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In late January, The Winter Antiques Show returned to the Park Avenue Armory. Correction: make that 'The Winter Show.' (1) Five years ago, as this venerable exposition fell under new [...]

Back before 'connoisseurship' became a dirty word, a generation of museum directors learned to 'know by the senses' through a Harvard course prosaically titled 'Museum Work and Museum Problems.' Created [...]

The art world never knew what to make of Joe Zucker, a painter who died in May at the age of eighty-two. Just as pirates became a recurring theme in [...]

I beg the reader never to forget when it is asserted of the phenomena of simultaneous contrast, that one color placed beside another receives such a modification from it that [...]

Manet Slash Degas. That's the title of the double headliner now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (1) It might as well be a statement. A physical slash runs clear [...]

The landing began eighty years ago at one minute past midnight. Loudspeakers on the American troopships approaching the coast of Italy gave the signal. In the first moments of September [...]

The Hispanic Society of America was founded over a century ago to reflect a gilded vision of Spain and the Iberian peoples. Since 1904, this institution on Broadway and 155th [...]

On 'Klimt Landscapes' at Neue Galerie, 'Wayne Thiebaud: Summer Days' at Acquavella Galleries & 'Paul Resika: Ode to the Moon' at Bookstein Projects, New York. A distinguishing feature of modern [...]

During the high dudgeon of the Black Lives Matter movement, New York's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts joined the chorus of handwringers with a particular twist. 'In our 60+ [...]

Max Beckmann reflected the traumas of the First World War from his own German perspective. As a volunteer medical orderly in East Prussia in 1914, he wrote to his first [...]

Walking up New York's Riverside Drive can be like visiting a lost civilization, like seeing the streets of Ostia Antica or Old Jerusalem. The curve of the drive, a departure [...]

Israel's judicial woes exploded just as we were approaching Ben Gurion Airport for our flight home. This time, it wasn't Syria or Lebanon, Iran or Egypt, or any of the [...]

Is this bad timing for a show on Russian art and design? 'The Utopian Avant-Garde: Soviet Film Posters of the 1920s,' which opened at New York's Poster House museum in [...]

It is the contemporary fate of Vittore Carpaccio (ca. 1465-1525), the Venetian painter of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, now with a major new exhibition at the National [...]

The article explores the lasting impact of America's Gilded Age through its coinage, particularly focusing on the legacy of the Lincoln cent designed by Victor David Brenner in 1909. It details the artistic transformation of American numismatics under President Theodore Roosevelt, highlighting the influence of artists like Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who redefined the aesthetics of American coins and medals.

We don't often hear about the plight of the overclass, but our progressive elites have a problem. They have become too successful, and their success is starting to show poorly. [...]

Edward Hopper (1882-1967) was the painter of small-town America. This we know. That his small town happened to be New York City, his home for nearly sixty years, we may [...]

Just off the rue Bonaparte, in the Saint-Germain-des-Pres district of Paris, in the courtyard of what is now the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, is a fragment of a fragment. Here on [...]

The museum of today dislikes the museum of yesterday. That's clear enough as the buildings, the collections, and the curators of the past are branded suspect and even denounced by [...]

Winslow Homer (1836-1910) was an artist of few words and much action. His paintings and watercolors depict moments of contemplation often surrounded by turmoil. Man against man, man against nature, [...]

The article reviews the art exhibition "Egon Schiele: Living Landscapes," featuring works by Schiele including portrait paintings, drawing, watercolors and gouaches, at the Neue Galerie in New York City.

The article reviews the exhibition "All About Herzl," featuring founder of modern political Zionism Theodor Herzl, at the Temple Emanu-El Bernard Museum of Judaica, New York during September 17, 2024-January 23, 2025.

The experience of art is never more vital than in times of crisis. During the Blitz, Kenneth Clark's 'picture of the month' restored one masterpiece at a time to the [...]

The Metropolitan Museum of Art reopened to the public in late August. Those of us who lined up outside early shared a special sense of relief at its return. As [...]

Spanish art often dwells in that dark hour before the dawn. The lights are down. The heavens have closed. The eyes adjust while you feel around. Forms lurk as colors [...]

