Category Archives: Arts & Literature

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Dec 4, 2023

Dancers and musicians can be seen practicing in the Juilliard School at night.

The New Yorker – December 4, 2023 issue: The new issue‘s cover features Sergio García Sánchez’s “Ready to Soar” – The artist discusses rhythm, rigor, and the linguistic capabilities of art.

How Jensen Huang’s Nvidia Is Powering the A.I. Revolution

A portrait of Jensen Huang made of computer chips.

The company’s C.E.O. bet it all on a new kind of chip. Now that Nvidia is one of the biggest companies in the world, what will he do next?

By Stephen Witt

The revelation that ChatGPT, the astonishing artificial-intelligence chatbot, had been trained on an Nvidia supercomputer spurred one of the largest single-day gains in stock-market history. When the Nasdaq opened on May 25, 2023, Nvidia’s value increased by about two hundred billion dollars. A few months earlier, Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s C.E.O., had informed investors that Nvidia had sold similar supercomputers to fifty of America’s hundred largest companies. By the close of trading, Nvidia was the sixth most valuable corporation on earth, worth more than Walmart and ExxonMobil combined. Huang’s business position can be compared to that of Samuel Brannan, the celebrated vender of prospecting supplies in San Francisco in the late eighteen-forties. “There’s a war going on out there in A.I., and Nvidia is the only arms dealer,” one Wall Street analyst said.

Why Trump’s Trials Should Be on TV

Why Trumps Trials Should Be on TV

The conduct of the trials, their fairness, and their possibly damning verdicts will be at the center of the 2024 election. Transparency is crucial.

By Amy Davidson Sorkin

On November 6th, Donald Trump emerged from a New York City courtroom, where he had testified in a civil trial alleging that he and others in the Trump Organization had committed fraud, and gave himself a great review. “I think it went very well,” he told reporters. “If you were there, and you listened, you’d see what a scam this is.” He meant that the case was a scam and not that his company was. “Everybody saw what happened today,” he went on. “And it was very conclusive.”

How to Play a Nazi

Sandra Hüller photographed sitting in a chair by Mark Peckmezian.

The German actress Sandra Hüller probes characters with unusual depth. But to portray a Fascist wife, in “The Zone of Interest,” she reversed her usual approach—and withheld her empathy.

By Rebecca Mead

In “Anatomy of a Fall,” Hüller stars as a successful novelist accused of murdering her husband. The camera often lingers on her face as it shifts like quicksilver between playfulness, defiance, and evasion.Photograph by Mark Peckmezian for The New Yorker

Art History: Rembrandt’s Prints & Life In Amsterdam

Christie’s (November 26, 2023) – Rembrandt House Museum Specialist Tim Schmelcher and Head of Collections, Epco Runia, discover more about Rembrandt’s life in Amsterdam, in particular his printmaking.

Then a more detailed look at the Sam Josefowitz Collection of Rembrandt prints – the most comprehensive and impressive in private hands – as we examine some of the highlights of these graphic masterpieces.

On 7 December 2023, Christie’s will be offering a selection of these prints across two sales in London: Old Masters Part I and The Sam Josefowitz Collection: Graphic Masterpieces by Rembrandt van Rijn.

Reviews: The 12 Best Art Books Of 2023 (The Times)

12 best art books of 202312 best art books of 2023
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The Times and The Sunday Times (November 24, 2023): Lose yourself among lily pads, potbellied Dutch merchants and Venetian canals. Laura Freeman and Waldemar Januszczak curate the finest of this year’s art books, taking in Monet, Picasso, Gwen John and more

12 Best Art Books Of 2023

Monet: The Restless Vision by Jackie Wullschläger

In his eighties, Claude Monet was spotted by a younger artist, “old but still very handsome”, wrapped in a sumptuous fur, sitting on top of a dyke “in a bitter west wind which ruffled his long white beard, mingling it with the foam of the waves”. This transporting biography by the Financial Times’s art critic Jackie Wullschläger paints the impressionist as a man for all seasons, out in the dawn and the dusk and the snow, obsessed, possessed, with capturing the fleeting effects of light, shade and water, calm as millpond or whipped up by a storm. Chocolate box? Jamais! Monet mounted the barricades of modern art, revolutionising the way the world could be seen and painted. A book for art-lovers — and for gardeners too. Art and literature, Monet proclaimed, were all humbug. “There’s nothing but the earth.” Laura Freeman

