The Week In Art Podcast (December 8, 2023): This week: the final big art market event of the year, Art Basel in Miami Beach. The Art Newspaper’s associate digital editor, Alexander Morrison, talks to our acting art market editor, Tim Schneider, in Miami about the fair, as tensions rise ahead of the pivotal 2024 US election.
In Athens, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, or EMST, is next week opening a months-long programme which will end up with the entire museum filled with women artists. We talk to EMST’s director, Katerina Gregos, about the programme, called What if Women Ruled the World? And this episode’s Work of the Week is two objects: the 15th-century Florentine artist Francesco Pesellino’s panels telling the story of David and Goliath, made for a luxurious cassone or chest for the Medici family.
The panels belong to the National Gallery in London and have just been restored for a new exhibition there, Pesellino: A Renaissance Master Revealed. We talk to Jill Dunkerton, who did the restoration, about these extraordinary paintings.
Art Basel in Miami Beach, Miami Beach Convention Center, until Sunday, 10 December.
What if Women Ruled the World? begins at EMST, Athens, on 14 December.Pesellino: A Renaissance Master Revealed, National Gallery, London, until 10 March 2024.
London Review of Books (LRB) – December 7, 2023: The latest issue features Monet: The Restless Vision; Aldus Manutius – The Invention of the Publisher; The Fraud by Zadie Smith and Capitalism and Slavery…
Literary Review – December 6, 2023: The latest issue, December 2023/January 2024, features the Christmas Double Issue; Architecture & Us; To Catch a Book Thief; Could We Move to Mars?; Milosz goes West; Ballard unplugged; To Brideshead Born and Maharajahs behaving badly…
‘Unruly schoolboys,’ Lord Curzon called them, but then again, he had a penchant for understatement. John Zubrzycki’s new book on India’s last princely rulers is, in fact, Lord of the Flies meets The 120 Days of Sodom. Had Zubrzycki repurposed his material for a novel, he would no doubt have had some stern reviewer scribbling ‘too on the nose’ or ‘uninspired orientalist caricature’ in the margins. Yet the rulers of India’s 562 princely states were for real, and the Raj, resolute on ruling with a light touch, much preferred coexisting with them to conquering them outright.
In a late poem about a friend’s death, Czesław Miłosz writes of the long passage between youth and age as one of learning ‘how to bear what is borne by others’. It could be a summary of his own poetic witness. Eva Hoffman’s moving and eloquent essay traces the ways in which that simultaneously guilty, compassionate and fastidious response characterises Miłosz’s work from its earliest days. Bearing what is borne by others is, for Miłosz, close to the heart of the poetic task, but it is also fraught with risk.
Country Life Magazine – December 6, 2023: The latest issue features ‘George Harrison’s Garden’ – Friar Park rescued by the former Beatle; Folklore of the Rowan ‘Wizard’s’ tree; the best and worst gifts in classic literature and Travel – From the Caribbean to Concorde….
George Harrison’s garden: All things must pass
Charles Quest-Ritson visits Friar Park in Oxfordshire and marvels at the topiary garden rescued by former Beatle George Harrison
Native breeds
Kate Green meets the distinctive and much-loved Belted Galloway
Never knowingly undersold
Country Life advertisements in 1923 capture Britain’s evolution, as Melanie Bryan discovers
Neptune’s wooden angels
Harry Pearson takes to the high seas to chart the fascinating history of the figureheads that keep ships safe in stormy weather
A kind of tree magic
The rowan tree is a symbol of safety across the world — Aeneas Dennison delves into the folklore of the wizard’s tree
Native breeds
Kate Green meets the distinctive and much-loved Belted Galloway
Never knowingly undersold
Country Life advertisements in 1923 capture Britain’s evolution, as Melanie Bryan discovers
Neptune’s wooden angels
Harry Pearson takes to the high seas to chart the fascinating history of the figureheads that keep ships safe in stormy weather
And that’s an unwrap
From cursed jewels to diamond-encrusted tortoises, Felicity Day reads up on the best and worst gifts in classic literature
Travel
Lady Glenconner’s Mustique memories and much more, plus Rosie Paterson uncovers the real Barbados and Pamela Goodman goes supersonic
Melanie Vandenbrouck’s favourite painting
The gallery curator loses herself in an expressive, exuberant work
The life of a naturalist
Carla Carlisle reflects on the legacy of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney — ‘a truly good man’
Taking account of the past
Steven Brindle is full of praise for the refurbishment of Chartered Accountants’ Hall, an architectural jewel in the City of London
Not so jolly old Saint Nicholas
Ian Morton examines how Father Christmas was transformed from a sozzled figure riding a goat into the jolly fellow we know and love
Interiors
Pheasants, leopards, parrots and reindeer are all welcome at Melanie Johnson’s festive table
The good stuff
Editor Mark Hedges picks his favourite luxuries of 2023
London Life
The capital’s Christmas lights dazzle Emma Love (page 83), Gilly Hopper shares her must-see seasonal suggestions (page 86), Carla Passino views London in a new light with Sir John Soane (page 92) and Emma Hughes hails the survivors of the restaurant scene (page 98)
Travel
From the Caribbean to Concorde
A case of mistaken identity
Ian Morton looks at the merits of ground elder and ground ivy, an unloved and misnamed duo
Paris Review Winter 2023 — The new issue features Louise Glück on the Art of Poetry – “You want a poem to register in every mind the way it did in yours. Then you discover this never happens.”; Yu Hua on the Art of Fiction: “If I’d taken another two or three years to start writing, I’d still be a dentist.”; Prose by Ananda Devi, Fiona McFarlane, and Sean Thor Conroe and more…
The New Yorker – December11, 2023 issue: The new issue‘s cover featuresBarry Blitt’s “Special Delivery” – The artist discusses holiday shopping and his prized Popeye punching bag.
