Jed Perl

Impassioned Ferocity

A critic’s power lies in the testing of deeply held beliefs about the nature of art and art’s place in the world against the experience of specific artworks.

A Century of Surrealism

One hundred years after André Breton launched the Surrealist movement, we’re still trying to make sense of its aims and effects.

Echoes of Eternity

The critic Arlene Croce found in classical ballet timeless values in a timely form, but she looked to modern dance for the reverse: timely values taking on a timeless form.

Ralph Ellison’s Alchemical Camera

The novelist’s photographs reveal an aestheticizing impulse that is difficult to reconcile with the relentless seriousness of his observations and critiques of American society.

Succumbing to Spectacle

During the last half-century, artists, curators, and scholars have been increasingly preoccupied with the idea of spectacle and with how to embrace, critique, or co-opt the power of work that envelops and overwhelms the viewer.

Reimagining the Ordinary

The French artist Jean Hélion approached painting with a philosophical precision, each style a hypothesis to be investigated and tested.

Picasso’s Transformations

Pablo Picasso reconceived everything he touched, but fifty years after his death his transformative art has been eclipsed by Andy Warhol’s art of appropriation and replication.

The Modern Hephaestus

David Smith was an expressionist with an all-or-nothing approach to art who reveled in the violent acts of metalworking that created new forms of permanence.

‘Art’ or ‘Research’?

The Chilliest Mystique

Two exhibitions of computer and video art demonstrate that technological savvy and artistic naiveté all too often go hand in hand.

Going to Extremes

For Matisse art was a perpetual emergency, a matter of testing boundaries, breaking through.

Between Abstraction and Representation

Artists today think they no longer have to choose between two opposed artistic traditions. But what is being lost in this eclecticism?

The Power of Ornament

An exhibition at the Drawing Center explores the astonishing variety that the ornamental impulse has inspired across centuries and continents but never grapples with the aesthetic questions it raises.

Proud of His Conundrums

The midcentury art critic Harold Rosenberg skewered his fellow New York intellectuals as a “herd of independent minds,” but his own work has more striking provocations than deep conclusions.

Colors in Conversation

Joan Mitchell was a Romantic whose paintings join nature and feelings with an operatic lyricism.

Interpreting Nature

A transcendent exhibition of Cézanne’s drawings at MoMA reveals an artist who is drunk on sensation but always sober enough to pin it down.

See More, Think More

The art historian Leo Steinberg tried in his writings to reconcile a passion that was inarguably subjective with a desire for something like objectivity.

Cubism’s Poet

Writer, painter, and a close friend of Picasso, Max Jacob was part of the glory of interwar bohemian Paris.

The Cults of Wagner

Alex Ross’s ‘Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music’

‘Almost Certain’

Did Félix Fénéon plant a bomb at the Restaurant Foyot?