Tag Archives: Arts & Literature

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

April 6, 2023: This week: Ben Luke talks to Melanie Gerlis about the recent turbulence in the banking sector, as US banks go under, an ailing Credit Suisse is acquired by UBS and Deutsche Bank shares fall at one point by 14%.

What are the implications for the art world? Melanie also explains the figures in the latest Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report. The Baltimore Museum of Art in the US this week opens the exhibition The Culture: Hip Hop & Contemporary Art in the 21st Century.

We speak to Asma Naeem, the director of the BMA and co-curator of the show, about what she’s called “the second pop art movement”. And this episode’s Work of the Week is The Calling of Saint Matthew by the 17th-century Afro-Hispanic artist Juan de Pareja. He is best known as the subject of one of the greatest ever portraits, by Diego Velázquez, the artist who enslaved Pareja for two decades before his manumission in Rome in 1650.

David Pullins and Vanessa K. Valdés, the curators of a new exhibition about Juan de Pareja at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, tell us about the painting.The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century, Baltimore Museum of Art, until 16 July; St Louis Art Museum, 26 August-1 January 2024.Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, until 16 July. 

New Art Exhibitions: ‘John Craxton – Drawn To Light’, Meşher Studio In Istanbul

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Meşher, Istanbul’s leading multidisciplinary art space, is to celebrate the life and work of the painter and designer John Craxton (1922–2009). The late British artist’s first solo exhibition in Türkiye will run April 5–July 23, 2023.

John Craxton: Drawn To Light

5 April – 23 July 2023

Meşher will have the honour of exhibiting the biggest and the most comprehensive display of Craxton’s artworks ever to be showcased. John Craxton: Drawn to Lightcurated by Ian Collins, friend and the biographer of the artist, brings together a diverse selection of works spanning the artist’s long career.

John Craxton: Drawn to Light - Announcements - e-flux

Featuring nearly 200 works, the exhibition offers a wide-ranging presentation of Craxton’s artworks including a monumental tapestry, paintings, drawings, prints, book designs and personal effects. The exhibition charts a joyful creative life moving from war-time darkness into light and from monochrome to brilliant colour. The window display features an example of the vintage motorbikes the artist loved to ride.

John Craxton: Drawn to Light - Announcements - e-flux

In addition to loaned works, Meşher’s John Craxton: Drawn to Light exhibition features 44 artworks from the Ömer Koç Collection, whose holding of Craxton works is second only to the John Craxton Estate. Photographs by the American photographer Robert McCabe and the London-born painter Nicholas Moore also enrich the John Craxton: Drawn to Light exhibition. First travelling to Aegean in 1954, McCabe’s photography focuses on its landscape and people, providing a close parallel with the art of John Craxton. Nicholas Moore’s photographs show scenes from his 1985 trip to Istanbul with John Craxton. A frequent visitor and an admirer of Istanbul, Craxton’s revelatory exhibition invites art lovers to explore his art and life in the lands he loved best.

READ MORE at e-flux

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – April 17, 2023

A courtroom drawing of Donald Trump at his arraignment on April 4 2023.
Art by Jane Rosenberg – April 5, 2023

The New Yorker – April 17, 2023 issue: Truth is stranger than fiction: for the first time in its long history, The New Yorker is publishing a courtroom sketch on the cover.

America’s First Indicted Ex-President Is Very Sorry—for Himself

A photo of Donald Trump speaks in a MaraLago ballroom hours after being arraigned.

Notes on Donald Trump’s day in court.

By the time Donald Trump marched out from behind a phalanx of American flags and emerged into the gilded Mar-a-Lago ballroom to speak to cheering supporters on Tuesday night, America’s first indicted ex-President hardly seemed chastened by his historic day as a defendant in a Manhattan courtroom

Alvin Bragg, Donald Trump, and the Pursuit of Low-Level Crimes

Alvin Bragg steps out of a car on March 27 2023.
The fact that Donald Trump has finally been brought to court for an alleged crime relating to paying hush money may well contradict Alvin Bragg’s key contention.

Following the Manhattan District Attorney’s investigation, the former President was arraigned on felony charges stemming from hush-money payments.

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – April 7, 2023

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Times Literary Supplement @TheTLS (April 7, 2023) – This week’s @TheTLS, featuring the late Jane Maas on Philip Roth’s great love; David Throsby on consulting firms; an extract from The God Desire by @Baddiel; @LamornaAsh on Max Porter; @funesdamemorius on Mike Nelson; a new poem by Carl Dennis – and more.

Art Exhibitions: ‘Dosso Dossi. The Aeneas Frieze’ At The Galleria Borghese

Dosso Dossi. The Aeneas Frieze

Dosso Dossi. The Aeneas Frieze

Galleria Borghese – From April 4 to June 11, 2023, the Galleria Borghese brings to fruition its research on landscape painting and the relationship between Art and Nature with Dosso Dossi. The Aeneas Frieze, a never-before-seen exhibition – the first dedicated to the great Ferrarese master’s pictorial cycle-curated by Marina Minozzi.


