‘I’m Nobody’? Not a Chance, Emily Dickinson

by Holland Cotter

New York Times
January 19, 2017

“In the Trumpian sense of the term, she’s the ultimate ‘nasty woman.’ An inspiration. Volcanic. When I start to write about her, I always feel, uh-oh.” The volcano referred to is Emily Dickinson, as described by the contemporary poet Susan Howe in the catalog for an exhibition, “I’m Nobody! Who are you? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson,” opening on Friday at the Morgan Library & Museum.

The show is one of the largest gatherings ever of prime Dickinson relics, and it comes with an aura the size of a city block. It instantly turns the Morgan into a pilgrimage site, a literary Lourdes, a place to come in contact with one aspect of American culture that truly can claim greatness, which we sure can use in an uh-oh political moment.

The show has a mission: To give 21st-century audiences a fresh take on Dickinson. Gone is the white-gowned Puritan nun, and that infantilized charmer, the Belle of Amherst. At the Morgan we get a different Dickinson, a person among people: a member of a household, a village-dweller, a citizen.

She was born in 1830 to rural gentry in Western Massachusetts, and one of the earliest items in the show gives an impression of modest Yankee privilege. It’s a portrait of Dickinson at around age 10 with her older brother, Austin, and young sister, Lavinia, done by a local artist, Otis Allen. It’s sort of a big deal to have it here: This is the first time it has left Houghton Library at Harvard since it arrived there in 1950. And the Morgan displays it well, against rose-patterned wallpaper that replicates the original, only recently uncovered, in Emily’s Amherst bedroom. In a sweet coincidence, the roses on the paper echo the flower the poet-to-be holds in her portrait.

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David Hockney and the joy of looking

by Emma Crichton-Miller

Prospect
February 2017

We think we know David Hockney. He is one of the most recognisable and best-loved artists in the world—whether in his early incarnation as the boy from Bradford with bleached hair and round glasses who painted boys in swimming pools, or in his latter years as the trainer-wearing celebrant of East Yorkshire’s rolling landscape. His photo collage Pearblossom Hwy, 11-18th April 1986, #2 is the most popular image at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. His 1967 painting A Bigger Splash—with its meticulously realised explosion of white water in a scene of rectilinear calm—is regularly in the top 10 most popular British paintings. In 2011, British art students voted Hockney the most influential artist of all time.

On the one hand, Hockney seems reassuringly conservative in his focus on still life, landscape and portraiture. On the other, his bright-hued optimism and excited embrace of technology, from fax machines to the iPhone and iPad, have endeared him to new audiences. As two recent exhibitions at the Royal Academy—Yorkshire landscapes in 2012 and portraits in 2016—have proven, crowds flock to his abundant, inquisitive and joyful art.

In Hockney’s 80th year, however, Tate Britain is hoping to present a more comprehensive and nuanced account of his achievement in a new retrospective exhibition that runs from 9th February to 29th May.

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‘Monet: The Early Years’ Reviews: A Youthful Visionary

by Karen Wilkin

Wall Street Journal
January 5, 2017

In the summer of 1858, Eugène Boudin, the painter of Normandy seacoasts, took his 17-year-old protégé, Claude Monet (1840-1926), to work from the landscape in a village near Le Havre. The gifted teenager’s canvas, “View Near Rouelles” (1858), begins “Monet: The Early Years,” at the Kimbell Art Museum: a sunlit, verdant field, sliced by a narrow river and framed by trees. A fisherman sits on the bank. It’s an astonishing picture—not only because of its precocious accomplishment, but also because it anticipates the way the mature Monet evokes the play of light on leaves, flowers, grasses and water, at a particular moment, in a particular season, without describing anything literally. More presciently, a row of tall, ragged poplars silhouetted against the sky is reflected in the river below, a motif Monet would return to more than three decades later, in one of his most daring series. And for further prescience, nearby, there’s a long horizontal painting of grainstacks under a spectacular sunset sky, made by the 24-year-old painter, along with some windswept views of the Normandy coast, at different times of day.

When Monet submitted these seaside paintings to the Salon of 1865—his first try—they were not only accepted but also admired and bought by a dealer. Encouraged by success, he began the enormous, extraordinarily ambitious “Luncheon on the Grass” (1865-66), a broadly painted picnic in a sun-dappled clearing in the forest of Fontainebleau, with the women’s wide skirts competing for attention with the pattern of light on a wall of trees. Intended for the 1866 Salon, but not completed in time, the vast picture was badly stored and damaged. Monet salvaged the two tantalizing fragments exhibited at the Kimbell and apparently kept them all his life. A full-length painting of his mistress, Camille Doncieux, in a green dress, was sent to the Salon instead and, again, accepted and praised. This, however, wasn’t a foretaste of the future. All but one of Monet’s later submissions to the Salon were rejected.

