The Dark Side: Exhibition Peers into Romanticism's Realm of Evil

Spiegel
September 27, 2012

A new exhibition in Frankfurt focuses on the dark side of the Romantic movement. Works from artists including Dalí, Goya and Munch examine themes of good and evil, sanity and madness and suffering and lust. Just the thing for the long winter evenings.

As autumn's dusky mantle begins to settle over Germany, the doors to a fitting new exhibition that explores the gloomy side of the Romantic movement have creaked open in Frankfurt.

Visitors to the city's Städel Museum are taken to a strange twilight world with the nightmarish visions, Satanic rites and somber death scenes featured in "Dark Romanticism: From Goya to Max Ernst," which opened on Wednesday.

"The art works speak of loneliness and melancholy, passion and death, of the fascination with horror and the irrationality of dreams," the museum says in a statement.

Some 240 works from more than 70 artists comprise the show, encompassing some 150 years of fascination with mysticism and the supernatural. The paintings, sculptures, photographs and films were created by prominent artists such as Francisco de Goya, William Blake, Caspar David Friedrich, Johann Heinrich Fuseli, Edvard Munch, René Magritte, Hans Bellmer, Salvador Dalí, and Max Ernst. While some come from the Städel's own halls, others are on loan from internationally recognized collections like the Musée d'Orsay and Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Museo del Prado in Madrid and the Art Institute of Chicago.

The exhibition categorizes the works both chronologically and geographically with an aim toward linking various interpretations of Romanticism, the post-Enlightenment movement that began sweeping across Europe by the end of the 18th century and continued its influence long after.

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Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie

Salvador Dalí

Füssli (1790)

"Frankenstein" (1931) directed by James Whale

"Faust" (1926) directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau

Goya (1797-8)

Ernst Ferdinand Oehme (1828)

Carlos Schwabe (1907)

Edvard Munch (1916-8)

René Magritte (1945)

Franz von Stuck (1893)

Caspar David Friedrich (1821-2)

Paul Hippolyte Delaroche (1845-6)

Samuel Colman (1836-8)

William Blake (1803-5)

Berlin's Culture War: Debate Pits Modern Art against Old Masters

Spiegel
September 14, 2012

All summer long, a heated debate has simmered in Berlin over the future of its world-famous collection of Old Masters paintings. The city wants to move the Gemäldegalerie to make room for a modern art museum that would rival MOMA. Critics say it will cause at least half of one of Europe's most important art collections to be put in storage for years.

It may have a few glaring omissions in its collection -- there is, for example, not a single Leonardo da Vinci -- but Berlin's Gemäldegalerie can still hold its own against the best of Europe's classical collections. Any talk of moving or splitting the works quickly stirs up passions in the German capital.

The Feuilletons, or culture pages, of Germany's newspapers have been brimming with a heated debate this summer over the future of the Old Masters. Following a wave of public outcry from prominent intellectuals, the city is reconsidering plans to move its 3,000-strong Gemäldegalerie collection out of its current home near Potsdamer Platz.

Spanning five centuries and including important European works by Vermeer, Brueghel, Caravaggio and Hans Holbein the Younger, the Gemäldegalerie collection of paintings was to be moved to a much smaller space on the city's Museuminsel, or Museum Island, to make way for a new museum of 20th-century art, including works from the private collection of German billionaire industrialist Heiner Pietzsch and his wife Ulla.

Earlier this week, the Prussian Cultural Foundation, which operates many of the city's top museums and is in charge of the proposed move, announced the commission of a feasibility study to weigh various alternatives. "Against the background of the controversial debate, it is a question on the one hand of developing an appropriate opportunity for exhibiting the Old Masters and on the other, of doing justice to the Nationalgalerie's 20th-century collection and the inclusion of the Pietzsch collection." The foundation is still standing behind its position to move the collection, but the study could slow or possibly end those plans.

