Exhibition co-curated at the New-York Historical Society:

For the editors of LIFE—the first magazine to tell stories with photographs rather than text—the camera was not merely a reporter, but also a potent commentator with the power to frame news and events for a popular audience. For decades, Americans saw the world through the lens of the magazine’s photographers. Yet between the 1930s and the early 1970s, LIFE kept only six women photographers on staff. LIFE’s Women features more than 80 images...

         Jenny Saville’s exhibition Ancestors at Gagosian checks off all the boxes of a bad BFA thesis show—sloppy abstraction mixed with sloppy figuration, some “edgy” mutilated figures, a healthy dose of misplaced angst, and a facile conceptual framework. The paintings themselves are superficial, fast, and constructed without conviction. The emotions Saville proposes have no pathos; they instead seem manufactured, with no empathy or intrigue. We have nothing but pure posturing and...

The Cinema of Catherine Breillat.

by Sophie Bélot. Brill Rodopi 2017. $112.00 hardcover. Also available in e-book. 162 pages.

Reviewed by William J. Simmons

            Catherine Breillat may be one of the most difficult filmmakers to write about with sensitivity, not only because she eschews traditional feminist critiques even as she engages with them...

Does Louise Lawler Make You Cry?

            Louise Lawler’s work has been plagued by totalizing readings about the art market and appropriation. We rely on truisms about the domestication of the art object in Lawler’s photographs of masterpieces in collectors’ homes, and we rehearse a tentatively feminist reading of her critiques of capitalism and male authorship without...