Category Archives: Arts & Literature

The New York Times Book Review – August 20, 2023

Image

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – August 20, 2023: The issue features “never before told” narrative histories including a tale of the female botanists who surveyed the Grand Canyon in 1938, a recent biography of the 19th-century “abortionist of Fifth Avenue” and the book on this week’s cover: Prudence Peiffer’s “The Slip,” which brings into focus a thriving artistic community that existed at the southernmost tip of Manhattan in the 1950s and ’60s.

They Overcame Hazards — and Doubters — to Make Botanical History

In a black-and-white photograph from 1938, two women and four men sit in a boat looking at the camera. One woman wears a white dress and hat; the other wears slacks and a blouse. Three of the men are shirtless; two wear pith helmets.

In Melissa Sevigny’s “Brave the Wild River,” we meet the two scientists who explored unknown terrain — and broke barriers.

BRAVE THE WILD RIVER: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon, by Melissa L. Sevigny

Let’s start this story on a sun-blistered evening in August 1938. A small band of adventurers had just concluded a 43-day journey from Utah to Nevada — although perhaps “journey” is too tame a description for a trip that had required weeks of small wooden boats tumbling down more than 600 miles of rock-strewn rivers. The goal was twofold. First, to simply survive. And then, to chart the plants building homes along the serrated walls of the Grand Canyon.

At New York’s Coenties Slip, an Artist Colony and a ‘Rebellion’

Prudence Peiffer’s “The Slip” is a group biography of six visual artists and the work they created on the edge of Manhattan in the 1950s and ’60s.

Exhibitions: Artist Frida Kahlo In South Australia

ABC News In-depth (August 17, 2023) – She’s one of the most famous artists of the 20th century, known for her colourful self-portraits. But what else do you know about Frida Kahlo? We visit an exhibition to find out more about her artwork and learn about her interesting life.

Frida & Diego: Love & Revolution

THE ART GALLERY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA

24 Jun – 17 Sep 2023

Art Gallery of SA exhibition to explore the enduring allure of Frida Kahlo  - InReview

Mexican artist Frida Kahlo is remembered for her self-portraits, pain and passion, and bold, vibrant colors. She is celebrated in Mexico for her attention to Mexican and indigenous culture and by feminists for her depiction of the female experience and form.

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Aug 18, 2023

Image

Times Literary Supplement (August 18 & 25, 2023): Theatre of war – How Susan Sontag brought Beckett to Sarajevo; Mina Loy; Madmen in the White House; Grieving for a child; Through the looking-glass again; Women artists unleashed and more…

Previews: Country Life Magazine – August 16, 2023

Image

Country Life Magazine – August 16, 2023: This week’s issue features a look at Britain’s sharks, classic posters, nightjars and dramatic wallpaper.

No fin compares to you

Far from being scary, our native sharks are friendly, sleekly swift and even bioluminescent. Helen Scales takes a dip

And all that jazz

The Roaring Twenties saw war-damaged Britain come alive in a swirl of cocktails and flapper dresses, finds Claire Jackson

A dramatic revival

The ruins of Hellifield Peel Tower, North Yorkshire, have been transformed. Jeremy Musson tours a splendid family home

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – August 21, 2023

Image

The New Yorker – August 21, 2023 issue: This week’s cover features Kadir Nelson’s “Rideout” – The artist discusses biking, bridges, risk, and scale.

How the Writer and Critic Jacqueline Rose Puts the World on the Couch

Jacqueline Rose photographed by Robbie Lawrence.

Enlisting Freud and feminism, she reveals the hidden currents in poetry and politics alike.

By Parul Sehgal

“Psychoanalysis brings to light everything we don’t want to think about,” she said. “If you can acknowledge the complexity of your own heart


The Ukrainians Forced to Flee to Russia

A woman and child standing in between broken down buildings.

Some are brought against their will. Others are encouraged in subtler ways. But the over-all efforts seem aimed at the erasure of the Ukrainian people.

By Masha Gessen

How Carl Linnaeus Set Out to Label All of Life

A man sitting on a large flower looking at a list of paper.

He sorted and systematized and coined names for more than twelve thousand species. What do you call someone like that?

