Art
Required Reading
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.
Weekend
Music
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.
Books
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.
Books
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.
Art
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.
Art
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.”
Art
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.
Art
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.
Art
Required Reading
This week, Charlotte Brontë miniature magazine, flax age vs. iron age, the problem with "landscape urbanism," China's new drone tech, US exporting homophobia, and more.
Performance
Staging a History of Violence
Schaubühne Berlin vividly adapts the author Édouard Louis’s first-person account of the experience of rape and attempted murder.
Music
Four Approaches to Sonic Immersion
When the world encroaches, aural blankets are comforting, but they can also function as weapons.
Books
Giorgio de Chirico's Dream-like Verse
These poems channel the artist's restlessness and longings into uncanny, animated visions.