It’s the 50th anniversary of Pablo Picasso’s death and The Musée National in Paris along with The Albertina Museum in Vienna are commemorating the occasion with two outstanding shows centered around the legendary artist’s work.
The new landmark Vermeer exhibition in Amsterdam showcases 28 known works by the artist, providing a rare opportunity to see a significant collection of his masterpieces in one place. Learn about these thrilling shows and more in this video.
Poetry a special section
T. S. Eliot’s still point by James Matthew Wilson
Singing the “Frauenliebe” by Ian Bostridge
The foundational “Kokinshu” by Torquil Duthie
A White Russian on the rocks by Boris Dralyuk
Darkness visible: Auden collected by William Logan
Three poems by Georgia Douglas Johnson
New poems by David Ewbank
A review of Peace and Friendship by Stephen Aron & Indigenous Continent by Pekka Hämäläinen.
A review of India: A History in Objects by T. Richard Blurton.
The New York Times Book Review – March 19, 2023:
The new book by the sociologist and author of “Evicted” examines the persistence of want in the wealthy United States, finding that keeping some citizens poor serves the interests of many.
Brazil’s ultra urban megacity overwhelms the landscape and the imagination. Paulo Scott recommends books that peel back its layers.
The fashion world’s hunger for larger-than-life figures glorified the designer. But a cozy new biography shows him to be more business whiz than artist.
March 17, 2023: the extraordinary story behind what Canadian police have called “the biggest art fraud in history”. More than 1,000 fake works purporting to be by the First Nations artist Norval Morrisseau are seized and eight people have been charged.
The Art Newspaper’s Editor, Americas, Ben Sutton, tells the extraordinary story, involving a rock star, a television documentary and alleged forgery rings, and what it tells us about the market for First Nations art in Canada. A report into artists’ pay in the UK has exposed the inordinately low sums paid to artists for their labour by arts organisations.
We talk to the art collective Industria, who wrote the report, and Julie Lomax, the CEO of a-n, The Artists’ Information Company, which has published the study. And this episode’s Work of the Week is An Old Woman (around 1513) by the Northern Renaissance artist Quinten Massys, a painting better known as The Ugly Duchess.
A new exhibition at the National Gallery focuses on this work in its collection, exploring its origins in a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, and the combination of satire, folklore, humanism and misogyny from which it emerged. Emma Capron, the curator of the show, tells us more.A PDF of Industria’s Structurally F–cked report can be found at a-n.co.uk. Industria’s website is we-industria.org.The Ugly Duchess: Beauty and Satire in the Renaissance, National Gallery, London, until 11 June.
English Garden Eccentrics: Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries
By Todd Longstaffe-Gowan
In the English garden, eccentricity and variety went hand in hand.
What counts as eccentric in the garden, and what counts as a folly? As a child I used to be taken on Sunday walks to the Needle’s Eye in Wentworth, South Yorkshire, a kind of sharp pyramid of stone some forty-five feet tall and pierced by an arched passage.
The Diaries
by Franz Kafka, translated from the German by Ross Benjamin
Kafka’s diaries—made up of false starts, stray thoughts, self-doubts, internal dialogues, dreams, doodles, aphorisms, drafts of stories, character sketches, and scenes from family life—are often very funny.
March 1946. Albert Camus has just spent two weeks at sea on the SS Oregon, a cargo ship transporting passengers from Le Havre to New York City. He’s made several friends during this transatlantic passage.
In his poem “After Avery R. Young,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Jericho Brown writes, “The blk mind / Is a continuous mind.” These lines emerge for me as a guiding principle—as a mantra, even—when I consider the work of Black poetry in America, which insists upon the centrality of Black lives to the human story, and offers the terms of memory, music, conscience, and imagination that serve to counteract the many erasures and distortions riddling the prevailing narrative of Black life in this country.
As I was going to enter college that fall my parents felt that I should build myself up at a summer camp of some sort. They sent me down to a place in the Ozarks on a beautiful lake. It was called a camp but it was not just for boys. It was for both sexes and all ages. It was a rustic, comfortable place. But I was disappointed to find that most of the young people went to another camp several miles down the lake toward the dam. I spent a great deal of time by myself that summer, which is hardly good for a boy of seventeen.
Times Literary Supplement @TheTLS (March 17, 2023) –
This week’s @TheTLS, featuresJaqueline Banerjee on George Eliot’s double life; Paul Collier on capitalism and democracy; @djtaylorwriter on Inez Holden; @BoydTonkin on Klint and Strindberg; @irinibus on ballet – and more.
Our culture is dominated by efforts to score points and win arguments. But do we really talk anymore?
There was once a time when strangers talked to one another, sometimes eagerly. “In past eras, daily life made it necessary for individuals to engage with others different from themselves,” Paula Marantz Cohen explains. In those moments of unpredictability and serendipity, we confronted difference. There were no smartphones, message boards, or online factions. Maybe because life moved at a slower pace, and every interaction wasn’t so freighted with political meaning, we had the opportunity to recognize our full humanity. Nowadays, she argues, we are sectarian and “self-soothing,” having fallen out of such practice. What we need is to return to the basics: to brush up on the art of conversation.
A succession battle involving a fight for the patronage of Sarah Jessica Parker threatens to stop the presses at a Greenwich Village newspaper.
An entomologist races to find them before they disappear.
Caterpillars are to lepidoptera—butterflies and moths—what grubs are to beetles and maggots are to flies; they are larvae. Even among nature lovers, larvae tend to be unloved. For every ten butterfly fanciers, there are approximately zero caterpillar enthusiasts. The reason for this will, to most, seem obvious. The worm in the apple is usually a caterpillar.
Oxford Review of Books (Spring 2023) – This issue includes reviews of the latest releases from Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, and Jon Fosse, interviews with Brian Dillon and the Know Your Enemy Podcast. Our writers explore the politics of pension reform in France, Hollywood’s obsession with sequels, and the shifting linguistic landscape of Taiwan (among countless great articles!) as well as a Q+A with writer Alex Niven and Academic Nigel Biggar.
The New York Times Book Review – March 12, 2023:
In Jenny Jackson’s debut novel, “Pineapple Street,” readers get a tour of a world they might learn not to envy by the end of the book.
Watch for reality-bending explorations of time and space, a Western horror novel from Victor LaValle and new fiction from Han Kang. Plus: Tom Hanks (yes, that Tom Hanks) releases his debut novel.
A new book by Joel Warner traces the fate of the parchment on which the infamous author wrote “120 Days of Sodom,” a trail involving scholars, aristocrats and thieves — and lots of money.
Boomers Daily 