By Kathryn Schulz

2023 Exhibitions: ‘Banksy – Cut & Run’ In Glasgow

CBS Sunday Morning (August 13, 2023) – Putting together the first authorized exhibition in 14 years of works by the anonymous street artist Banksy required extensive planning and a cover story to hide its true identity until it opened, unannounced, in Glasgow this summer.

Photo Credit Banksy

The show will feature work from across his career titled CUT & RUN: 25 years card labour! Stencils from 2008 until 2023 are on display at this historic event.

Correspondent Seth Doane explores the art and the mysteries of Banksy’s world, including the continued speculation about the artist’s true identity, a closely-held secret for decades.

The New York Times Book Review – August 13, 2023

Image

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW – August 13, 2023: The annual thrillers issue features – a tense murder mystery set aboard a cruise ship; a heist novel involving rough diamonds, crooked lawyers and masters of the double cross; and an especially creepy serial-killer novel, to name just a few.

Being Underestimated Was Her Secret Weapon

A black-and-white photograph portrays the head and shoulders of a woman with dark hair, elegantly dressed in furs.

In “Flirting With Danger,” Janet Wallach tells the story of Marguerite Harrison, who traded a life of privilege to become America’s first international female spy.

By Chloe Malle

FLIRTING WITH DANGER: The Mysterious Life of Marguerite Harrison, Socialite Spy, by Janet Wallach


Anyone complaining about a canceled Delta flight would do well to channel Marguerite Harrison. The United States’ first international female spy, Harrison crisscrossed the globe by rickshaw, propeller plane, camel, inflated goatskin raft and rail freight car and once brightly described a trans-Siberian voyage, in which she was wedged between sacks of tea and oats on the back of a troika in a blizzard, as “a rare and delightful experience.”

Chasing a World Record, They Endured Storms, Sharks and Freak Waves

There are two vintage black-and-white photos next to one another here. The one on the left portrays a man in a white T-shirt squinting past the camera; the one on the right shows a man on a boat giving himself s shave. He is shirtless and his face is covered with shaving cream.
From left: John Fairfax; Tom McCleanCredit…From left: Daily Mail/Shutterstock; Tom McClean

In “Completely Mad,” James Hansen tells the stories of two men who in 1969 vied to be the first to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

COMPLETELY MAD: Tom McClean, John Fairfax, and the Epic Race to Row Solo Across the Atlantic, by James R. Hansen


The day before the Apollo mission landed two men on the moon, a British man named John Fairfax waded into Hollywood Beach, Fla., greeted by masses of cheering fans, having been the first person to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Eight days later, another Briton, Tom McClean, pulled his dory up a deserted beach in Blacksod Bay, Ireland, having rowed solo across the Atlantic in the opposite direction. While Fairfax was acclaimed and feted, McClean walked to the closest pub, alone.

Artist Profiles: American Painter Shara Hughes

Shara Hughes

Shara Hughes was born 1981 in Atlanta, Georgia. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Shara Hughes, Hard Hats, 2021
Shara Hughes – Hard Hats – 2021

She describes her lush, vibrantly chromatic images of hills, rivers, trees and shorelines, often framed by abstract patterning, as “invented landscapes.” Full of gestural effect, surface tactility and possessing a fairytale mood of reverie, these paintings, as the New Yorker described them, “use every trick in the book to seduce, but still manage to come off as guileless visions of not-so-far-away worlds.”

Shara Hughes, Soft and Strong, 2021
Shara Hughes – Soft and Strong – 2021

Bold, clashing colours and shifting perspectives manifest into dream-like landscapes that push and pull the eye across the canvas, challenging conventions of space. Rather than depicting true to life landscapes, Hughes invites us into a fantastical world offered as a portal for psychological discovery and reflection.

READ MORE

Books: Best Historical Crime Fiction Of 2023

 

Literary Hub (August 9, 2023) – MOLLY ODINTZ reviews 20 essential new historical crime novels in an amazing year for historical fiction.