All the Beauty in the World: A Museum Guard’s Adventures in Life, Loss and Art by Patrick Bringley

Who would have thought that the outstanding art book of the year would be written not by a curator or an art historian or even an artist — but by a museum guard? For ten years Patrick Bringley worked at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, directing visitors to the Islamic collections and watching out for angry protestors. It turned out to be a remarkably fruitful experience. Bringley weaves the story of a personal tragedy involving his sick brother with startling insights into museum life and — most impressively — into the great art in the Met’s collection. Waldemar Januszczak

Looking at Picasso by Pepe Karmel

If you have been living under a rock in 2023, you will not have noticed that this year was the 50th anniversary of the death of Picasso. The rest of us couldn’t avoid it. Countless exhibitions, events and books commemorated the occasion, but this was the most useful. Focusing on the art rather than the biography of the man, it’s a generous and sensitive text with brilliant illustrations. WJ

Pauline Boty: British Pop Art’s Sole Sister by Marc Kristal

Pauline Boty was “the Wimbledon Bardot”, “an ice-cream of a girl” and by her own mocking, ironic reckoning, “a happy, dumb blonde”. She was so much more than that, as this fizzing biography shows. Meet Boty the Sixties It girl, pop artist, voice-of-a-generation broadcaster and “anti-ugly” campaigner against hideous postwar development. Marc Kristal gives you the crumbling studios of the Royal College of Art, the creative squalor of Notting Hill bedsitters and the thrill of finding your feet (in knee-high boots) in swinging London. Boty died appallingly young, but her life was no tragedy. It was full of mischief, provocation and promise. This book brings Boty to life, painting, protesting and dancing the miniskirted twist. LF

Venice: City of Pictures by Martin Gayford

Venice isn’t just the most painted city in the world, it is probably the most written about too. Finding a fresh angle from which to view it is a challenge. Gayford’s answer is to understand the city and its history through the splendid and varied art it has inspired. Packed with potted histories and informed anecdotes, this is a tome to pack on a visit to La Serenissima. WJ


Giacometti in Paris by Michael Peppiatt

Alberto Giacometti used to claim that really he would have liked to carve and cast voluptuous women such as Marilyn Monroe. “The more I tried to make them broader, the narrower they got.” Giacometti’s beanpole people became icons of 20th-century art and Michael Peppiatt’s compelling portrait cuts to the core of the sculptor’s “strange life and his stranger fame”. Giacometti’s Paris studio is a character in its own right: a filthy lair filled with the most extraordinary figures and fragments, with a leaking roof, a tree growing up through the floor and a local fox given the run of the place. Appalling and fascinating. You’ll never look at a Giacometti the same way. LF

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The New York Times Book Review – November 26, 2023

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (November 26, 2023): This week’s issue features  Michael Cunningham’s “Day.”; the 2023 Notables list, “Kantika”, “The Nursery.” and “Western Lane” , because it’s a finalist for the Booker Prize, which will be announced on Sunday.

A Pandemic Novel That Never Says ‘Pandemic’

This illustration shows three people sitting at a table, but the image is broken up into three panels, giving the appearance that the three people are in the same space, but alone and at different times.

Michael Cunningham’s “Day” peeks into the lives of a family on one specific April date across three years as life changes because of Covid and other challenges.

By Caleb Crain

DAY, by Michael Cunningham


Michael Cunningham’s new novel, “Day,” visits a family on April 5 in 2019, 2020 and 2021 — before, during and after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, which shadows the book although the words “Covid” and “pandemic” never appear.

‘Western Lane’ Finds Solace From Grief on the Squash Court

In Chetna Maroo’s debut novel, an adolescent girl mourns the death of her mother in the empty reverberations between points.

