Books
Dali, Warhol, and Pollock: This Is Your Life
A new graphic biography series launched last month with books that follow the lives of Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, and Salvador Dalí in text and illustration.
Books
Books
Genet Redux: On Chris Tysh’s 'Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic'
Chris Tysh’s Our Lady of the Flowers, Echoic is, as the title suggests, a revision, or better yet, a re-sounding, a twenty-first century echo of Jean Genet’s transgressive and groundbreaking debut novel Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, which he drafted in prison in 1942 and framed as a kind of playful, metafi
Books
Maira Kalman's Empathetic Portraits
The girl stands awkwardly, her arms crossed over her stomach. Below them she wears high-waisted shorts, wrinkled through with creases and rolled at the bottom; above them she wears a frilly top. And above that, her deeply furrowed brow, mirrored by the part in her neatly done hair.
Books
Photographs of the Everyday in an Isolated Village
The village of Pikin Slee in the South American nation of Suriname is incredibly remote. But the details of the place caught photographer Viviane Sassen's eye, and she decided it was worth the journey to document.
Books
At the Morgan, a Master's Minuscule Manuscripts
The Morgan Library & Museum over the last few years has added some small wonders to its collections, and now for the first time a sampling of these miniature books is on public view. Opened last month, Miracles in Miniature: The Art of the Master of Claude de France celebrates one of the last greats
Books
In Photographs of an Abandoned Town, a Post-Apocalyptic Puzzle
A silhouette of a ballerina is fading on an abandoned semi truck, a sign for Lover's Lane warns of "falling rocks" and "high water." And not a person is around. What is this strange and desolate landscape?
Books
Bookbinding the Dead: Harvard Confirms 19th-Century Book Bound in Human Skin
After having deadly disappointment earlier this year when it was revealed two of the three books at Harvard University believed to be bound in human skin were both sheepskin, the third has been confirmed as being hominid-made.
Books
What It Is to Be Cool in America
What is cool and why do Americans care so much? That's the hinge on which the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery has fixed American Cool — an exhibition of portraiture that opened in February — and its accompanying catalogue.
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A Fashion Mag with Beauty and Brains
There will always be fashion magazines that instruct readers which silk faille caftan is appropriate for lounging on a yacht over Memorial Day weekend, but what about one that traces the sartorial origins of the safety pin as an accessory?
Books
A Story of Sentences: Nanni Balestrini’s Ever-Changing Novel
Tristano, the most recently translated book by the Italian poet and novelist Nanni Balestrini may come as a surprise to those who know him through his two previously translated works of fiction, The Unseen and Sandokan.
Books
The Call to Action to Save Digitized Books from Oblivion
Digitization may be increasing the accessibility to the history of literature, but there is something lost about the book as a physical object.
Books
How the West Was Won by a 19th-Century Photographer
Back in the 1860s, the capital of the United States was glimpsing two visions of its country: one of brutality, and one of beauty. The latter was captured by Carleton Watkins in his photographs of an untouched wilderness in the West.