In 1991 when Sir Elton John bought a duplex-apartment at Park Place on Peachtree Road in Atlanta’s coveted Buckhead neighbourhood, he couldn’t have imagined the extent to which the city would transform him personally and professionally.
Tag Archives: Art
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Jan 15, 2024
Has School Become Optional?
In the past few years, chronic absenteeism has nearly doubled. The fight to get students back in classrooms has only just begun.
Absenteeism underlies much of what has beset young people, including falling school achievement, deteriorating mental health, and elevated youth violence.
What Frantz Fanon and Ian Fleming Agreed On
From opposite directions, the revolutionary intellectual and the creator of James Bond saw violence as essential—psychologically and strategically—to solving the crisis of colonialism.
More than fifty years later, Zohra Drif could still picture the Milk Bar in Algiers on September 30, 1956. It was white and shining, she recalled, awash in laughter, young voices, “summer colors, the smell of pastries, and even the distant twittering of birds.” Drif, a well-coiffed law student in a stylish lavender dress, ordered a peach-Melba ice cream and wedged her beach bag against the counter. She paid, tipped, and left without her bag. The bomb inside it exploded soon afterward.
Fine Art: The Burlington Magazine – January 2024
The Burlington Magazine – January 3, 2024: The new issue features ‘The Golden Age of Avignon’ – Avignon as ‘New Rome’; Rubens and women; Tiepolo in New York; Gertrude Stein and Picasso, and more….
China’s Southern Paradise: Treasures from the Lower Yangzi Delta
A vivid photograph of a lotus pond ushers visitors into this ambitious exhibition on the arts and culture of Jiangnan. Lying to the south of the Yangtze – its name literally means ‘south of the river’ – this part of China includes such major cities as Shanghai, Hangzhou and Suzhou. Curated by Clarissa von Spee, Chair of Asian Art and the James and Donna Reid Curator of Chinese Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), this is the first exhibition outside China to present an encyclopaedic view of the cultural history of this historically affluent region.
The Walpole Society
Ever since the Walpole Society was founded in London in 1911 ‘with the object of promoting the study of the history of British art’, The Burlington Magazine has taken a close interest in an organisation with aims and principles so close to our own: this is the sixth Editorial we have devoted to the subject. The first, written by the art historian August F. Jaccaci, who edited the Magazine’s ‘Art in America’ section, appeared in 1913 on the occasion of the publication of the first of the annual volumes that are the society’s raison d’être.
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Jan 1 & 8, 2024
How Camille Pissarro Went from Mediocrity to Magnificence
He began as more of a tutor than a talent. But in his final decade he lent a keen eye-in-the-sky view to the Paris streets, rendering miracles of kinetic characterization.
By Adam Gopnik
It’s one of the stranger anomalies of French intellectual life that Impressionist painting—by far the most influential of French cultural enterprises—has received so little attention from the most ambitious French critics and philosophers. One can page through André Gide’s journal entries, a lot of them on art, or through Albert Camus’s, and find very little on Claude Monet or Edgar Degas (and much more on the Symbolists, a group that was far easier for a literary man to “get”). Marcel Proust cared passionately for painting, and his hero-painter Elstir has touches of Monet, but in order to make him interesting Proust had to model him on the more histrionic James McNeill Whistler, with samplings from a forgotten American painter added in.
A Palestinian Poet’s Perilous Journey Out of Gaza
Following Hamas’s October 7th attack and Israel’s invasion, Mosab Abu Toha fled his home with his wife and three children. Then I.D.F. soldiers took him into custody.
International Art: Apollo Magazine – January 2024
Breath of fresh air – Gerhard Richter in the Alps
Three exhibitions in the Engadin Valley explore how the Swiss mountains have inspired some of the painter’s most playful work
Remembering the festive geese of Christmas past
The festive bird has often been served up by artists and writers including J.M.W. Turner and Charles Dickens
Exhibits: ‘Medieval Money, Merchants, And Morality’ At The Morgan Library NYC
“Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality” is open to the public November 10, 2023 through March 10, 2024.
Trade was conducted on an unprecedented scale, banks were established, and coinage proliferated like never before. The widespread use of money in everyday life transformed every aspect of European society, including its values and culture. Bringing together some of the most acclaimed manuscripts in the Morgan’s collection and other exceptional objects including a renaissance purse, a brass alms box, and a hoard of coins, this exhibition will explore the fate of the avaricious, attitudes towards the poor, contentious lending practices, and money management.
The famous Hours of Catherine of Cleves, the Hours of Henry VIII, and the Prayer Book of Queen Claude de France will be presented from a decidedly new angle, combining economic and art history to consider the early history of capitalism and the crisis in values that it sparked. These will feature alongside lesser known treasures, including an Italian account book in its original binding and a stunning leaf from a register of creditors made in Bologna, Italy, in 1394–95. As people today reflect on fluctuating markets, disparities in wealth, personal values, and morality, the themes addressed in this exhibition are as relevant as ever.
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Dec 25, 2023
Can Crosswords Be More Inclusive?
The puzzles spread from the United States across the globe, but the American crossword today doesn’t always reflect the linguistic changes that immigration brings.
By Natan Last
Root around in the alphanumeric soup of the U.S. visa system for long enough and you’ll discover the EB-1A, sometimes known as the Einstein visa. Among the hardest permanent-resident visas to obtain, it is reserved for noncitizens with“extraordinary ability.” John Lennon got a forerunner of it, in 1976, after a deportation scare that could have sent him back to Britain. (His case, which spotlighted prosecutorial discretion in immigration law, forms the legal basis for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or daca.) Modern-day recipients include the tennis star Monica Seles and—in a tasteless bit of irony—the Slovenian model Melania Knauss, in 2001, four years before she became Melania Trump.
