Welcome to “Just Looking,” the Review’s new newsletter dedicated exclusively to visual art.

Our annual Art Issue is now arriving on newsstands and in mailboxes, and on the very last page you’ll find “At the Galleries,” our brand-new column. At a rocky moment for art criticism, “At the Galleries” will focus on the most thought-provoking exhibitions of the moment, with a particular emphasis on contemporary art.

Since the Review’s first issue, in 1963, when James Ackerman wrote about The Eternal Present Volume I: The Beginning of Art—“to confront Miro and Klee with cave painting is no more revealing than to confront Picasso’s classicizing figures with the Parthenon pediments”—the magazine has made art one of its primary concerns. Contributors initially covered books about art (here’s Clement Greenberg, under the guise of reviewing four photo books, on the art of the photograph), but soon enough they ventured into museums and galleries as well (here’s Francis Haskell in 1965 traipsing about the Hermitage in “Leningrad”). In our pages and on our website, distinguished art historians rub shoulders with critics, poets, and artists. Today they include David Salle, Susan Tallman, Ben Lerner, Jenny Uglow, Jarrett Earnest, Ingrid D. Rowland, and dozens more.

Here in “Just Looking,” every month we’ll collect the magazine’s reviews of gallery and museum shows alongside in-depth writing about artists and art history. This April, we are pleased to bring you the inaugural installment of “At the Galleries,” as well as some of the most exciting essays we’ve published this year, including, from our Art Issue, Jed Perl on the Whitney Biennial and “New Humans: Memories of the Future” at the reopened New Museum; Coco Fusco on “Wifredo Lam: When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream” at MoMA; and Elaine Blair on “How to Be a Guerrilla Girl” at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

We hope you enjoy just looking…

David Teniers the Younger: Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in his Painting Gallery in Brussels, 1651 (detail)

At the Galleries

Dawn Chan
Inflatable Life

On Paul Chan at Greene Naftali

Ben Davis
Visions of Depravity

On Ceija Stojka at the Drawing Center

From the Art Issue

Jed Perl
Art for Our Age of Chaos

The 2026 Whitney Biennial and the New Museum’s exhibition “New Humans: Memories of the Future” are attempts to respond to a world full of darkness, trauma, and strife.

Coco Fusco
A Vital Unconscious

Wifredo Lam’s paintings spring from a unique synthesis of European modernism and Afro-Cuban consciousness.

Elaine Blair
The Masked Avengers

The Guerrilla Girls used indisputable data and a dry, polished style to show that the art world, contrary to its self-conception, was deeply retrograde.

Recent Essays on Art from the Review

Carolina Miranda
Poisonous Objects

Two exhibitions in Los Angeles respond to the racist monuments to Confederate soldiers that have been erected all over the United States.

Jed Perl
The Painter’s Shadow World

Morgan Meis’s Three Paintings Trilogy is the most exciting new writing about the visual arts to appear in a generation.

Recent Essays on Art from the NYR Online

Walker Mimms
Dead Ringers

The sculptor Tatiana Trouvé makes dispassionate, ironic anti-monuments using profoundly inconvenient methods of a distant past.

Jeremy Lybarger
A Workingman’s Surrealist

The artist H. C. Westermann cribbed from science fiction, pulp novels, and comic strips to make impeccable constructions from utilitarian stock.

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