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Caravaggio, Armor als Sieger

Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde

Tate Britain: Exhibition
12 September 2012 - 13 January 2013

Combining rebellion, beauty, scientific precision and imaginative grandeur, the Pre-Raphaelites constitute Britain’s first modern art movement. This exhibition brings together over 150 works in different media, including painting, sculpture, photography and the applied arts, revealing the Pre-Raphaelites to be advanced in their approach to every genre. Led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) rebelled against the art establishment of the mid-nineteenth century, taking inspiration from early Renaissance painting.

The exhibition establishes the PRB as an early example of the avant-garde: painters who self-consciously overturned orthodoxy and established a new benchmark for modern painting and design. It will include many famous Pre-Raphaelite works, and will also re-introduce some rarely seen masterpieces including Ford Madox Brown’s polemical Work 1852–65 and the 1858 wardrobe designed by Philip Webb and painted by Edward Burne-Jones on the theme of The Prioress’s Tale.

You’ll also see John Everett Millais’s first painting ‘en plein air’ entitled: Ferdinand Lured by Ariel 1849-50 and the politically charged: A Huguenot, on St Bartholomew’s Day, refusing to shield himself from danger by wearing the Roman Catholic Badge 1851-2.

The exhibition shows that the Pre-Raphaelite environment was widely encompassing in its reach across the fine and decorative arts, in response to a fast-changing religious and political backdrop, and in its relationship to women practitioners.

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti
The Beloved ('The Bride') 1865-6

Sir John Everett Millais, Bt
Ophelia 1851-2

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Lady Lilith 1866–8

Henry Wallis
Chatterton 1856

Coloring a Classic, Just as Faulkner Hoped

by Brooke Allen

Wall Street Journal
August 10, 2012

William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929) is one of the monuments of High Modernism—America's answer to James Joyce's Ulysses (1922). As such, it is almost by definition "difficult": obscure, allusive, discontinuous. This tale of the dissolution of a once-aristocratic Southern family, the Compsons, is related in turn by each of the three Compson brothers—the idiot Benjy, the suicidal Quentin and the vengeful Jason—and lastly, in a final chapter, by the novel's omniscient narrator. Each of the four sections presents its own challenges, but the first one, Benjy's, is famously complex, for Benjy has no sense of time. Present, past and future are all one to him, and he slips almost unnoticeably among them.

Benjy's monologue is one of the great tours de force of stream-of-consciousness writing, on a level with those of Molly Bloom in Ulysses and Lily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927). The critics of Faulkner's era were not all charmed: Howard Rockey, for one, reviewing The Sound and the Fury in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1929, complained that the book might drive its readers "to apply for admission to the nearest insane asylum." Countless high-school and college students since then have agreed. Even Faulkner himself was not sure that the Benjy section really worked. "I did not try deliberately to make it obscure," he claimed in an introduction to the novel written in 1933 (though not published until 1972). His objective, he wrote, was "a continuous whole, since the thought transference is subjective; i.e., in Ben's mind and not in the reader's eye."

Faulkner spent a good deal of time tinkering with the first section's format, punctuation (or lack thereof), and typefaces in order to achieve the effects he sought while still making it possible for the reader to follow the narrative and construct from it a coherent whole. The solution he came up with was to indicate a change in time levels with the judicious use of italics: "I purposely used italics for both actual scenes and remembered scenes for the reason," he wrote to his agent, Ben Wasson, "not to indicate the different dates of happenings, but merely to permit the reader to anticipate a thought-transference, letting the recollection postulate its own date." But he acknowledged that the solution was still not quite satisfactory. "If I could only get it printed the way it ought," he complained, "with different color types for the different times in Benjy's section recording the flow of events for him, it would make it simpler, probably. I don't reckon, though, it'll ever be printed that way, and this'll have to be the best, with the italics indicating the changes of events."

This wistful fantasy has long posed a challenge to scholars and editors. As early as 1932, Faulkner's publisher, Bennett Cerf, proposed a limited edition of the novel with the Benjy section printed in colors, and the novelist provided him with a copy that he had marked up in three colors for the purpose. The Depression put an end to this expensive venture, and the color-coded copy vanished. The Internet has enabled would-be editors to present their own versions, and so far at least two such versions have appeared online, though due to copyright issues they are no longer accessible.

