subject matter.
Art
Trump in Hell
They used to call Satan the Greedy one, the Father of Lies. There's a new boss in the underworld who's gonna show them how its done.
Interview
Beer with a Painter: Paul Wackers
The cozy studio environment and the casual, gonzo aesthetic of the ceramic objects, not to mention Wackers’s personality, may bely how technically precise and complexly orchestrated his paintings are.