The New Criterion – January 2024 Preview
Tag Archives: Arts & Literature
The New York Times Book Review – December 17, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (December 15, 2023): The latest issue features ‘Glorious Memoirs by the Very Rich’ – A look back at a time when the super-wealthy felt they had nothing to lose by letting readers inside their gilded corridors; For Kate Christensen, Bad Prose Can Never Yield a Great Book – “A book is made of language,” says the author, whose new novel is “Welcome Home, Stranger.” “How can a house be great if it’s made of shoddy materials? How can a dinner be great if it’s made with terrible ingredients?”
It’s My Privilege: Glorious Memoirs by the Very Rich
A look back at a time when the super-wealthy felt they had nothing to lose by letting readers inside their gilded corridors.
By Molly Young
“Class consciousness takes a vacation while we’re in the thrall of this book,” Barbara Grizzuti Harrison wrote in the Book Review in 1985, in her evaluation of the heiress Gloria Vanderbilt’s memoir “Once Upon a Time.” To be clear, Harrison was referring to the class consciousness of the reader, not the author. Vanderbilt demonstrates perfect awareness throughout her book that most young children don’t play with emerald tiaras and alligator jewel boxes lined in chestnut satin, or rely on the services of multiple butlers, or lose count of their own houses. Harrison’s point was that Vanderbilt’s talent with a pen — and perspective on her own economic altitude — allowed consumers of her tale to suspend their envy and engage with the reality of growing up in opulent neglect.
For Kate Christensen, Bad Prose Can Never Yield a Great Book
“A book is made of language,” says the author, whose new novel is “Welcome Home, Stranger.” “How can a house be great if it’s made of shoddy materials? How can a dinner be great if it’s made with terrible ingredients?”
What books are on your night stand?
I’m living temporarily in a rented house in Iowa City, teaching at the Writers’ Workshop. When I arrived there was not one book in the entire place, so I made an emergency trip to the local used-book store, collecting whatever leaped out at me from the shelves, mostly based on the wonderful titles: “Overhead in a Balloon,” by Mavis Gallant; “Watson’s Apology,” by Beryl Bainbridge; “Anthills of the Savannah,” by Chinua Achebe; “The Brandon Papers,” by Quentin Bell; “The Marquis of Bolibar,” by Leo Perutz; “The Seven Sisters,” by Margaret Drabble; “Bruised Hibiscus,” by Elizabeth Nunez; “A Journal of the Plague Year,” by Daniel Defoe.
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: Country Life Magazine – Dec 13, 2023
Country Life Magazine – December 13, 2023: The latest ‘Double Christmas’ issue features How the Bible’s nativity story has influenced artists; the beauty of the gardens of Rockcliffe in Gloucestershire; In literature at least, the fox will come out on top in almost every brush with confrontation, and more….
Away in a manger
Love, pain, power and hope are all embodied in the Nativity. Michael Prodger examines how the Bible story influenced our greatest artists
The Bishop of Winchester’s favourite painting
The Right Revd Philip Mounstephen chooses an arresting Caravaggio
On the night watch
As darkness falls, the wild things emerge from the shadows. John Lewis-Stempel embraces the night
Prodigy or eccentric?