Now the Folio Society has tried its hand at the project, commissioning two eminent Faulknerians, Stephen M. Ross and Noel Polk, to produce a colorized version of Benjy's monologue as part of a deluxe edition of The Sound and the Fury, which includes an entire second volume with an extensive glossary and commentary. There is also a bookmark for the reader's convenience showing the color code for the various time levels in the Benjy section—14 of them, according to Messrs. Ross and Polk. The whole has been produced with the Folio Society's customary luxury paper and binding, and the edition is limited to 1,480 numbered copies for sale only to members of the society. (It is quite easy to join, at foliosociety.com.)

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The Sound and the Fury

By William Faulkner
Folio Society, 313 pages, $345

Marvin Hamlisch in Song

New York Times
August 7, 2012

Marvin Hamlisch, the award-winning composer who died on Monday at 68, had a career that spanned film, television, theater and recorded music.

Click on the link below to see trailers and excerpts from some of the films and musicals featuring his music.

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His Official Site

New York Times' Obituary

and rare footage from a scene from A Chorus Line performed at the 1976 Tony Awards!

Ruling on Artistic Authenticity: The Market vs. the Law

New York Times
August 5, 2012

Federal District Court Judge Paul G. Gardephe’s résumé includes many impressive accomplishments but not an art history degree. Nonetheless he has been asked to answer a question on which even pre-eminent art experts cannot agree: Are three reputed masterworks of Modernism genuine or fake.

Judge Gardephe’s situation is not unique. Although there are no statistics on whether such cases are increasing, lawyers agree that as art prices rise, so does the temptation to turn to the courts to settle disputes over authenticity. One result is that judges and juries with no background in art can frequently be asked to arbitrate among experts who have devoted their lives to parsing a brush stroke.

The three art cases on Judge Gardephe’s docket in Manhattan were brought by patrons of the now-defunct Knoedler & Company who charge that the Upper East Side gallery and its former president Ann Freedman duped them into spending millions of dollars on forgeries.

The judge’s rulings may ultimately rely more on the intricacies of contract law than on determinations of authenticity. But the defendants and plaintiffs are busily assembling impressive rosters of artistic and forensic experts who hope to convince the judge that the works — purportedly by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko — are clearly originals or obvious fakes.

Of course judges and juries routinely decide between competing experts. As Ronald D. Spencer, an art law specialist, put it, “A judge will rule on medical malpractice even if he doesn’t know how to take out a gallstone.” When it comes to questions of authenticity, however, lawyers note that the courts and the art world weigh evidence differently.

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The 2012 Sight & Sound Directors’ Top Ten

British Film Institute
August 2, 2012

The 10 Greatest Films of All Time, as chosen by 358 directors including Woody Allen, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Quentin Tarantino, the Dardenne brothers, Terence Davies, Guillermo del Toro, Martin Scorsese, Olivier Assayas, Michael Mann, Guy Maddin, Francis Ford Coppola, Mike Leigh, Aki Kaurismäki...

1. Tokyo Story

Ozu Yasujirô, 1953 (48 votes; pictured above)

Subtle and sensitive, Tokyo Story lets the viewer experience the tensions and demands that modern life makes on people – here family members—Adoor Gopalakrishnan


2. 2001: A Space Odyssey

Stanley Kubrick, 1968 (42 votes)

This is the film I’ve seen more than any other in my life. 40 times or more. My life altered when I discovered it when I was about 7 in Buenos Aires. It was my first hallucinogenic experience, my great artistic turning-point and also the moment when my mother finally explained what a foetus was and how I came into the world. Without this film I would never have become a director—Gaspar Noé


2. Citizen Kane

Orson Welles, 1941 (42 votes)

Welles’s feat of imagination in Citizen Kane remains dazzling and inspiring. Cinema aspiring to great art, political import – and delivered with unabashed showmanship. The fervour of the work is as excited and electric as ever. The thriller plot never disappoints—Kenneth Branagh

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The Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time

British Film Institute
August 1, 2012

846 critics, programmers, academics and distributors have voted – and the 50-year reign of Kane is over. Our critics’ poll has a new number one.

