Category Archives: Arts & Literature

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Feb 27, 2023

“Curiosities” by Edward Steed.

The New Yorker – February 27, 2023 issue:

It’s Time to Rethink the Idea of the “Indigenous”

A set of five heads connected by string. Each face is showing a different part of a map.

Many groups who identify as Indigenous don’t claim to be first peoples; many who did come first don’t claim to be Indigenous. Can the concept escape its colonial past?

Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s Minister of Chaos

As unrest roils the country, a controversial figure from the far right helps Benjamin Netanyahu hold on to power.

The Dystopian Underworld of South Africa’s Illegal Gold Mines

When the country’s mining industry collapsed, a criminal economy grew in its place, with thousands of men climbing into some of the deepest shafts in the world, searching for leftover gold.

Arts & Literature: The New Criterion – March 2023

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The New Criterion – March 2023 issue:

Names, pronouns & the law  by Joshua T. Katz
Balanchine’s Austrian evening  by Laura Jacobs
A Jewish life in the Third Reich  by Bruce Bawer
Learning from David Milch  by William Logan


New poems  by Michael Weingrad & Henri Cole

The New York Times Book Review – February 19, 2023

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The New York Times Book Review – February 19, 2023:

When the Government Goes Top Secret, Who Can Write Its History?

In “The Declassification Engine,” Matthew Connelly traces the evolution of America’s obsession with secrecy and the alarming implications for our understanding of the past.

Walter Mosley’s New York: Classes Divided, Races at War

His new novel, “Every Man a King,” is a hard-boiled tale of billionaires, white nationalists and a detective with a complicated past.

International Literature: Lush Landscapes, Hazy Memories

CREDITJOHN GALL

New books from Kevin Jared Hosein, Pilar Quintana, Nona Fernández and Patrick Modiano.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

February 17, 2023: Turkey and Syria. As the countries reel from the devastation of the 6 February earthquake, how can communities and agencies protect damaged heritage?

We talk to Aparna Tandon from Iccrom, the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property about culture’s significance in the humanitarian response to the crisis. As Alice Neel: Hot off the Griddle arrives at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, we take a tour of the show’s key moments with its curator, Eleanor Nairne.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is a Germantown “eye-dazzler” blanket, made between 1895 and 1905 by a Diné weaver from the Navajo Nation. It’s part of a new show at the Bard Graduate Center in New York,

Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest. Hadley Jensen, the curator of the exhibition, tells us more.Disasters Emergency Committee’s Turkey-Syria Earthquake: dec.org.uk; a PDF of Aparna Tandon’s handbook First Aid To Cultural Heritage In Times Of Crisis is available for free at iccrom.org.Alice Neel: Hot off the Griddle, Barbican Art Gallery, London, until 21 May.

The book accompanying the exhibition is published by Prestel, priced £24.99 or $29.95.Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest, Bard Graduate Center, New York, until 9 July. An online exhibition featuring an interactive catalogue has approximately 250 items from the American Museum of Natural History’s collection of Navajo textiles will be available later this month at bgc.bard.edu.

The New York Review Of Books – March 9, 2023

Download The New York Review of Books - March 9, 2023 - SoftArchive

The New York Review of Books – March 9, 2023:

Peddling Darkness

True crime stories, like Sarah Weinman’s Scoundrel, make for suspenseful reading. But do they exploit the criminal, and deepen a thirst for punishment?

Commanders and Courtiers

The Howe family achieved an influential position of power in late-eighteenth-century Britain, propelled by the shrewd social intelligence of the Howe women.

Books: TLS/Times Literary Supplement – Feb 17, 2023

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Times Literary Supplement (February 17, 2023) – This week’s @TheTLS , featuring @jamesamarcus on Mailer at 100; Tom Seymour Evans on James Ellroy; @SPlokhy on Putin’s war in Ukraine; @nclarke14 on Blake Morrison; @CamilleRalphs_on Sylvia Plath; @natsegnit on Salman Rushdie; @rinireg on balloons – and more.

