Art
Roger Brown’s Innovative Still Lifes
Brown was interested in mishaps and disasters, but above all, he was interested in what it meant to be American.
Weekend
Art
In Praise of Painting's Ambiguity, Part 3
Jasper Johns breaks down the image of a broken man.
Art
Required Reading
This week, Sam Gilliam, art as an asset class, John Waters at Mary Oliver's bookshop, Ai Weiwei on Hong Kong protest, the radical black history of techno music.
Books
David Bezmozgis's Strangers in a Strange Land
Nostalgia and despair form the emotional undercurrent of these stories about the afterlife of an immigrant childhood.
Books
Lyn Hejinian Imagines Life on Mars
The poet challenges assumptions about how thinking is a form of language.
Art
Brice Marden's Intuitive Formalism
Each work in Marden's series Cold Mountain Studies is the trace of a transient intention, and their variety is potentially infinite.
Art
Imagining the Western Other in 19th-Century Japanese Prints
Images of Americans in these prints tell us a great deal about the local culture as it met the West. They tell us, specifically, about what many Japanese feared, and desired, from the encounter of cultures.
Art
The Trouble with Renoir’s Nudes
Renoir: The Body, The Senses makes some attempts, vain in my opinion, to present Renoir as a politically progressive artist, even a closet feminist.
Art
The Disturbing Greatness of Hyman Bloom
Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock considered Hyman Bloom to be America’s first Abstract Expressionist, a label, it should be pointed out, that the artist himself rejected.
Art
In Praise of Painting's Ambiguity, Part 2
Despite all the changes that Jasper Johns’s art has undergone since the mid-1950s, he has repeatedly returned to the theme of brokenness.
Art
Required Reading
This week, Mapplethorpe's not-so-original images, indigo in ancient Peru, White Girl Art bingo, Western Civilization and white nationalism, a real life Snow White, and more.
Music
Jamila Woods and Her Ancestral Spirits
Woods’s new album Legacy! Legacy! is framed by the presence of a larger community — the enacted community of choir singing and an imagined community of Black artists.