Art en passant

“Why talk about arts and letters when people are being gunned down in the streets?” Zadie Smith asks in “Art for Our Sakes,” from the June 25, 2026, issue of the Review. The essay is a sort of refinement of “In Defense of Fiction,” which she wrote during President Trump’s first term in order to make the case for the novel’s capacity for compassion and the reader’s capacity for discernment. In light of the second Trump term and its calamities, she argues that “in a world of sheer power, where might is right, art is obviously toothless.” What do art and literature offer beyond empathy? “We can agree that empathy’s no magical cure-all…and that it won’t, by itself, change laws or bestow rights on anybody,” writes Smith. Instead, she turns to a surprising concept: “What kind of autonomy does art have?… Its distance from the prerogatives of the powerful is precisely where its force of resistance lies.”

And so we look at paintings anew. At Jack Shainman Gallery’s two New York locations, in Chelsea and Tribeca, a show of work by the British painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, on view through the end of July, offers an unexpected solidarity. In her review, which appears on the Review’s new “At the Galleries” page, Lovia Gyarkye writes that Yiadom-Boakye has, perhaps for the first time, invited viewers “into her subjects’ worlds.” It seems that those subjects—many of them solemn mourners, some of them thoughtful diners eating morsels of pie or fruit—are seeking communion.

Yiadom-Boakye is known, Gyarkye writes, for reflecting “the deep solitude of each of her subjects” and for keeping a transfixing distance from them. In the portraits in her 2017 exhibition at the New Museum, “it was as if Yiadom-Boakye had erected a boundary to protect these solitary Black figures in repose and preserve their serenity.” On the occasion of a show he curated at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, the artist Glenn Ligon clarified in our pages that her  “canvases are not portraits but are instead amalgamations of a wide range of archival materials,” and that her titles—such as Messages from Elsewhere and Greenhouse Fantasies—“suggest that blackness is a product of the imagination.” Reviewing the New Museum exhibition, Darryl Pinckney argued, “Her approach to portrait painting—the choice to impose a challenge, a framing device, some sort of distancing mechanism—also speaks of her generation, when painting in particular was unfashionable, and conceptual art, installations, were on the way to becoming the new academic art.”

“The body is a road to the face, the central concern,” Pinckney wrote of Yiadom-Boakye. For Huguette Caland, whose show at Lisson Gallery in New York is on view through July 25, the body leads elsewhere. In her review, Nicole Rudick writes about Caland’s series Bribes de corps, which translates roughly as “body bits”: “rich, sensuous clouds of color that depict isolated parts of the body. In one, a narrow area of white peeks from between a pair of pink loaf-like shapes that might be thighs. Other compositions are less easy to identify but no less alluring: a fulsome magenta square pinched into round quarters, for instance, or two areas of yellow, one softly mottled and the other intensely golden, divided by a thin, red-hot line.” Caland, who was born and raised in Lebanon but spent much of her life in France and California, was similarly peripatetic in her art, moving from figuration to abstraction to collages and sculptures, looking, perhaps, to understand “her place in the world, one bit at a time.”

At the Galleries

Lovia Gyarkye
Shades of Solace

In Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s new paintings, mourners find clarity through communion—a departure for an artist known for her masterful portraits of solitude.

Nicole Rudick
Beirut and Beyond

The idea of home—in a city, in one’s body, in a corpus of visual art—runs through an exhibition of inventive work by the Lebanese artist Huguette Caland.

On Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Darryl Pinckney
The Trickster’s Art

“Her portraits have attitude, but they are not heroic, just as she has said that she is suspicious of beauty and instead goes after the sensual, what the skin gives off.”

—August 17, 2017

Glenn Ligon
Kinds of Blue Black

“Yiadom-Boakye’s canvases are not portraits but are instead amalgamations of a wide range of archival materials. Her titles suggest that blackness is a product of the imagination.”

—September 30, 2017

Recent Essays on Art from the Review

Zadie Smith
Art for Our Sakes

Why should we go on making things?

Sanford Schwartz
The Fairy-Tale Hour

An exhibition of Paul Klee’s late works focuses on his depictions of the atmosphere of violence and intimidation in Germany after the Nazis came to power.

Clair Wills
Mighty Real

Tracey Emin’s art has often tackled taboo subjects, including rape, abortion, and sexual abuse, but her multifarious works are always bracingly antitherapeutic.

David S. Reynolds
Image Crazy

In the decades before the Civil War, innovations in printmaking and photography created a “rage for pictures” that transformed American visual culture.

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