Art: ‘Joan Miró – Absolute Reality. Paris, 1920–1945’

ARSCRONICA (February 12, 2023) – The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is set to host a retrospective of Catalan artist Joan Miró that will display dozens of works made during his stay in Paris between 1920 and 1945.The temporary exhibition “Joan Miró. Absolute reality. Paris, 1920-1945” will open on Friday until May 28.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Joan Miró. Absolute Reality. Paris, 1920–1945, an exhibition that explores the career between the years 1920 and 1945 of one of the most outstanding artists of the 20th century. The start of this fundamental period in Miró’s oeuvre is marked by the date of his first trip to Paris, a key city in his life and work, and it closes with the year when Miró, after producing his Constellations (1940–41) and then hardly painting at all for some years, created a great series of works on white backgrounds that consolidated his language of signs floating on ambiguous grounds.

In the 25 years of activity covered by the exhibition, there is a constant flow of new ideas ranging from his initial magic realism to his language of constellated signs. In this development, it becomes clear that prehistoric art, including rock paintings, petroglyphs, and statuettes, held a special interest for Miró, a fascination confirmed by his notebooks, where he proposes returning to the dawn of art in order to retrieve its original spiritual sense.

The New York Times Book Review – February 12, 2023


Illustration by Ben Giles

The New York Times Book Review – February 12, 2023:

Big Shots Behaving Badly

“Unscripted,” an account by the Times journalists James B. Stewart and Rachel Abrams of the media titan Sumner Redstone’s final years, is a chronicle of corporate greed, manipulation, misogyny and sexual impropriety on a spectacular scale.

A Cockeyed Optimist: Oscar Hammerstein Was No Stephen Sondheim

Laurie Winer’s new book, “Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical,” takes the measure of Sondheim’s mentor and spiritual godfather.

Reviews: The Week In Art “Vermeer Exhibition 2023”

February 10, 2023: In this special episode, we are in Amsterdam for one of the shows of the year: Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum.

As an unprecedented 28 of the 37 surviving Vermeer paintings are gathered in the Dutch capital, Ben Luke talks to several people involved in the project: Gregor Weber, one of the exhibition’s curators, tells us about his new biography that reveals the depth of influence of the Jesuits and Catholicism on the artist.

In the exhibition itself, we talk to Pieter Roelofs, Weber’s co-curator; Ige Verslype, a conservator who led an extensive research project on Vermeer paintings in the Rijksmuseum, Mauritshuis and Frick collections; and Taco Dibbits, the Rijksmuseum’s director. Plus, we bump into the artist Alvaro Barrington in the exhibition and he tells us what he makes of Vermeer as an artist working today.

In this episode’s Work of the Week, we explore a debate around the attribution of a painting: Betsy Wieseman, Curator and Head of the Department of Northern European Paintings at the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington DC, discusses Girl with a Flute (around 1669-75). Wieseman and her NGA colleagues now regard the painting as a work by Vermeer’s studio, even though it appears in the Rijksmuseum show as an authentic work by the master.Vermeer, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, until 4 June. Gregor Weber, Johannes Vermeer: Faith, Light, Reflection, Rijksmuseum, €25 (pb) 

Art: A Tour Of ‘Vermeer Exhibition’ In Amsterdam

FRANCE 24 (February 8, 2023) – Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum has brought together 28 of Dutch master Johannes Vermeer’s luminous masterpieces from around the world, in the largest-ever exhibition of the 17th century artist’s works.

JOHANNES VERMEER

Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) lived and worked in Delft. His work is best known for his tranquil, introverted indoor scenes, his unprecedented use of bright, colorful light and his convincing illusionism.

In contrast to Rembrandt, Vermeer left a remarkably small oeuvre with about 35 paintings. As his paintings generally considered the most prized treasures of every museum collection, Vermeer paintings are rarely lent out.

BIGGEST EVER VERMEER SHOW TO TAKE PLACE AT THE RIJKSMUSEUM IN 2023—AND IT WILL INCLUDE THE GIRL WITH THE PEARL EARRING

The Art Newspaper

INTERNATIONAL LOANS

The exhibition will include masterpieces such as The Girl with a Pearl Earring (Mauritshuis, The Hague), The Geographer (Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main), Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid (The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin) and Woman Holding a Balance (The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC).

Works never before shown to the public in the Netherlands will include the newly restored Girl Reading a Letter at the Open Window from the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden.