This week, a newly donated tiny Seurat, Eli Valley on the use of art to fight anti-semitism, reviewing The Irishman, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s freedom stories, the kinds of Spanish in the US, and more.
November 30, 2019
Taylor Swift’s Lover Surprises With Its Calm
Even on Swift’s most dramatic songs there’s an underlying calm to Lover, a sense of gratitude and relief at having made it this far.
A Peek Into Some of the Best Art Books of 2019
Paula Rego, John Ruskin, Donald Judd, Lucian Freud, Hokusai, and, yes, Leonardo da Vinci.
The Polymathic Mind of John Ruskin
Ruskin was captivated with more than just art and architecture. He wrote at some length on geology, mythology, crystallography, ornithology, herpetology — and who knows what else.
Unconstrained Paintings of Terror and Love
Joe Coleman is a hyper-realist who crams every picture with data, producing an image of all-over intensity that is at once a scrumptious meal and hard to stomach.
Positively Ninth Street Women
By the mid-1970s, critic Thomas Hess acknowledged the critical favoritism shown to postwar male artists when he singled out the women of the Ninth Street Show as “sparkling Amazons.”
Artists of the Darkness and Light
While Tatsumi Hijikata and Eikoh Hosoe reflected the countercultural mood of Japan’s postwar avant-garde, the trauma of World War II is inscribed in both artists’ aesthetics.
A Fresh Direction for Printmaking
Sarah Amos’s work may be labor-intensive, yet it conveys neither labor nor the consumption of time, but a meditative joy.