Arts

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

The Magician

“Raphael would portray these same disciples in a painted vortex that forms—an image of pure wind—the center of his phenomenal Transfiguration, spinning each of them off on his own headlong spiral trajectory, every twist and turn of a body in space now totally under control.”

December 16, 2004 issue

Lucian Freud’s Pitiless Eye

Violent, curious, nosy, intrusive—sometimes tender—Lucian Freud was a pitiless observer of the human body, and of human vulnerability and frailty.

August 22, 2016

Gold & Geld

“Does its subject’s lush, heavy-lipped, dark-browed, green-eyed face, beneath a black blob of hair and above a silver-encrusted collar, really mesh with the astonishing efflorescence of perspective-free patterns—eyes, spirals, squares, streaks, and splotches, ostensibly related to the wistful sitter’s dress, robe, and armchair?”

December 20, 2007 issue

Sketching an Uncertain Future

Eleanor Davis is one of the very best cartoonists working today.

November 2, 2019

He Ridiculed the Nazis

The carefree world of Father and Son gives little hint of the fate that would be suffered by its creator, E. O. Plauen, who had become world-famous for his comic strips and was driven to take his own life.

September 14, 2017

Saul Steinberg’s Universe

Saul Steinberg’s images grow and even live on the page; somewhere in the viewing of a Steinberg drawing the reader follows not only his line, but also his line of thought.

May 26, 2017

Virtuoso of the Tiny

Richard McGuire’s Sequential Drawings: The New Yorker Series is a tribute to the spot illustration, the unsung toiler of the magazine page.

November 17, 2016

When They Came from Another World

What if the future is as real as the past?

January 19, 2017 issue

India’s Streaming Auteurs

Realistic depictions of religion, sexuality, and politics have been off-limits in Bollywood for decades, but in recent years directors were able to bypass censorship by moving to the small screen.

July 1, 2021 issue

The Ministry of Mr. Rogers

He saw his show as a faithful companion to young people and even a daily seminar for parents

January 17, 2019 issue

A Telenovela Macondo

Netflix’s adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude has skimmed off only the melodramatic and the anecdotal parts of Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece.

February 27, 2025 issue