After the Civil War, Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, was to be tried for treason. Does the debacle hold lessons for the trials awaiting Donald Trump?
Jefferson Davis, the half-blind ex-President of the Confederate States of America, leaned on a cane as he hobbled into a federal courthouse in Richmond, Virginia. Only days before, a Chicago Tribune reporter, who’d met Davis on the boat ride to Richmond, had written that “his step is light and elastic.” But in court, facing trial for treason, Davis, fifty-eight, gave every appearance of being bent and broken. A reporter from Kentucky described him as “a gaunt and feeble-looking man,” wearing a soft black hat and a sober black suit, as if he were a corpse. He’d spent two years in a military prison. He wanted to be released. A good many Americans wanted him dead. “We’ll hang Jeff Davis from a sour-apple tree,” they sang to the tune of “John Brown’s Body.”
The companies had honed a protocol for releasing artificial intelligence ambitiously but safely. Then OpenAI’s board exploded all their carefully laid plans.
At around 11:30 a.m. on the Friday before Thanksgiving, Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, was having his weekly meeting with senior leaders when a panicked colleague told him to pick up the phone. An executive from OpenAI, an artificial-intelligence startup into which Microsoft had invested a reported thirteen billion dollars, was calling to explain that within the next twenty minutes the company’s board would announce that it had fired Sam Altman, OpenAI’s C.E.O. and co-founder. It was the start of a five-day crisis that some people at Microsoft began calling the Turkey-Shoot Clusterfuck.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (December 3, 2023): This week features the Holiday Books issue that lands with a thump, a 56-page behemoth crammed with reviews, coffee-table book spreads, recommendations from our genre columnists, a children’s book gift guide and our 100 Notables list.
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.
As long as people have been buying gifts for the holidays, they have been buying books. Books offer infinite variety, are easily wrapped, can be personalized for the recipient and displayed as a signifier of one’s own identity. They are, in many respects, the quintessential Christmas — or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or other December celebration — gift.
PBS NewsHour (November 29, 2023) – The great painter John Singer Sargent, an American expat, is the subject of a new show at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. It reveals much about his methods and why his work remains relevant more than a hundred years later.
Apollo Magazine– December 2023: The new issue features Best in show: art at the Kennel Club; The magnificent art of Marisol; The rise of the Renaissance woman, and more…
The Chess Game (detail; 1555), Sofonisba Anguissola. National Museum, Poznan
Among the art-gallery going public, is anyone still unaware that there have always been women artists, even before the 19th century? Perhaps a few still think that women first picked up their paintbrushes around the time they started campaigning for the vote. Certainly, the further back you go, the more surprising it may seem – given the limitations placed on women – that some were nonetheless able to build successful artistic careers. But beginning in earnest with the National Gallery’s blockbuster Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition of 2019, a flurry of shows has put the names of various Renaissance women in lights. Just this year, we have had ‘Lavinia Fontana: Trailblazer, Rule Breaker’ at the National Gallery of Ireland, ‘Mary Beale: Experimental Secrets’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery, ‘Artemisia Gentileschi: coraggio e passione’ at the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa, and ‘Sofonisba Anguissola: Portraitist of the Renaissance’ at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede, to name only a few.
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