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Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Stilled Life The photography of Wolfgang Tillmans. 'To look without fear,' the immense, flabbergastingly installed retrospective of the German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, at the Museum of Modern [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Dutch Magus Excavating the mysteries of Mondrian's greatness. Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian are, to me, the twin groundbreakers of twentieth-century European pictorial art: Picasso the greatest [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Time Capsule 'New York: 1962-1964' captures a period of creative preéminence. This is where I came in. A spectacular historical show of art and documentation, 'New York: [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Confrontations A Robert Colescott retrospective, and 'Women at War.' 'Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott,' a clamorous retrospective at the New Museum, bodes to [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Modern Lore Oscar Howe at the National Museum of the American Indian. In town with some summer hours to spare? Visit 'Dakota Modern: The Art of Oscar [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Scaling Up Early modernism at the Whitney and a show by Walter Price. I relish the abundance of relatively-and poignantly-dud paintings in 'At the Dawn of a [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Going Flat Out The revolutionary charge of Henri Matisse. Henri Matisse's large painting 'The Red Studio' (1911) is so familiar an icon of modern art that you [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl All Together Now The Whitney Biennial returns, after a pandemic-induced delay. The startlingly coherent and bold Whitney Biennial is a material manifesto of late-pandemic institutional culture. Long [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Facing War How artists have pictured conflict. War is the worst evil that people have inflicted upon one another, at costs to themselves, since some hominid discovered [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl In Orbit The men and women who circled around Marcel Duchamp. The word 'salon,' for a starry convocation of creative types, intelligentsia, and patrons, has never firmly [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Holding Forth Faith Ringgold's place in the canon. The most provocative curatorial coup in the Museum of Modern Art's recent series of rehangings of its permanent collection [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Head On The portraits of Hans Holbein the Younger. There's a new old painter in town: Hans Holbein the Younger, the dazzling Renaissance German specialist in portraiture, [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Shocks of the Sublime Charles Ray's sculptures. 'Charles Ray: Figure Ground,' at the Metropolitan Museum, is a succinct retrospective of nineteen works from the more than five-decade-long [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Pleasure Principles Art and commerce unite in shows about Walt Disney and E. McKnight Kauffer. What explains the lasting wonderment of French rococo, the theatrically frivolous, flauntingly [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl A Woman's Work Sophie Taeuber-Arp at MOMA. My first-ever solid take on Sophie Taeuber-Arp, the subject of a wonderful retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, occurred [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Anti-Material Kandinsky at the Guggenheim. Choose a direction for your perusal of 'Vasily Kandinsky: Around the Circle,' a retrospective that lines the upper three-fifths of the Guggenheim [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Far Out 'Surrealism Beyond Borders,' at the Met. 'Surrealism Beyond Borders,' at the Metropolitan Museum, is a huge, deliriously entertaining survey of the transnational spread of a [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Who's We? 'Greater New York,' at MOMA PS1. What did I expect of 'Greater New York,' a show of hundreds of works by forty-seven more or less [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Another Eye 'The New Woman Behind the Camera' at the Met. 'LIFE'S BOURKE-WHITE GOES BOMBING,' reads the headline of an article in Life from March 1, 1943, [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl A Great Unknown Discovering the Norwegian artist Nikolai Astrup. Have you ever heard of a Norwegian artist named Nikolai Astrup, a younger contemporary of Edvard Munch? If [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Drawing Conclusions Cézanne at MOMA. Some of us don't like the inarguably great artist Paul Cézanne as much as we know we are supposed to. I, for [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl A Trip to the Fair Frieze returns to New York. I quite enjoyed Frieze New York, the recent edition of the annual (except last year) international art [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Life Force Niki de Saint Phalle at MOMA PS1. 'Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life,' at moma PS1, is a ravishing and scandalously overdue New York [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl X-Ed Out KAWS at the Brooklyn Museum. In 1992, a Jersey City graffiti artist named Brian Donnelly adopted KAWS as his nom de spray can, only because, [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Mastering Sorrow The New Museum's powerful show of Black American artists. 'Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,' which recently opened at the New Museum, is [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Movements of One Josef Albers and Giorgio Morandi. Imagine bits of wood trapped in eddies of a stream, going round and round atop the waters that flow [...]

'If God is a human invention, good for us! We had to come up with something.' --American art critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl What Are Artists For? The Constructivists, at MOMA. Your first impression of 'Engineer, Agitator, Constructor: The Artist Reinvented, 1918-1939,' a vast and exciting show, at the Museum [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl The Fix We're In Drawing through the pandemic. An invitational show of international artists, '100 Drawings from Now,' at the Drawing Center, in SoHo, speaks to our [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Happy Returns The Metropolitan Museum at a hundred and fifty. 'Here time becomes space.' A famously enigmatic line from Richard Wagner's 'Parsifal' toyed with my mind during [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Off the Wall At eighty-six, Sam Gilliam still astonishes. A powerful show of new work by the Washington, D.C., artist Sam Gilliam, at Pace, is his first [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Us Cosmopolitans Should a Philip Guston retrospective be postponed? Art people have been shocked by the postponement, possibly until 2024, of a major exhibition, 'Philip Guston Now,' [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Waves of Change Goya and the art of survival. A good time for thinking about Francisco Goya is while the world stumbles. Crisis becomes him. 'Goya: A [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Lineage French drawings from the nineteenth century. 'Lines from Life: French Drawings from the Diamond Collection,' at the Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is a pleasant [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl The Great Outdoors A return to Storm King. tifPhotograph by Justine Kurland for The New YorkerMark di Suvero's 'Figolu,' from 2005-11. Some of his works at Storm [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Apart Edward Hopper's solitude. tifSmithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. / Art Resource, N.Y. � 2020 Heirs of Josephine N. Hopper / Licensed by ARS, N.Y'Cape Cod [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Out of the Dark Dorothea Lange and Félix Fénéon at MOMA. tifPhotograph by Dorothea Lange / Courtesy MOMALange's 'Woman of the High Plains, Texas Panhandle,' from 1938.72tif73 [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Painting History The dense layers of Gerhard Richter's work. tif� Gerhard Richter 2019 (08102019)Richter's series 'Birkenau,' from 2014, exposes a thread of sorrow and guilt.94tif� Gerhard Richter [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl The Shape of Things Donald Judd in retrospect. tifPhotograph courtesy MoMA � 2020 Judd Foundation / ARS, New York'Untitled,' from 1967. Judd's objects expose and flavor the [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Wall Power The influence of Mexico's great muralists. tifCourtesy MOMA / � ARS, New YorkJos� Clemente Orozco's 'Zapatistas,' from 1931, lyricizes the revolutionary force.68 The title of [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Target Practice The paintings of Peter Saul. tifCourtesy the artist'Art Critic Suicide,' from 1996, features Hilton Kramer and the author.94 Surprisingly, the timeliest as well as the [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl 77 Sunset Me Notes on an ending. tifPhotograph by Sheree RoseThe author and his wife in 1981. 'Meeting Brooke, having Ada, and getting sober are my life's [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Casualties What can art tell us about war? tifCourtesy the artist and Galerie St. EtienneSue Coe's 'Bomb Shelter,' from 1991, appears in PS1's show about the Gulf [...]

Art Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Neue Galerie The psychic torment of Kirchner's life aside, there's nothing not to love about this overview of the German Expressionist painter, whose uninhibited palette is [...]

Byline: Peter Schjeldahl Rehab The Museum of Modern Art enlarged. tifPhotograph by Ward Roberts for The New YorkerMasterpieces dulled by overfamiliarity spring to second lives by being repositioned.84 The Vatican, [...]