By Ivy Pochoda

WESTERN LANE, by Chetna Maroo


At the start of Chetna Maroo’s polished and disciplined debut, Gopi, an 11-year-old Jain girl who has just lost her mother, stands on a squash court outside London. She isn’t playing. Instead, she’s listening to the sound of the ball hitting the wall on the adjacent court, “a quick, low pistol-shot of a sound, with a close echo.” It is not so much the shot itself that Gopi is hearing, but that echo, the empty reverb, the lonely response as the ball’s impact gives the striker a split second to retreat to the T, the center of the court, and prepare to counteract her opponent’s responding shot.

Art History: Two Paintings Survey Canaletto’s Venice

Christie’s (November 23, 2023) – Immerse yourself in a dreamlike vision of Canaletto’s Venice where the floating city of the 1700s appears strikingly unchanged centuries later. Giovanni Antonio Canal, better known as Canaletto (1697-1768), was born and died in Venice.

Did Canaletto paint these paired views of Venice for the Countess of Essex?

Home for most of his life, the city was also the artistic subject that dominated his career. Canaletto helped establish the veduta — or topographical view — as one of the chief genres of Venetian painting in the 18th century, as well as a prime export. A pair of vedute by Canaletto, unknown to scholars until now, will lead the Old Masters Part I sale at Christie’s in London on 7 December 2023, as part of Classic Week.

Coming from a private collection, these masterpieces were painted around 1734, when Canaletto was at the peak of his powers, almost certainly for an English patron.

Find out more: https://www.christies.com/en/stories/…

Book Of The Year: “James Gillray – A Revolution in Satire” By Tim Clayton

Apollo Magazine (November 23, 2023) Political satire is by its nature ephemeral: it reacts to events and personalities and moves quickly on. Yet James Gillray’s (1756–1815) excoriating attacks on William Pitt, Charles James Fox, George III, the Prince Regent and a whole cavalcade of Georgian public figures retain their sting more than two centuries after he dreamed them up. In his sumptuously illustrated study of Gillray, Tim Clayton explains why.

Gillray was, shows Clayton, as much an artist as a caricaturist – his fertile wit and invention were equalled by his facility with an etching needle. His images reveal a man of learning, liberal with allusions in his prints to Shakespeare, Milton and the classics, who developed a style that combined the literary and the visual. His seven years at the Royal Academy, meanwhile, helped shape him into one of the most accomplished draughtsmen of the early 19th century.

Although Clayton takes Gillray from his early training as a letter engraver through his time as a travelling player and into his pomp and then the madness that blighted his later years, this is not a biography in the traditional sense. There are few documentary sources relating directly to Gillray, so Clayton skilfully reveals his man through examining the ‘business of satire’. He looks at Gillray’s often overlapping professional and personal relationships, at the intricacies of Georgian print culture, and the ebbs and flows of politics.

Paris Tours: ‘Artcurial – Old Master Art’ Exhibition

ART VISION TV / C&B JOURNAL (November 22, 2023) – Artcurial’s Old Master & 19th Century Art department will be holding its prestige sale on 22nd November, featuring The Sacrifice to the Minotaur, a masterpiece by the 18th century painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard.

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Nov 24, 2023

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Times Literary Supplement (November 22, 2023): The new issue features Edward Thomas’s journey – The radical turn in English poetry; An AI emergency; Great American history; Magical thinking; Carry On Napoleon, and more…

Reviews: Top Historical Fiction Books Of 2023

The New York Times Book Review (November 21, 2023): Each year, we pore over thousands of new books, seeking out the best novels, memoirs, biographies, poetry collections, stories and more. Here are the standouts, selected by the staff of The New York Times Book Review.

Top Historical Fiction Books of 2023

AFTER SAPPHO by Selby Wynn Schwartz

AFTER SAPPHO by Pan

Inspired by Sappho’s work, Schwartz’s debut novel offers an alternate history of creativity at the turn of the 20th century, one that centers queer women artists, writers and intellectuals who refused to accept society’s boundaries.