Introduction: Ian Christie rings in the changes in our biggest-ever poll.

And the loser is – Citizen Kane. After 50 years at the top of the Sight & Sound poll, Orson Welles’s debut film has been convincingly ousted by Alfred Hitchcock’s 45th feature Vertigo – and by a whopping 34 votes, compared with the mere five that separated them a decade ago. So what does it mean? Given that Kane actually clocked over three times as many votes this year as it did last time, it hasn’t exactly been snubbed by the vastly larger number of voters taking part in this new poll, which has spread its net far wider than any of its six predecessors.

But it does mean that Hitchcock, who only entered the top ten in 1982 (two years after his death), has risen steadily in esteem over the course of 30 years, with Vertigo climbing from seventh place, to fourth in 1992, second in 2002 and now first, to make him the Old Master. Welles, uniquely, had two films (The Magnificent Ambersons as well as Kane) in the list in 1972 and 1982, but now Ambersons has slipped to 81st place in the top 100.

So does 2012 – the first poll to be conducted since the internet became almost certainly the main channel of communication about films – mark a revolution in taste, such as happened in 1962? Back then a brand-new film, Antonioni’s L’avventura, vaulted into second place. If there was going to be an equivalent today, it might have been Malick’s The Tree of Life, which only polled one vote less than the last title in the top 100. In fact the highest film from the new century is Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, just 12 years old, now sharing joint 24th slot with Dreyer’s venerable Ordet...

THE TOP 50

1. Vertigo

Alfred Hitchcock, 1958 (191 votes)

Hitchcock’s supreme and most mysterious piece (as cinema and as an emblem of the art). Paranoia and obsession have never looked better—Marco Müller

After half a century of monopolising the top spot, Citizen Kane was beginning to look smugly inviolable. Call it Schadenfreude, but let’s rejoice that this now conventional and ritualised symbol of ‘the greatest’ has finally been taken down a peg. The accession of Vertigo is hardly in the nature of a coup d’état. Tying for 11th place in 1972, Hitchcock’s masterpiece steadily inched up the poll over the next three decades, and by 2002 was clearly the heir apparent. Still, even ardent Wellesians should feel gratified at the modest revolution – if only for the proof that film canons (and the versions of history they legitimate) are not completely fossilised.

There may be no larger significance in the bare fact that a couple of films made in California 17 years apart have traded numerical rankings on a whimsically impressionistic list. Yet the human urge to interpret chance phenomena will not be denied, and Vertigo is a crafty, duplicitous machine for spinning meaning...—Peter Matthews

2. Citizen Kane

Orson Welles, 1941 (157 votes)

Kane and Vertigo don’t top the chart by divine right. But those two films are just still the best at doing what great cinema ought to do: extending the everyday into the visionary—Nigel Andrews

In the last decade I’ve watched this first feature many times, and each time, it reveals new treasures. Clearly, no single film is the greatest ever made. But if there were one, for me Kane would now be the strongest contender, bar none—Geoff Andrew

All celluloid life is present in Citizen Kane; seeing it for the first or umpteenth time remains a revelation—Trevor Johnston

3. Tokyo Story

Ozu Yasujiro, 1953 (107 votes)

Ozu used to liken himself to a “tofu-maker”, in reference to the way his films – at least the post-war ones – were all variations on a small number of themes. So why is it Tokyo Story that is acclaimed by most as his masterpiece? DVD releases have made available such prewar films as I Was Born, But…, and yet the Ozu vote has not been split, and Tokyo Story has actually climbed two places since 2002. It may simply be that in Tokyo Story this most Japanese tofu-maker refined his art to the point of perfection, and crafted a truly universal film about family, time and loss—James Bell

4. La Règle du jeu

Jean Renoir, 1939 (100 votes)

Only Renoir has managed to express on film the most elevated notion of naturalism, examining this world from a perspective that is dark, cruel but objective, before going on to achieve the serenity of the work of his old age. With him, one has no qualms about using superlatives: La Règle du jeu is quite simply the greatest French film by the greatest of French directors—Olivier Père

5. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

FW Murnau, 1927 (93 votes)

When F.W. Murnau left Germany for America in 1926, did cinema foresee what was coming? Did it sense that change was around the corner – that now was the time to fill up on fantasy, delirium and spectacle before talking actors wrenched the artform closer to reality? Many things make this film more than just a morality tale about temptation and lust, a fable about a young husband so crazy with desire for a city girl that he contemplates drowning his wife, an elemental but sweet story of a husband and wife rediscovering their love for each other. Sunrise was an example – perhaps never again repeated on the same scale – of unfettered imagination and the clout of the studio system working together rather than at cross purposes—Isabel Stevens

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Obama the Socialist? Not Even Close

by Milos Forman

New York Times
July 10, 2012

When I was asked to direct One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, my friends warned me not to go anywhere near it.

The story is so American, they argued, that I, an immigrant fresh off the boat, could not do it justice. They were surprised when I explained why I wanted to make the film. To me it was not just literature but real life, the life I lived in Czechoslovakia from my birth in 1932 until 1968. The Communist Party was my Nurse Ratched, telling me what I could and could not do; what I was or was not allowed to say; where I was and was not allowed to go; even who I was and was not.

Now, years later, I hear the word “socialist” being tossed around by the likes of Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and others. President Obama, they warn, is a socialist. The critics cry, “Obamacare is socialism!” They falsely equate Western European-style socialism, and its government provision of social insurance and health care, with Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism. It offends me, and cheapens the experience of millions who lived, and continue to live, under brutal forms of socialism.

My sister-in-law’s father, Jan Kunasek, lived in Czechoslovakia all his life. He was a middle-class man who ran a tiny inn in a tiny village. One winter night in 1972, during a blizzard, a man, soaked to the bone, awakened him at 2 in the morning. The man looked destitute and, while asking for shelter, couldn’t stop cursing the Communists. Taking pity, the elderly Mr. Kunasek put him up for the night.

A couple of hours later, Mr. Kunasek was awakened again, this time by three plainclothes policemen. He was arrested, accused of sheltering a terrorist and sentenced to several years of hard labor in uranium mines. The state seized his property. When he was finally released, ill and penniless, he died within a few weeks. Years later we learned that the night visitor had been working for the police. According to the Communists, Mr. Kunasek was a class enemy and deserved to be punished.

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'The Girl From Ipanema' Turns 50

Wall Street Journal
June 29, 2012

'The Girl From Ipanema,' the classic Brazilian bossa sung by everyone from Frank Sinatra to Dionne Warwick, is the second most recorded song in pop music history. It turns 50 this summer, and here is a look back at its history.

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Gustav Klimt: The Magic of Line

The J. Paul Getty Museum
June 2012

This major loan exhibition was organized by the Albertina Museum, Vienna, in association with the J. Paul Getty Museum, to mark the 150th anniversary of Klimt's birth. The drawings in this exhibition come mostly from the Albertina, which houses one of the most comprehensive collections of Klimt drawings. They are supplemented by works from the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Research Institute, and a number of generous lenders.

Gustav Klimt was one of the seminal figures of international Modernism. His entire artistic enterprise was based on drawing, which he practiced every day. Approximately 4,000 of Klimt's drawings survive, and this is surely but a portion of the total number he made. From his earliest work in the 1880s to his death, the centerpiece of his draftsmanship, indeed of his artistic creativity as a whole, was life drawing from the nude model, in particular the female nude.

It was through drawing that Klimt developed his momentous themes of human suffering, longing for love and happiness, and the cycle of life from birth to death. Over the course of his career, Klimt journeyed from an academic drawing style with three-dimensional and shaded figures to an ethereal language of pure line and light touch by which he expressed his concern with the ever-changing and inescapable stream of human existence. Through drawing, Klimt arrives at the planarity (an emphasis on the two-dimensional surface of the picture plane), the interweaving of human forms, and the paradoxical sense of a figure's sensual presence but spatial remove that are all central to his unique expression of Modernism.

