Category Archives: Arts & Literature

Art History: ‘Still Life With Apples’ By Paul Cézanne

The Fitzwilliam Museum – This painting was executed sometime between 1877, when Cézanne exhibited for the second and last time with the Impressionist painters, and 1878, when he returned to live in Provence. Cézanne himself claimed that he planned to conquer Paris with an apple, and his paintings of this single fruit have in fact proved to be among his most admired works.

Bought by Degas for 100 francs in January 1896, it was acquired in Paris by John Maynard Keynes at the sale of the contents of Degas’s studio in March 1918. It is one of the most celebrated of all his still-lifes, and, through Keynes’s friendship with the painter and writer Roger Fry, and the circle of Bloomsbury writers, came to be crucial in the dissemination of knowledge of Cézanne’s work in England.

Art: The ‘Dazzling’ Artist Studios Of Damian Elwes

Matisse’s Studio in Collioure

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Gauguin’s Studio in Marquesas Islands

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Monet’s Studio in Giverny

DAMIAN ELWES is a British/American artist with studios in Santa Monica and Colombia.

Elwes chooses a moment in time when an artist is at their most inventive and then examines what was going on in their studios.

Website

Books: TLS/Times Literary Supplement – Oct 28, 2022

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This week’s @TheTLS , featuring Helen Vendler on Matthew Hollis’s biography of The Waste Land; Vernon Bogdanor on the UK’s future; Christopher Priest on Terry Pratchett; Felipe Fernández-Armesto on lying; @irinibus on the creative potential of constraints – and more.

Preview: London Review Of Books – Nov 3, 2022

London Review of Books (LRB) – November 3, 2022:

Kissinger’s Duplicity

Charles Glass – Although World War Three had come perilously close, Martin Indyk absolves Henry Kissinger: Soviet actions were ‘yet again characterised by an ultimate timidity in the face of American resolve’. ‘Resolve’ is one way of describing the risk of nuclear Armageddon. Another is ‘recklessness’.

Wartime Objectors

Susan Pedersen – The problem with individual conscientious objection is that we are mutually dependent whether we acknowledge it or not. You may refuse to get vaccinated on grounds of conscience but will benefit from herd immunity if others do; you may refuse to pay taxes but will still get your rubbish collected; you may refuse to take up arms in war but will be protected from harm if others serve.

Droning Things

James Meek – If an innocuous merchant ship passing through the Baltic or the North Sea had a handful of ordinary, secretly armed trucks lashed to its deck, would any Nato country notice? Would the drones be detected or intercepted? If they were launched and hit their targets, could it ever be proven where they originated? As a threat to Europe, this is creative licence. But using swarms of Shahed-136s and other forms of missile to destroy a country’s energy system, on the eve of winter, is exactly what Russia is doing to Ukraine.

Arts Preview: The Getty Magazine – Fall 2022

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The Getty Magazine – Fall 2022: Featuring Conserving Black Modernism, our recently launched effort to conserve Modern Movement architecture by Black architects and designers, plus more behind-the-scenes info on all things Getty.

The Art of Exhibition Design

How to put on a really 16 great show

Egyptomania!

An international passion for Egypt fueled the discovery of King Tut’s 22 tomb

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Oct 31, 2022

People dressed in Halloween costumes including a vampire a pirate and Batman walk through Grand Central.

The New Yorker – Inside the October 31, 2022 Issue:

Will Sanctions Against Russia End the War in Ukraine?

D.C. bureaucrats have worked stealthily with allies to open a financial front against Putin.

How Samuel Adams Helped Ferment a Revolution

Portrait of Samuel Adams writing on a chair.

A virtuoso of the eighteenth-century version of viral memes and fake news, he had a sense of political theatre that helped create a radical new reality.

Sergio García Sánchez’s “Old Haunts”

The artist discussed Día de todos los santos and taking inspiration from the Old Masters.

By Françoise Mouly, Art by Sergio García Sánchez

International Art: Apollo Magazine – November 2022

Apollo Magazine – Inside the November 2022 Issue:

  • The enduring genius of the Peanuts comics
  • The tussle over Tutankhamun’s tomb
  • A Chinese dragon-handled cup in Baltimore
  • Around the world in early colour photographs
  • Plus: art and illness, plastic sushi, auction-house machinations and reviews of William Kentridge, Renaissance lace and the Empress Eugénie in England

Interviews: Author John Irving – “A Writer’s Life”

CBS Sunday Morning – Author John Irving has mined his personal history and obsessions as the starting point for such acclaimed works of fiction as “The World According to Garp” and “The Cider House Rules.” Now 80, he has published his first novel in seven years, “The Last Chairlift,” a tale of sexual politics and ghosts. He talks with correspondent Rita Braver about inspiration, Charles Dickens, and acceptance.

Books: The New York Times Book Review – Oct 23, 2022

Cormac McCarthy’s New Novel: Two Lives, Two Ways of Seeing

The New York Times – In “The Passenger,” a pair of siblings contend with the world’s enigmas and their own demons. The term “Janus word” was coined in the 1880s by the English theologian Thomas Kelly Cheyne to describe a word that can express two, more or less opposite meanings. Cheyne gave it the name of the two-faced Roman god who looks forward and back at the same time. 

Ken Burns Wishes More People Would Call Willa Cather a Great American Novelist

“What about ‘O Pioneers!’ or ‘My Ántonia’?” asks the documentarian and author of the forthcoming photo book “Our America.” “For that matter, what about Gabriel García Márquez? We do not have a copyright on the word ‘American.’”

Paul Newman’s Humanity and Star Power

When the actor appeared in the movie version of “Nobody’s Fool,” Richard Russo saw another side of him.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

This week: we talk to Emma Brown of Just Stop Oil about why the group targeted Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in the National Gallery, London, for its climate emergency protest.

Stacy Boldrick, assistant professor of museum studies at the University of Leicester, discusses the climate protests in the context of the long history of iconoclasm and attacks on works of art. The first version of Paris+, Art Basel’s fair in the French capital, opened this week, and we ask Melanie Gerlis, a columnist for the Financial Times and The Art Newspaper, how it compares to Paris’s previous fair, Fiac, and to the Frieze fairs in London last week.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is Frank Bowling’s Suncrush (1976), which features in an exhibition of the Guyana-born artist’s work at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Reto Thüring, the curator of the show, tells us about the painting and Bowling’s 10-year stay in America in the 1960s and 1970s.

Links:juststopoil.orgStacy Boldrick, Iconoclasm and the Museum, Routledge, 212pp, £27.99, $35.96 (pb)Paris+, until 23 October.Melanie Gerlis, The Art Fair Story: a Rollercoaster Ride, Lund Humphries, 104pp, £19.99, $34.99 (hb)Frank Bowling’s Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 22 October-9 April 2023; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 13 May-10 September next year. Related shows: Equals 6: A Sum Effect of Frank Bowling’s 5+1, University Hall Gallery, UMass Boston, 14 November-18 February 2023; Revisiting 5+1, Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, Staller Center for the Arts, Stony Brook University, 10 November-23 February 2023.