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World War I — The Quick. The Dead. The Artists.

by Holland Cotter

New York Times
January 5, 2017

The idea lingers that art can be separated from politics. But it can’t. All art — high, low; illustrative, abstract — is embedded in specific political histories, and direct links, however obscured, are always there. Such links are the unswerving focus of “World War I and American Art” at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, a panoramic show that has the narrative flow of a documentary, and the suspenseful, off-kilter emotional texture of live drama.

World War I lasted roughly four years, from 1914 to 1918, with the United States joining the fray in 1917. The brevity of that engagement has led Americans to play down the war, but we shouldn’t. Although politicians at the time spun the conflict — which the public increasingly understood to be a murderous mistake — as the war that would end all wars, it did the opposite. It set the model for World War II, Vietnam, Iraq. And it departed from previous models of war only in ramping up their barbarities with modern technology.

With World War I, invisibility became a deadly weapon. Submarines turned oceans into minefields. Airplanes, used in regular combat for the first time, killed through stealth and distance. Silent death emerged: poisonous gases enveloped victims, blinding them, eating their flesh, leaving them to drown in their own fluids. Add to these grisly innovations the high-power guns that, dronelike, pulverize bodies outside the range of vision, and you can see how warfare became depersonalized. It felt like a scientific experiment, not a human engagement.

For a long time, the United States watched from afar, as the Allied Powers (France, Britain, Russia) and the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire) battled each other in Europe. At the same time, America had its own wars of opinion, as citizens, artists among them, lined up on either side of the question of whether their country should stay neutral or gear up for battle.

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America's National Gallery of Art

by Philip Kopper and the Publishing Office of the National Gallery of Art

Princeton University Press
January 2017

Seventy-five years ago, on the brink of America’s entry into World War II, the National Gallery of Art opened in Washington, DC. Founded by Andrew W. Mellon and accepted on behalf of the nation by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mellon’s gift included his magnificent art collection and the neoclassical structure that is today’s West Building. Since its opening in 1941, the Gallery’s singular status as the nation’s art museum has continued to attract public-spirited donors. Their generosity has added tens of thousands of superb works of art and has made possible the construction of I. M. Pei’s East Building in 1978, the Sculpture Garden in 1999, and most recently a rooftop terrace and new tower galleries in the East Building.

In celebration of the 75th anniversary of a beloved cultural institution, America’s National Gallery of Art takes readers on a definitive inside tour through the museum’s remarkable history. With lively prose and abundant illustrations, this richly detailed volume recounts the development of the Gallery under its four directors—David Finley, John Walker, J. Carter Brown, and currently Earl A. Powell III—and highlights the museum’s collections, exhibitions, architecture, and ambience. Later chapters explore the Gallery’s new emphasis on contemporary art and its historic 2014 agreement to accept custody of the Corcoran Collection, giving readers and visitors a window onto the future of this national treasure.

Philip Kopper is publisher and chief editorial officer of Posterity Press in Bethesda, MD. He is the author of New Southern Classicism and Colonial Williamsburg and coauthor of The National Museum of Natural History.

‘Time and Cosmos in Greco-Roman Antiquity’ Review: Sundials and Stargazing

by Edward Rothstein

Wall Street Journal
January 3, 2017

Isn’t measuring time a fairly simple matter? It seems complicated only because of the mechanical clock’s intricate assemblage of clicking gears or the atomic clock’s reliance on oscillating atomic energy states. But imagine a world in which time’s passing is measured by the sun or stars. Could anything be more elementary? The world is itself a clock: Look closely, and you can take time’s measure.

But visit the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University to see its remarkable exhibition, “Time and Cosmos in Greco-Roman Antiquity,” and that notion will quickly disappear. Many artifacts in these two modest galleries are large irregular stone fragments of strange shapes, with curved sides and carved lines. They are almost all ruins of calendars and sundials going back to the late fourth century B.C., when time really was measured by the sun and stars. And their cryptic markings, we learn, incorporate complex conceptions of the ancient cosmos.

It took five years to arrange the loans of these objects from museums all over the world. From Salzburg, Austria, is a fragment of a bronze disc with engraved images; watch a short animation and we see that in the first or second century, it was part of a Roman waterclock used at the frontier of the Empire—one of the few surviving relics of such fragile timepieces.

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The 25 best books I read in 2016 (by Prof. Aristides N. Hatzis)