The World’s Fastest Road Cars—and the People Who Drive Them
“Hypercars” can approach or even exceed 300 m.p.h. Often costing millions of dollars, they’re ostentatious trophies—and sublime engines of innovation.
By Ed Caesar
A Bugatti Chiron Super Sport, near the company’s factory, in Molsheim, France. The car, which has lusciously curved side panels, has been produced in a limited run of five hundred. Although its engine is as big as a Shetland pony, the interior is eerily quiet.
Return to New York City
Revisiting old haunts leads to revelations about “real life.”
By Julia Wertz
Art Books: “David Hockney – Normandy Portraits”
David Hockney: Normandy Portraits
A compact album presentation of Hockney’s newest explorations in portraiture
This concise volume illustrates around 40 acrylic on canvas works painted by David Hockney (born 1937) at his Normandy studio—depicting his friends and visitors, as well as the artist himself. David Hockney: Normandy Portraits showcases a series of some previously unseen portraits, across 48 pages, uninterrupted by text, to allow readers to engage directly with the artworks.
These new works highlight the ongoing importance of portraiture within the artist’s practice and demonstrate his sentiment that “drawings and paintings … are a lot better than photographs to give you a sense of the person.”
Hockney returned to painting after an intensive period spent depicting the Normandy landscape using an iPad. The portraits were painted quickly and directly onto the canvas without underdrawing. As Hockney has said, “to do a portrait slowly is a bit of a contradiction.”
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New York Times Reviews: Best Art Books In 2023
Jason Farago
‘Botticelli Drawings’ By Furio Rinaldi (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco/Yale).
His strawberry-blond Venus on a wind-propelled scallop shell still pulls Florence’s tourists from the gelateria to the Uffizi — but a rarer Botticelli feast is currently on offer in San Francisco, where the Legion of Honor is presenting the first exhibition ever of this Renaissance master’s fragile drawings (through Feb. 11). In this authoritative catalog, Rinaldi makes several new attributions, including two exquisite head studies of a man gazing upward and a woman with modestly lowered eyes. For a Florentine in the later 15th century, the core of painting was disegno (“design,” but also “drawing”), and Botticelli put drawing first. Delicate highlights of white and yellow show the light on tensed muscles or bowed heads. Effortless squiggles cohere into Simonetta Vespucci’s curled hair or John the Baptist’s camel cloak. His line feels spring-loaded; his saints and angels seem ready for the dance floor; his paintings’ grace and vigor started with a pen.
‘Abraham Ángel: Between Wonder and Seduction’ Edited by Mark A. Castro (Dallas Museum of Art; distributed by Yale University Press).
Like Vermeer, the Mexican portraitist Abraham Ángel, who died at age 19 in 1924, left little behind. His 20 extant works (on view in Dallas through next January) reproduce beautifully in a slim but convincing catalog that doesn’t overstate the case. Ángel’s preferred substrate was cardboard, and the bumpy nap of it really shows in these pages. So do the Fauve-like colors he used to outline his sitters. (Instead of black he preferred blues and browns, as Alice Neel would.) Playfully primitive, these knowing likenesses (among them Ángel’s tutor and lover, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano) combined Mexico’s burgeoning populist aesthetic with a private romanticism that seems nonetheless to have sought clarity on the promise of his country’s Revolution.
Holland Cotter
‘Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction’ Edited by Lynne Cooke (University of Chicago Press).
This major looker of an exhibition catalog loosens up the warp and weft of conventional views of modern art — all those tight-knotted hierarchical categories (high versus low, art versus craft) on which our institutions and markets still rest — and demonstrates the universe of formal and conceptual brilliance that has always traveled on a parallel track. The sheer variety of work produced by more than 50 artists chosen by the book’s editor, Lynne Cooke, will knock your socks off. (Just wait till you see what’s happening in the field of basketry alone.) So will the visual imaginations of individual geniuses we already know like Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, Gego, Lenore Tawney and Sheila Hicks, and the others we’re introduced to here.
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Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Dec 18, 2023
All the Carcinogens We Cannot See
We routinely test for chemicals that cause mutations. What about the dark matter of carcinogens—substances that don’t create cancer cells but rouse them from their slumber?
In the nineteen-seventies, Bruce Ames, a biochemist at Berkeley, devised a way to test whether a chemical might cause cancer. Various tenets of cancer biology were already well established. Cancer resulted from genetic mutations—changes in a cell’s DNA sequence that typically cause the cell to divide uncontrollably. These mutations could be inherited, induced by viruses, or generated by random copying errors in dividing cells. They could also be produced by physical or chemical agents: radiation, ultraviolet light, benzene. One day, Ames had found himself reading the list of ingredients on a package of potato chips, and wondering how safe the chemicals used as preservatives really were.
The Troubled History of the Espionage Act
The law, passed in a frenzy after the First World War, is a disaster. Why is it still on the books?
In March, 1940, Edmund Carl Heine, a forty-nine-year-old American automobile executive, reached an understanding with a company then known as Volkswagenwerk GmbH. Heine, who immigrated to the United States from Germany as a young man, had spent years at Ford, first in Michigan and then in its international operations in South America and Europe, landing finally in Germany. In 1935, two years after the Nazi regime came to power, Ford fired him, for reasons that are unclear. Heine next signed on with Chrysler, in Spain, but the Spanish Civil War was tough on the car business. And so he was out of a job again.
Boomers Daily 