Arts

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Jed Perl

The Painter’s Shadow World

Morgan Meis’s Three Paintings Trilogy is the most exciting new writing about the visual arts to appear in a generation.

April 23, 2026 issue

Alice Kaplan

Misjudgment at Nuremberg

In James Vanderbilt’s film Nuremberg, about the trial of the major Nazi war criminals, the questioning of Russell Crowe’s all too charming Hermann Göring becomes a moment of invented high drama.

April 23, 2026 issue

David A. Bell

‘A Vast Symphony of Stone’

In his renovation of Notre-Dame, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc projected his own Romantic vision of the Middle Ages onto the Gothic cathedral.

April 23, 2026 issue

James Romm

The Marbles & the Muses

A. E. Stallings’s reflections on the Elgin Marbles illustrate how beautiful objects have the power to inspire both the noblest effusions and the pettiest efforts at acquisition.

April 9, 2026 issue

Pablo Scheffer

The Tennissance

Two young tennis stars have revived the sport by embodying the sort of athletic-aesthetic duality that made Nadal and Federer so fascinating.

April 9, 2026 issue

Andrew Katzenstein

‘Not Insane!’

The Firesign Theatre, a comedy group formed in the 1960s, created surreal albums that mixed satire and science fiction, and inspired a generation of misfits.

April 9, 2026 issue

Jenny Uglow

Rivals of the Landscape

The more we learn about J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, the more extraordinary it seems that two such breathtakingly original painters could emerge and flourish at the same time in the British art world.

April 9, 2026 issue

Michael Dirda

Dantès’s Inferno

When I first read The Count of Monte Cristo, it offered something irresistible: the possibility of reinvention. If, against all odds, Edmond Dantès could remake himself, so could I.

April 9, 2026 issue

Private Life Podcast

Martin Filler, read by Maya Lin

Maya Lin Reads ‘Ghosts in the House’

Episode 12 of Private Life

April 29, 2026

Martin FIller, in conversation with Jarrett Earnest

Martin Filler on Writing, Frank Gehry, and the Dramatic World of Architecture

Episode 11 of Private Life

April 22, 2026

Namwali Serpell, in conversation with Jarrett Earnest

Namwali Serpell on Toni Morrison, Criticism, and Narrative Empathy

Episode 9 of Private Life

April 9, 2026

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Be My Florentine

Andrew Butterfield

The Magic of Donatello

“Since the end of classical antiquity nearly a thousand years before, no Italian sculptor had tried anything so bold in the carving of marble sculpture.”

April 23, 2015 issue

Julian Bell

The Mystery of the Great Piero

“What do we see in Piero della Francesca’s work? An extraordinarily fine mind contemplating an ordinary settledness.”

June 19, 2014 issue

H.W. Janson

Della Robbia Disputes

“The justly famous ten reliefs of the Cantoria display a distinctive style heavily dependent on Graeco-Roman sources that has no direct antecedents on Florentine soil. How did Luca della Robbia develop it?”

April 17, 1980 issue

Garry Wills

The Loveliest Doors

All other great works of art in Florence’s Baptistery of San Giovanni were considered mere preludes or accompaniments to the supreme masterpiece of its doors.

November 8, 2007 issue

Susan Sontag (1933–2004)

Susan Sontag

A selection of Susan Sontag’s contributions to the New York Review. Read all of her essays here.

Susan Sontag

Fascinating Fascism

February 6, 1975 issue

Susan Sontag

Illness as Metaphor

January 26, 1978 issue

Susan Sontag

Photography

October 18, 1973 issue

Susan Sontag

Godot Comes to Sarajevo

October 21, 1993 issue

Susan Sontag

Simone Weil

February 1, 1963 issue

Susan Sontag

Freak Show

November 15, 1973 issue

The Latest

Max Norman

Quoting the World

There may be no unifying style in Eugène Atget’s photographs—only an uncanny realism that still arrests viewers a century after his death.

April 30, 2026

Martin Filler, read by Maya Lin

Maya Lin Reads ‘Ghosts in the House’

Episode 12 of Private Life

April 29, 2026

James Romm

Vengeance Is Theirs

In Shakespeare’s most infamous play, a disordered Roman state becomes the backdrop for nihilism, bloodshed, and scrambled moral hierarchies.

April 26, 2026

Jo Livingstone

We Goofed

A new exhibition celebrates the humble poetry of errata.

April 25, 2026

Susan Tallman

Manet and Morisot: Game On

An important exhibition showcases a painterly repartee that altered the trajectory of the two artists’ work and, by extension, modern art itself.

May 14, 2026 issue

Jed Perl

Art for Our Age of Chaos

The 2026 Whitney Biennial and the New Museum’s exhibition “New Humans: Memories of the Future” are attempts to respond to a world full of darkness, trauma, and strife.

May 14, 2026 issue

Ben Davis

Visions of Depravity

Ceija Stojka, who survived the Romani Holocaust, came to painting later in life to preserve the horrors of her childhood.

May 14, 2026 issue

Dawn Chan

Inflatable Life

Paul Chan’s eerily animated sculptures pose the question of who gets to identify humanity in others.

May 14, 2026 issue

Nicole Rudick

Seeing by Hand

“I feel my fingers have eyes,” June Leaf once said. The need to literally feel her way through her work is a primary subject of her art.

May 14, 2026 issue

Julian Bell

Drawn to the Void

Joseph Wright of Derby introduced chiaroscuro to British audiences, using everything from blazing bladders to ivory planets to illuminate his dazzled subjects.

May 14, 2026 issue