Dosso Dossi (Giovanni di Nicolò Luteri, Tramuschio ?, c. 1487 – Ferrara, 1542) – The Cretan Plague c. 1520-1521

For the first time, five of the ten canvases that made up the frieze created by Dosso Dossi between 1518 and 1520 for the Camerino d’Alabastro of Duke Alfonso I d’Este in Ferrara are being brought together in a single location. The operation, also prompted by enthusiasm for the recent reappearance of some of these paintings, is the result of an ambitious collaboration with the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Museo del Prado in Madrid.

Dosso Dossi (Giovanni di Nicolò Luteri, Tramuschio ?, c. 1487 – Ferrara, 1542) The Repair of the Trojan Ships;
the Building of the Temple to Venus at Eryx and the Offerings at Anchises’s Grave c. 1518-1519

The Frieze, of which only seven canvases have been found to date, was made by Dosso Dossi drawing inspiration from specific episodes of the Virgilian poem taken from the first, third, fifth and sixth books, leaving out, however, the part devoted to the hero’s love story with Dido, that of the wars in Italy and the founding of Rome.

Preview: Banshee Literary Journal – Spring 2023

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Banshee Literary Journal – Spring/Summer 2023:

Issue 15 features poetry from @el_fodongo, Elizabeth McGeown, @JamieOHallo108, @MNSghost, @AnneTannam, @hmorganvl, @crownofpetals, @dogwithoutlegs, @yopopodawn and Derek JG Williams.

Preview: London Review Of Books – April 13, 2023

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London Review of Books (LRB) – April 13, 2023 issue:

Let’s go to CroydonJonathan Meades

Iconicon: A Journey Around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain

Iconicon: A Journey Around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain By John Grindrod Cover Image

Its appeal is part of the recurrent cycle of the centripetal giving way to the lure of the burbs. Save that, in this instance, it’s not the lure that accounts for an invasion of beards and craft beer but the unaffordability of housing in East London. Let’s go to Croydon! For want of anywhere else.

Rewriting the Marcos YearsSheila S. Coronel

Which archival sources are used and whose voices are silenced? The Marcoses have – for now – claimed the archive and seized the narrative. They tell the story of a golden age followed by a fall and a quest for redemption. In the Philippines, a deeply Catholic country, the story has a satisfying narrative arc.

Arts/Culture: Humanities Magazine – Spring 2023

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Humanities Magazine – Spring 2023 Issue

Audubon in This Day and Age

The artist and his birds continue to challenge us

John James Audubon, dead for 172 years, has been in the news again. Disturbing facts known to his biographers—that, for example, when he kept a store in Henderson, Kentucky, he enslaved people—have gained new currency, although the National Audubon Society has, for now, held on to its name. For many, Audubon has become synonymous with an activity—call it science, ornithology, natural history, birding, love of the outdoors—that has, for the longest time, excluded people of color.  

A Lot of What Is Known about Pirates Is Not True, and a Lot of What Is True Is Not Known.

In 1701, in Middletown, New Jersey, Moses Butterworth languished in a jail, accused of piracy. Like many young men based in England or her colonies, he had joined a crew that sailed the Indian Ocean intent on plundering ships of the Muslim Mughal Empire. Throughout the 1690s, these pirates marauded vessels laden with gold, jewels, silk, and calico on pilgrimage toward Mecca. After achieving great success, many of these men sailed back into the Atlantic via Madagascar to the North American seaboard, where they quietly disembarked in Charleston, Philadelphia, New Jersey, New York City, Newport, and Boston, and made themselves at home.

Books: Literary Review Magazine – April 2023

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Literary Review – April 2023 issue: The April issue of Literary Review is out now! In this month’s cover article, Kirsten Tambling looks at how Shakespeare’s Juliet has been reinterpreted and received through the ages.

Such Sweet Sorrow

Searching for Juliet: The Lives and Deaths of Shakespeare’s First Tragic Heroine – In 1611, the Somerset-born traveller Thomas Coryat described an Italian architectural novelty: a ‘very pleasant little tarrasse, that jutteth or butteth out from the maine building: the edge whereof is decked with many pretty little turned pillers … to leane over’.

One Day in October

Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown

Art: ‘BASQUIAT × WARHOL PAINTING FOUR HANDS’ – Fondation Louis Vuitton

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BASQUIAT × WARHOL. PAINTING FOUR HANDS

In 2018, the Fondation featured the “Jean-Michel Basquiat” exhibition. It continues its exploration of the work of the artist, revealing, this time, his collaboration with Andy Warhol.

Jean-Michel Basquiat et Andy Warhol, Untitled (collaboration no.23) / Quality, 1984-1985

Between 1984 and 1985, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) and Andy Warhol (1928-1987) created around 160 paintings together in tandem, “à quatre mains”, including some of the largest works produced during their respective careers. Keith Haring (1958-1990), who witnessed their friendship and collaboration production, would go on to speak of a “conversation occurring through painting, instead of words,” and of two minds merging to create a “third distinctive and unique mind.”

“Basquiat × Warhol. Painting four hands” is the most important exhibition ever dedicated to this extraordinary body of work and brings together more than three hundred works and documents including eighty canvases jointly signed by the two artists. Also featured are individual works by each as well as a set of works by other major artists (Michael Halsband, Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Kenny Scharf……) in order to evoke the energy of the New York downtown art scene of the 1980s.