Books
Getting Closer to Vermeer with Three New Books on the Artist
Vermeer died twice. The first time was in 1675, after the Dutch art market collapsed.
Review
Art
The Tender Playfulness of Paul Klee
PARIS — The key to Paul Klee’s wonderfully shaped energy is not ironic detachment, as the title of the Centre Pompidou’s current retrospective suggests, but rather the playful and idyllic emotion he transmits through masterly line and dusty color.
Art
An Artist Attempts to Draw the Entire History of Vietnam
HO CHI MINH CITY — At times the downtown here can appear as one great, big construction site — gleaming Chanel storefronts arise around the corner from propaganda posters.
Art
The Sinuous Lines of Influence Between Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt
CLEVELAND — When I first saw the wall, I didn't see what was on it.
Art
The Underground Press and Its Extraordinary Moment in US History
What if the history of an era were stocked away in an attic, waiting for our attention?
Art
In Cleveland, Two Artists Picture the Ugly Realities of American Politics
CLEVELAND — Maybe it’s not quite that bad; hell is just some others — many of who stopped in Cleveland this past week for the Republican National Convention.
Art
Democracy, Art, and the Frustrations of Populism
Art exhibitions concerned with politics are very much of the moment.
Art
Artist Duo TOILETPAPER’s Kitschy Department Store Wipeout
PARIS — Jaded neo-pop (one is tempted to say “poop” here) is on view in the Galeries Lafayette’s très kitsch exhibition TP–RAMA, the latest from art-commerce duo of Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari, aka TOILETPAPER.
Books
Reader’s Diary: Robert Glück’s ‘Communal Nude’
Some of Robert Glück’s essays came my way in the 1980s via such publications as Poetics Journal.
Art
The Two Faces of Grace Jane
Margot Bergman paints boldly simplified portraits of women on top of found paintings, which she salvages from flea markets.
Art
Upbeat and Edgy
With the rise of artists desperate to align themselves with one compromised avant-garde tradition or another, it is useful to remember that Stuart Davis never fit in.
Books
Squaring the Circle
John Peck is the author of ten volumes of poetry, a psychoanalyst, translator of Euripides and C. G. Jung’s The Red Book, a poet under-appreciated by or unfamiliar to most, yet long and deeply admired by a cadre of serious poets and critics on both sides of the Atlantic.