John Goodall explores Bristol Cathedral, a building of international importance
When Christmas was cancelled
Always winter, never festive: Cromwell’s directive cast a pall, laments Ian Morton
Made with love
Cast your eyes down next time you’re in church to admire the hassock you kneel upon, urges the Revd Colin Heber-Percy
’Tis the season to be busy
There’s no rest for the farmer, the baker or the cheesemonger at this time of year. Ben Lerwill champions the people who make Christmas happen
So, this is Christmas
Queen Victoria would feel quite at home in any of our houses this season, believes John Mueller
It came upon a midnight clear
Come one, come all, says Kate Green, as the villagers gather once more at the big house
The Editor’s Christmas quiz
Pit your wits. The only prize is glory
Luxury
Christian Dior, David Gandy, dinky toys and Sir Chris Hoy’s favourite things
Cold comforts
Frost-dusted and fleece-wrapped, the beauty of the gardens of Rockcliffe in Gloucestershire enchant Tiffany Daneff
It’s a wonderful life
Carla Passino travels the world for Christmas traditions, from Swedish tomte to Japanese KFC
Christmas conundrums
Turkey or goose? Stocking or sack? Port or Sauternes? Giles Kime poses the big questions
Think outside the fox
Clever and agile, Vulpes vulpes is frequently on top in literature. Kate Green turns the pages
Back to black
The Périgord black truffle is worth the price for Tom Parker Bowles
The peel-good factor
The rich scents of citrus permeate Deborah Nicholls-Lee’s Christmas
Sugar, spice and all things nice
Carla Passino builds a gingerbread house
On top of the mirey, merey moor
John Lewis-Stempel tucks his chin into his scarf and sets off into the frozen wastes
Native breeds
Kate Green advocates heritage turkeys
Artisans: Metalwork In Ladakh, Northern India
Deeply entwined with its cultural heritage, the mountainous territory carries a historic tradition of craft metalwork – as a center for the production of hand-crafted ornaments, teapots and spiritual artefacts, destined for temples, and held in high regard by India’s king dynasties.
But the craft has entered a point of decline, continued by just a handful of artisanal metalworkers who fight for its preservation.…
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.
Travel & Culture In Spain: Salvador Dali’s Figueres
This northeasterly nook of Catalonia’s Costa Brava, between the Pyrenees to the north and the Mediterranean to the south, was the landscape that Dalí called his “ongoing inspiration” and is a recurring motif throughout his work.
While the Casa Natal Dalí took me on a tour of Dalí’s life, its near neighbour, the gigantic Dalí Theatre-Museum (£15; salvador-dali.org), just five minutes’ walk away, was designed by the maestro himself. It opened in 1974 and showcases his style at its most eccentric, not to say egocentric.
With its pink façade and giant white eggs on its roof, like decorations on a cake, this is where you’ll find not only the Mae West “lips” sofa, but also numerous grandiose paintings and drawings, trompe l’oeils and painted ceilings — as well as Dalí’s tomb in the crypt.
The New York Times Book Review – December 10, 2023
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (December 10, 2023):
The Critics’ Picks: A Year in Reading
The Book Review’s daily critics — Dwight Garner, Alexandra Jacobs and Jennifer Szalai — reflect on the books that stuck with them in 2023.
By Jennifer Szalai, Alexandra Jacobs and Dwight Garner
24 Things That Stuck With Us in 2023
Films, TV shows, albums, books, art and A.I.-generated SpongeBob performances that reporters, editors and visual journalists in Culture couldn’t stop thinking about this year.
Interviews: British Writer Ian McEwan – ‘Life Stories’
Ian McEwan is considered one of the most important British novelists alive today. When he writes, characters and plot are difficult to separate because “often characters arise out of plots, often plots drive characters into existence”, he says. What is crucial to McEwan when writing is that “circumstances make the character and the characters generate possibilities. That sense of possibility is always so important. So characters can create their own waves.” The novel Lessons (2022) is McEwan’s most personal novel. It was written in lockdown when he was entering his 70s and beginning to take a look back at his existence. People who know him well can always connect what he is writing with things in his own life, he says.
In Lessons, McEwan wanted to create “the emotional truth of certain rather sad, tragic, disturbing things that happened in my family”, he says. “And the reflective element was also the movement towards trying to understand the circumstances, not only of my life but my generation’s life.” Ian McEwan enjoys reading biographies, but “if you want to know everything it’s possible to know about a great poet, you’ll need to read three or four biographies written over maybe a century or two centuries”, he says. He admits that fiction does not influence him like it did when he was younger.
“We have very little sense of how to generate on the page an open-ended character until the writing of Jane Austen” and he adds that it was the great Russian writers who taught us how to write characters as if they were real people. By the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, there was a great artistic revolution; McEwan points out and emphasizes that it was especially James Joyce who taught us “to understand characters from the flow of consciousness, right from the very inside”.
Boomers Daily 