Arts + Culture

William Drenttel|Essays

El Lissitzky for Pesach

We all have images in our mind of the work of the Russian artist El Lissitzky: formal modernism, geometric constructions, typographic abstractions. This image was enlarged when I encountered the wonderful illustrations from an early book …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Lying Game

Agence France-Presse—Getty ImagesEarlier this week, Nationalist Party protesters in Taiwan picketed their highly disputed political election with doctored images of President Chen Shui-bian: the idea was to depict his shame by …

Rick Poynor|Essays

Jan van Toorn: Arguing with Visual Means

Jan van Toorn’s designs embody an idea about citizenship. They address viewers as critical, thinking individuals who can be expected to take an informed and skeptical interest in the circumstances of their world.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Blanket Statements

Psalm 23 Quilt, Lena MooreAn exhibit currently on view in New York at the American Folk Art Museum explores the visual texture of language through a selection of approximately twenty quilts made by women over the last 150 years. Here, …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Crisis of Intent

Victor Schrager's photographs currently on view at Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York are dream-like and unsettling: richly saturated, they're a cross between the urban drama of a Hugh Ferris drawing and the sobering stillness of a Gerhard …

William Drenttel|Essays

Rationalizing Absence

[Left: Michael Arad + Peter Walker, Reflecting Absence, 2004. Right: James Turrell, Hover, 1983.]I believe these images speak for themselves. When a German photo agency mistakenly released new renderings of the World Trade Center memorial …

William Drenttel|Essays

Adolf Wölfli Invents Design Brut?

[Adolf Wolfli, The Cevelar Mary (Funeral March, p.4038), (detail), 1929]Adolf Wölfli was a mad artist, a schizophrenic who molested three-year-old girls. Born in Bern, Switzerland in 1864, Wölfli died in 1930 at the age of 66. …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Mind the Light, Light the Mind

I was driving in the car recently when one of my children asked me to explain Quakerism. (A propos of what, now, I can't recall, though a similarly unprovoked opening conversational gambit came several days earlier, when the same child …

Rick Poynor|Essays

Remember Picelj

The English-speaking world knows little about the design history of Communist Europe. Few will have heard of the distinguished Slovenian Ivan Picelj. His prints ask us to remember; they are full of yearning.

Michael Bierut|Essays

Mark Lombardi and the Ecstasy of Conspiracy

Artist Mark Lombardi's intricate handdrawn diagrams describing the relationships behind contemporary political and financial scandals are both beautiful objects and extraordinary feats of information design.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

On Visual Empathy

In a world besieged by unpredictable atrocities, don’t we all feel a little emotionally raw? Two recent articles in suggest that visual empathy may more critical to a productive imagination than we thought.

Rick Poynor|Essays

It's a Man's World

Adam Parfrey’s book shows hundreds of men’s magazine covers from the 1950s painted by artists who specialized in depictions of tough guys abusing terrified women. Have we outgrown this kind of thing? Heck no.