THE COVENANT OF WATER by Abraham Verghese

Verghese’s first novel since “Cutting for Stone” follows generations of a family across 77 years in southwestern India as they contend with political strife and other troubles — capped by a shocking discovery made by the matriarch’s granddaughter, a doctor.

FORBIDDEN NOTEBOOK by Alba de Céspedes

A best-selling novelist and prominent anti-Fascist in her native Italy, de Céspedes has lately fallen into unjust obscurity. Translated by Ann Goldstein, this elegant novel from the 1950s tells the story of a married mother, Valeria, whose life is transformed when she begins keeping a secret diary.

THE FRAUD by Zadie Smith

Based on a celebrated 19th-century trial in which the defendant was accused of impersonating a nobleman, Smith’s novel offers a vast panoply of London and the English countryside, and successfully locates the social controversies of an era in a handful of characters.

A HISTORY OF BURNING by Janika Oza

This remarkable debut novel tells the story of an extended Indo-Ugandan family that is displaced, settled and displaced again.

KAIROS by Jenny Erpenbeck

This tale of a torrid, yearslong relationship between a young woman and a much older married man — translated from the German by Michael Hofmann — is both profound and moving.

KANTIKA by Elizabeth Graver

Inspired by the life of Graver’s maternal grandmother, this exquisitely imagined family saga spans cultures and continents as it traces the migrations of a Sephardic Jewish girl from turn-of-the-20th-century Constantinople to Barcelona, Havana and, finally, Queens, N.Y.

LONE WOMEN by Victor LaValle

The year is 1915, and the narrator of LaValle’s horror-tinged western has arrived in Montana to cultivate an unforgiving homestead. She’s looking for a fresh start as a single Black woman in a sparsely populated state, but the locked trunk she has in stow holds a terrifying secret.

NORTH WOODS by Daniel Mason

Mason’s novel looks at the occupants of a single house in Massachusetts over several centuries, from colonial times to present day. An apple farmer, an abolitionist, a wealthy manufacturer: The book follows these lives and many others, with detours into natural history and crime reportage.

NOT EVEN THE DEAD by Juan Gómez Bárcena

An ex-conquistador in Spanish-ruled, 16th-century Mexico is asked to hunt down an Indigenous prophet in this novel by a leading writer in Spain, splendidly translated by Katie Whittemore. The epic search stretches across much of the continent and, as the author bends time and history, lasts centuries.

THIS OTHER EDEN by Paul Harding

In his latest novel, inspired by the true story of a devastating 1912 eviction in Maine that displaced an entire mixed-race fishing community, Harding turns that history into a lyrical tale about the fictional Apple Island on the cusp of destruction.

THE UNSETTLED by Ayana Mathis

This novel follows three generations across time and place: a young mother trying to create a home for herself and her son in 1980s Philadelphia, and her mother, who is trying to save their Alabama hometown from white supremacists seeking to displace her from her land.

Preview: London Review Of Books – Nov 30, 2023

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London Review of Books (LRB) – November 30, 2023: The latest issue features Jaqueline Rose on violence and its origins; Zain Samir reporting from Southern Lebanon; Clare Bucknell – Rescuing Lord Byron; David Trotter – Werner Herzog’s Visions, and more….

‘You made me do it’

Jacqueline Rose on violence and its origins

In response​ to the destruction of Gaza, it seems to be becoming almost impossible to lament more than one people at a time. When I signed Artists for Palestine’s statement last month, I looked for mention of the atrocities committed by Hamas against Israeli Jews on 7 October, and then decided to settle for the unambiguous condemnation of ‘every act of violence against civilians and every infringement of international law whoever perpetrates them’. 

The Unnecessary Bomb

Andrew Cockburn

‘Little Boy’ exploded over Hiroshima at 8.15 a.m. on 6 August 1945, wiping most of the city off the face of the earth and killing eighty thousand people instantly. But the ‘shock’ to the leadership in Tokyo envisaged by the former US secretary of war Henry Stimson failed to materialise.