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Was Edvard Munch a One-Hit Wonder?

by Brian Palmer

Slate
May 3, 2012

An unidentified buyer purchased Edvard Munch’s The Scream for nearly $120 million at auction on Wednesday. Despite the phenomenal popularity of The Scream, it's likely that few people outside of Norway could name another Munch painting. Are there one-hit wonders in the world of fine art?

Yes. Plenty of painters have managed to capture the public’s attention with a single work of genius, while their other work remains relatively unknown. The best known to Americans is Grant Wood, who painted American Gothic, but Théodore Géricault (The Raft of the Medusa) and Antoine-Jean Gros (Bonaparte Visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa) are also classic examples. These artists produced plenty of other work before and after creating their masterpieces, but none earned them much public notice or critical acclaim.

University of Chicago economist David Galenson has compiled a list of one-hit-wonder artists in recent history, based on the number of mentions their masterpieces have received in scholarly literature, compared to mentions of their lesser works. According to this approach, the sculptor and landscape artist Maya Lin might be the classic one-hit wonder. When she designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. while still a college student in 1981, her work was absolutely revolutionary. Before Lin, war memorials almost always featured statues of soldiers. (Think of the Iwo Jima Memorial.) Today, they almost never do. And yet, Maya Lin hasn’t produced anything else that's been deemed worthy of much talk in academic circles.

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Read the Paper

What the Dickens (Sales of Charles Dickens's books in his lifetime)

Economist
February 7, 2012

On the death of Charles Dickens in 1870 the Times lamented, “The loss of such a man is an event which makes ordinary expressions of regret seem cold and conventional”. It was the prodigious popularity of his work that went furthest to explaining the effect his death had on book-reading Britain and beyond. To mark today's 200th anniversary of his birth, we have tried to discover which novel sold best during Dickens's life. The answer, below, comes with bigger caveats than most items on this blog. They do not include the sales of novels in instalments. The numbers date from 1846, by which time Pickwick Papers, Dickens’s first novel, was already ten years old. And owing to the vagaries of 19th-century record-keeping, the sales of different books were sometimes grouped together under a single heading, “cheap editions”, and so cannot be split into their constituent titles. For those last two reasons, the figures for Dickens’s earlier novels may be under-counted. But we believe these are the best numbers available. For 465 pages of detailed explanation, consult Robert Patten’s 1978 tome, Charles Dickens and his Publishers, from which we derived our figures.

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In Philadelphia, Van Gogh's Nature Cure

by Dan Neil

Wall Street Journal
January 28, 2012

Vincent Van Gogh was a handful: almost certainly a victim of epilepsy, perhaps an alcoholic, maybe mad from the leaded paint he worked with, but in any case a raving, God-haunted lunatic most of the time and nobody's favorite neighbor.

Fortunately for him, and us, Van Gogh was able to self-medicate.

"Focus on a small detail of nature allowed him to keep a calm frame of mind," writes Anabelle Kienle, co-curator of the Philadelphia Museum of Art's "Van Gogh: Up Close," a retrospective covering 47 of the Dutch painter's astonishing, point-blank paintings from nature, particularly those from the last two years in Arles, Saint-Rémy and Auvers-sur-Oise, France. They come from collections around the world.

Ms. Kienle argues, with Van Gogh's many letters as evidence, that the greatest Dutch painter since Rembrandt managed to survive, in part, by employing a kind of self-hypnosis, sessions of superhuman focus that helped Van Gogh put down the fires in his head.

It's not surprising that Van Gogh found transcendence in a "blade of grass"—an image he perhaps borrowed from the Calvinist critic Thomas Carlyle. And Van Gogh was not the only artist possessing a Zen-like zoom lens. Ms. Kienle might as easily have name-checked T.S. Eliot, who writes in "Four Quartets": "We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion."

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The Whirling Sound of Planet Dickens

by Verlyn Klinkenborg

New York Times
January 14, 2012

In death, Charles Dickens still keeps his greatest secret to himself — the essence of his energy. None of the physical relics he left behind betray it. The manuscripts of his novels — like Our Mutual Friend at the Morgan Library — look no more fevered or hectic than the manuscripts left behind by other novelists.