The City Between the Bridges: 1794

Niklas Natt och Dag
Setting: Stockholm, 1794

I adored Niklas Natt och Dag’s brilliantly cynical debut, The Wolf and the Watchman, and The City Between the Bridges is just full of filth and cynicism, the perfect combination for depicting the late 18th century and its terrible iniquities. The watchman of The Wolf and the Watchman returns to solve a new crime, this one the brutal murder of a tenant’s daughter on the eve of her wedding to a seemingly sensitive nobleman. Natt och Dag is particularly adept at savagely ripping the notion of a “civilized age” apart and showing the raw suffering underneath. As a side note, I’ve long believed that historical fiction is only to be trusted when the author is willing to describe bad smells to set the scene, and this book is full of truly disgusting odors.

 Hungry Ghosts

Kevin Jared Hosein
Setting: Trinidad, 1940s

Set in the dying colonial era, Kevin Jared Hosein’s searing debut examines race, class, and decolonization through the lens of two families, one white and wealthy, the other Black and disenfranchised, as their lives become ever more entwined after the disappearance of the white family’s patriarch. Like the best historical fiction, Hungry Ghosts is immersed in the ideas and complexities of its’ shifting time period, for a triumph of well-researched storytelling.

At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf

Tara Ison
Setting: WWII France

In one of those amazing life twists that feels as bizarre as it is inspiring, Tara Ison, the writer of the cult hit Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead has crafted one of the best tales of collaboration ever written. In Between the Hour of Dog and Wolf, Tara Ison takes us into the mind of an adolescent Jewish girl being hidden with a French family during WWII. She spends so much time pretending to align with the ideals of the occupiers that she finds herself beginning to agree with them, in what reads as a Jewish version of Lacombe, Lucien. Perhaps it’s not such a twist—both book and film are about the ways we assume new roles when necessary to survival, whether that’s taking a job as a fashion consultant to feed siblings and putting on a batshit fashion show (a la Babysitter) or pretending to be a fascist to to protect from others knowing that you are Jewish. Okay, maybe that last comparison is a bit of a stretch, but still, everyone should read this book and also everyone should should rewatch that movie.

The Shards

Bret Easton Ellis
Setting: Los Angeles, 1981

Bret Easton Ellis is back, this time with a new serial killer novel that brings together all the best aspects of Less Than Zero and American Psycho. It’s 1981, Missing Persons is playing on the stereo, and future writer Bret is doing bumps with his prep-school friends by the poolside, dressed sharply in Ralph Lauren, as a killer makes his way closer and closer to their wealthy enclave. Ellis’ teenage emotional truths collide with violent fictional set-pieces for an epic tale of Southern Californian sins.

READ MORE

Profiles: David Hockney At The Huntington Library

Painting of a bare tree, with many small branches, in a green field with a blue sky.
David Hockney, Tree on Woldgate, 6 March, 2006

The Huntington Library (August 9, 2023) – A David Hockney in The Huntington’s venerable European art gallery? Yes, visitors can view the large and striking Tree on Woldgate, 6 March (2006), which depicts the serene Yorkshire countryside where the renowned artist grew up.

You can see fields in the distance and, in the center, a leafless tree with branches that twist and turn in an almost snakelike manner. The painting comes from a period in Hockney’s career when he created a series of plein air landscapes around his hometown.

Watercolor self-portrait of David Hockney, paintbrush in hand, looking at the viewer.
David Hockney, Self-Portrait with Red Braces, 2003

The painting hangs in conversation with John Constable’s monumental View on the Stour Near Dedham (1822). While the two works were created more than 180 years apart, their inspiration comes from the same source—childhood surroundings—and they both convey a sense of place and nostalgia.

One of the most famous British artists of the 20th century, Hockney emerged as a major contributor to the 1960s pop art movement and has had a multifaced career as a painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. He is perhaps best known for his acrylic paintings of bright swimming pools, split-level homes, and suburban California landscapes.

In 2022, The Huntington acquired its first Hockney works: 17 works on paper that include an artist book, drawings, prints, photocollages, and watercolors. These works display an intimate side of Hockney—like the self-portrait of the artist in red suspenders, bent over a table and peering over his wire-rimmed glasses, paintbrush in hand. His blue eyes, gazing straight at the viewer, create an immediate intimacy.

READ MORE