3+ day, 16+ hour ago   (1114+ words) The Brooklyn Rail In their monograph, At the Edge of Where God Built, L.E.FT Architects (Ziad Jamaleddine and Makram el Kadi) not only present ten years of architectural practice, but also offer an important manifesto for the discipline, laying out…...

3+ day, 15+ hour ago   (757+ words) The Brooklyn Rail The exhibition Never The Less at Guild Hall in East Hampton, New York, presents 185 small paintings (measuring 10 by 8 inches or vice versa) and ten large paintings of varying sizes by Ross Bleckner. This contrast in scale highlights…...

3+ day, 15+ hour ago   (1562+ words) The Brooklyn Rail Babek Ahmedpoor in Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987). Courtesy Janus Films. A school notebook must be returned to its owner in Abbas Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House? (1987). The entire film rests on this deceptively simple premise:…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (184+ words) With the recent return to figuration and ascendance of portraiture in contemporary painting, historical reference has returned as a viable method to convey authenticity and engage with tradition in an unironic manner.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 hundred years of…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (1030+ words) Welcome Back, Maurice Béjart The Brooklyn Rail American critics loved to hate Maurice Béjart, the late French choreographer who would have turned one hundred next year. To glance at the scathing missives that tended to follow performances of his work…...

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   (542+ words) The Brooklyn Rail On a corner that formerly housed a gas station in the gentrifying neighborhood of Clinton Hill, a clean white box with massive windows and orange entry points, 272 Greene Avenue, designed by Inès Lamunière of Switzerland and architect…...

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   (833+ words) The Brooklyn Rail In school, I was interested in tabula rasa. I had this rather naïve notion that there was a kind of political and ethical purity in the avant-garde, which was pretty much outlawed in the Soviet Union, and…...

1+ week, 4+ day ago   (1568+ words) The Brooklyn Rail Contemplating painting should be work. The monks of the Convent of San Marco in Florence spent a sizeable portion of their mature lives sitting in their cells staring at Fra Angelico’s frescoes, praying for the salvation of…...