The handwritten words on the page, round and legible in blue ink, are the marks of a mind that has already settled itself to composition.

Dickens, who was born 200 years ago, wrote a long shelf of novels, 14 in all, not counting The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which lay half-finished at his death. They sit plump and bursting with life, spilling over with the chaos of existence itself. It’s easy to imagine writers working the way Dickens’s prolific contemporary, Anthony Trollope, did — steadily, routinely, knocking off his 2,000 words a day until, by the end of his life, he had written 47 novels. But this is not how Dickens wrote.

Find the tumultuous heart of your favorite Dickens novel, the place where 19th-century London seems to be seething, smoking, overcrowded, in a state of vulgar contradiction. Then imagine Dickens working in the midst of it — a small, brisk figure rushing past you on a dark and dirty street. He is lost in a kind of mental ventriloquism, calling up his emotions and studying them. Every night he walked a dozen miles, without which, he said, “I should just explode and perish.”

Under the pseudonym Boz, he wrote, “There is nothing we enjoy more than a little amateur vagrancy,” walking through London as though “the whole were an unknown region to our wandering mind.” Yet there was nothing remotely solitary about Dickens. One person who saw him in the highest spirits at a family party wrote that he “happily sang two or three songs, one the patter song, The Dog’s Meat Man, and gave several successful imitations of the most distinguished actors of the day.”

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Can You Hear Him Now?

New York Times
Editorial
January 12, 2012

“A symphony must be like the world,” advised Gustav Mahler, who composed nine symphonies across a brilliant career. “It must contain everything.”

Little could Mahler, a century gone from the modern world, have anticipated the horrific intrusion of an incessant cellphone ring near the end of his ethereal 90-minute masterpiece, the Ninth. The instrument rang untended across excruciating minutes Tuesday night at Lincoln Center from the pocket of a front-row listener, sending the audience, the New York Philharmonic players and the conductor Alan Gilbert into shock and dismay.

As the ringing (one connoisseur said it was the iPhone’s marimba signal) vied with the Adagio climax of bittersweet quietude, Mr. Gilbert had had enough. He stopped the orchestra and turned, one witness said, and sternly asked the offender: “Are you finished?” The rage in the hall was general, according to bloggers who were there. “Kick him out!” came a shout from one music lover. “A thousand dollar fine!” demanded another.

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The Art of Science at Princeton

by Rebecca Horne

Wall Street Journal
December 30, 2011

Princeton’s annual “Art of Science” contest is open to students, faculty, staff and alumni, and aims to prove that science is beautiful–these images were created during the course of research. The 56 winners of the 2011 Art of Science contest represent this year’s broadly interpreted theme of “intelligent design,” and were chosen by a panel based on their purely visual qualities as well as scientific interest. The images will also be included in an exhibition at the university, up through November 2012.

Gerald Poirier of Princeton explains the science behind this image: “The material is piezo electric material developed in the Princeton Imaging and Analysis Center. This particular material is being studied because of its unique ability to convert mechanical energy to electrical energy, offering a wide range of energy harvesting applications. It may be possible to embed this material in tires and road surfaces to produce energy to power highway lights and possibly more…. This image was taken with an Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope, which allows us to see nanostructures in their native state with extraordinary three-dimensional clarity. ESEM images are originally black and white. But colors can be added subsequently (in order to give better clarity to the image) by assigning a given color to a specific gray scale.”

To see a gallery of images from the contest, click here.

First Place

Second Place

Third Place

A Victorian Christmas

by Maureen Dowd

New York Times
December 24, 2011

At the end of his life, Charles Dickens did not have great expectations for Christmas.

He had separated from his wife, describing his marriage as “blighted and wasted.” His mistress was not around. He was disappointed that his sons lacked his ambition. His final Christmas, he wrote a colleague, was painful and miserable.

“The Inimitable,” as he had christened himself when he was young and celebrated, was drained from traveling to give paid readings and suffering from such severe gout that he could not write clearly or walk well. He was confined to bed all Christmas Day and through dinner, bleak in his house.