On the evening of October 29,1964, a trio of beach boys sidled their white Cadillac up to the American Museum of Natural History. By the next morning, they had pulled [...]

Venice can be a furnace, as anyone who visits in midsummer will tell you. Beyond the heat of the Adriatic sun, the lagoon city is also a furnace for culture. [...]

What is so wild about If I Ran the Zoo? Don't ask young Gerald McGrew. It was hard to escape the news when, on March 2, the zoo-loving protagonist of [...]

I like to go 'housing' the way many people go birding. What I mean is, I like to classify and call out house styles as I come upon them in [...]

For as long as anyone can remember--until last month, that is--Giovanni Bellini's St. Francis in the Desert (ca. 1480) has lived at a single New York address: One East Seventieth [...]

The demolition of McKim, Mead & White's Pennsylvania Station proved to be the great architectural trauma of New York. It was arguably the worst destruction the city endured in the [...]

There is nothing particularly impressive about Plymouth Rock. As far as famous rocks go, the seaside boulder on which the Pilgrims may have first set foot in the New World [...]

Where could Jacob Lawrence go after 'The Migration Series'? Lawrence's trailblazing work of sixty paintings, originally called 'The Migration of the Negro,' pulled together the story of the Great Migration [...]

Pandemics are not always biological. Sometimes they are ideological. This summer certainly saw a plague of ruin descend over the cultural landscape. Even more alarming, there was little immune response [...]

John Singer Sargent could trace out subjects who were larger than life and as illustrious as his brush. He drew the brilliance of the brilliant. 'John Singer Sargent: Portraits in [...]

The history of culture is a history of plague. The Abrahamic religions were forged in it. The deity Horns might be a bigger bird today were it not for the [...]

The Frick Collection will soon be strictly for the birds--or, more strictly, for a goldfinch. It was a goldfinch, or, strictly speaking, the painting The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius (1654), [...]

The declining fortunes of all but the biggest New York galleries continue to have a chilling effect on the world of art. By nurturing artists, cultivating collectors, and opening their [...]

The subject of ghosts, both their literary and spectral forms, was a lifelong fascination for Russell Kirk. He was a scholar of speculative fiction, also called 'genre' fiction. These days, [...]

If the architecture of the American university is said to have a common style, it surely must be the style of aspiration. With no native vernacular academic form, there is [...]

Paintings of the nude can still be shocking, just not in the way you might think. The real nudity of 'William Bailey: Looking Through Time,' now on view at the [...]

The Venice Biennale, that strange pageant of contemporary fashions, offers the opportunity, if not the necessity, to explore the real art of La Serenissima. At the furthest extreme from the [...]

Hudson Yards, the real estate development that opened in March on the far west side of midtown Manhattan, is an astonishing feat of American industry. This is especially true at [...]

Jeffrey Hart, who died in February, was a literary scholar whose genius was to bring you into the storyline. He was a character who could demonstrate your own role in [...]

You might have expected the $100 million expansion of the Norton Museum of Art, in West Palm Beach, Florida, to go wrong. Just consider the backstory: An ambitious director (Hope [...]

Andrew Wyeth was born a century ago this year. To mark the centennial, the United States Postal Service issued a series of stamps and keepsakes, with a launch ceremony last [...]

The article focuses on the significance of the arrival of Giorgione's painting "The Three Philosophers" in the U.S. for a special exhibition at the Frick Collection's temporary location, along with its reunion with Giovanni Bellini's "St. Francis in the Desert." Topics include the historical context of the paintings, the meticulous curation by Xavier F. Salomon, and the tribute to the Frick's outgoing director, Ian Wardropper.

Funny what you remember from childhood, but I will never forget an exhibition of Red Grooms I attended when I was six. The show was called 'Ruckus Manhattan.' It featured [...]

If there were ever an artist in need of some reevaluation, it must be the painter Thomas Cole (1801-1848). Cole's remarkable life has been long overshadowed by his outsize legacy [...]

What's a museum? This is a question I have asked more than once in The New Criterion. It's one this magazine has been asking since its first issue. And it's [...]