1+ week, 4+ day ago   (708+ words) Historicism’s Modernity: Modernism is History The Brooklyn Rail Among the shibboleths of the orthodox narrative touted by MoMA and American art history textbooks for much of the twentieth century, none has proved more stubborn than this: that modernism and historicism…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (989+ words) Portrait of Malcolm Peacock, pencil on paper by Phong H. Bui. Malcolm Peacock: I think that what I’ve become interested in—and in fact what I was already interested in prior to making Five—is the situation the work is traveling…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (179+ words) Willem de Kooning, Untitled (Reclining Figure), ca. 1945. Oil and charcoal on Masonite, 15 × 19 ⅞ inches. © 2026 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy the Collection of Gene and Sueyun Locks. After immigrating as a stowaway from the Netherlands…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (1039+ words) The Brooklyn Rail With the recent return to figuration and ascendance of portraiture in contemporary painting, historical reference has returned as a viable method to convey authenticity and engage with tradition in an unironic manner.Now, artists wade through six…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (871+ words) Cecilia Vicuña, Sam Frésquez, Lola Ayisha Ogbara: Spatial Poems The Brooklyn Rail Installation view: Spatial Poems, MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA, 2026–27. Courtesy MASS MoCA. Spatial Poems set a big agenda for itself with an “aim to disrupt the art world’s…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (1135+ words) Weiting Liu (Rail): IX XI is, apparently, a stylized rendering of 9/11. Can we start with your intention behind this stylization? Sean Wilsey: Much of the film is contained in the title. Visually, “IX XI” evokes the Twin Towers, which I…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (698+ words) The Brooklyn Rail The Western art historical canon is a selective construction of the past, one that buries the cultural, technical, and social contributions of marginalized groups in favor of a narrative that privileges a European patriarchal perspective. Revisions to…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (652+ words) Portrait of Adam Caruso, pencil on paper by Phong H. Bui. Nile Greenberg (Rail): It seems that architecture is in a state of turmoil. Your practice has been faithful to architecture as a source. Faith in architecture’s ability to be meaningful…...

3+ week, 4+ day ago   (173+ words) The Brooklyn Rail The same relation emerges in the water/landscape paintings, whose near-abstraction is inversely related to the geometry and fracture of the urban works. Water becomes a reflective surface of distorted, dispersed, and doubled images. Estes does not…...

3+ week, 4+ day ago   (683+ words) The Brooklyn Rail Too often, as Sydney J. Freedberg writes in his 1970 survey Painting in Italy: 1500–1600, Giorgio Vasari has been “characterized as a good writer and a bad painter.“ Inspired by that claim, I went to Rome to see this exhibition....