J. Hoberman

Comic​ strips and comic books are quintessential creations of America’s 20th-century culture industry. They are also perhaps its lowliest products. Yet this trash medium, with its presumed audience of subliterates and kids, has produced its own geniuses, not all of whom were Disney prodigies of brand creation and marketing. Chester Gould, the hard-boiled newsman responsible for the...

Futurism,​ the first organised avant-garde art movement of the 20th century, appeared in Italy in the years before the First World War. Fascism, the original self-identified totalitarian political ideology, no less brashly expressive of modern times, emerged in Italy in the years immediately following the war. Neorealism, a spontaneous development without leaders and with few manifestos,...

‘Should​ the street be considered one of the fine arts?’ Fernand Léger asked in 1928. He was thinking of the objects displayed in Parisian shop windows. Others have been more impressed by junk, debris and things abandoned. The street as both source and inspiration is everywhere apparent in the exhibition at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery (until 1 April),

‘It’s easy not to be a Nazi when no Hitler is around,’ Hans-Jürgen Syberberg commented in his filmed interview with the aged, unashamed Führer-familiar Winifred Wagner in 1975. Eighty years after Hitler came to power in Germany, is it possible to imagine the world when the Third Reich was new? Before September 1939 and even after the Second World War began, the...

‘The Russians have everything in name, and nothing in reality,’ the Marquis de Custine observed in 1839, comparing the empire to a blank book with a magnificent table of contents. ‘How many distant regiments are there without men, and cities and roads which exist only in idea!’ The entire country was but a façade pasted on Europe – or, as might have been...