Barry Schwabsky | The Nation

A tour of the New York art galleries reveals a number of talented artists exploring the possibilities of "bad" representational painting.

Gustave Courbet's blunt pictorial style and taciturn sensibility prefigured the ambivalence and photographic exactitude of modern painting.

The best location for Lawrence Weiner's conceptual art is in the viewer's own imagination.

Taking stock of the new New Museum.

Museums can't get enough of Kara Walker, whose silhouettes of the history of slavery seem to be a nightmare she's trying to enjoy.

Reconsidering the life and legacy of avant-garde artist and poet Francis Picabia.

Gordon Matta-Clark's art displays how empty spaces illuminate the structures they are housed in.

Diego Velázquez was a restless innovator, a painter who slyly revealed the ordinariness of his exalted subjects--one is almost tempted to call him modern.

Two new biographies of Clement Greenberg take the measure of an ambitious art critic who had a knack for predicting success.

Four editors of October magazine trace the history of
contemporary art. Though Art Since
1900 seeks to be comprehensive, its writers leave out entire movements and impose moralistic
judgments on the artists and art they profile.