Literature’s answer to Santa Claus, as Robert Douglas-Fairhurst writes in “Becoming Dickens,” had always gravitated to the holiday.

“Christmas was always a time which in our home was looked forward to with eagerness and delight,” his daughter Mamie said.

Dickens would dance and play the conjurer. “My father was always at his best, a splendid host, bright and jolly as a boy and throwing his heart and soul into everything,” recalled his son Henry.

Douglas-Fairhurst wonders if this “inventor of Christmas” might have developed his “ruthless” determination to enjoy the day because of the traumatic year he spent as a child working in a rat-infested shoe-polish warehouse in London after his father went to prison for debts. Did England’s most famous novelist need “to recreate his childhood as it should have been rather than as it was?”

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Artistic labour and occupational choice in Baroque painting

by Federico Etro

Vox
December 23, 2011

To some, the world of art and world of economics are diametrically opposed. To others, such as the author of this column, they are part of the same. This column looks at the wages of painters during the 17th century Baroque art movement and asks what insights it can provide for art lovers, economists, and those who consider themselves both.

Exhibit 1. Caravaggio, The Fortune Teller, Paris, Louvre Museum ©

Economists are always on the lookout for new data to test their theories. But rather than sit around itching for the latest surveys or commissioning new randomised trials, researchers might want to dig up what we already have. With a bit of luck, the pages of history can be a rewarding friend. Take for instance the well-documented details of painters in 17th century Italy, at the height of the Baroque age. This is an example of a high-skilled labour market and can provide a fruitful area for study.

One of the most impressive and rapid features of the Baroque art movement was the innovation that led mass productions of new genres of painting – to the economists among us, this is a form of horizontal product differentiation.

Beyond old genres such as figurative paintings (including religious, mythological, and historical subjects) and portraits, the new genres of the Baroque art market included still lifes (reproducing animals, fruits, flowers, and lifeless objects), landscapes (reproducing the countryside or the urban environment), so-called genre paintings (reproducing daily life scenes, as in Exhibit 1 by Caravaggio) and battles (reproducing fights without necessarily a specific historical content). Each genre represented a specific sector of production, and painters either specialised in one or few genres or they could switch between them according to the market opportunities driven by price differentials (think of Caravaggio, who introduced still lifes and genre paintings and yet was often engaged in figurative paintings and portraits).

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John Williams: The Last Movie Maestro

Wall Street Journal
December 16, 2011

John Williams, composer of the iconic movie scores for "Indiana Jones," "Jaws," "Star Wars" and "Superman" has two new films, both directed by Steven Spielberg, opening this month. But the business of making movie scores has begun to change dramatically around him. John Jurgensen has details on Lunch Break.

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Poetry in paint: The art of Elizabeth Bishop

Economist
December 14, 2011

Had Elizabeth Bishop got her way, she may never have become one of North America’s finest modern poets. “How I wish I’d been a painter,” she once wrote, “that must really be the best profession—none of this fiddling with words.”

“Objects and Apparitions”, an exhibition of Bishop's artwork at the Tibor de Nagy gallery in New York, lends a glimpse of her private life as a painter. The show gathers together a selection of the relatively unknown pieces she produced in her lifetime—for friends, lovers or as gifts, never intended for public display—along with some of the objects she adorned her homes with in Brazil and America.

The result is illuminating. As in so many of her poems, Bishop’s paintings—all small, averaging around 8 by 8 inches in size—are intricately detailed. And yet they can trip you up with a sudden, vertiginous shift in perspective (as in “Table with Candelabra”, in which objects on a flowery tablecloth seem to be poised somewhere between forever slipping off the table, and forever staying still), just as the break of an enjambment in her poetry might suddenly lift you to another, unexpected plane. These paintings feature pansies for one lover, Lota de Macedo Soares; or capture another lover lying asleep on her bed. One depicts a lonely tea service laid out, a single cup and saucer ready for use.

As in her poetry, these domestic details have a darker undercurrent. The sleeping lover looks more dead than alive, whereas the provenance of “Pansies” goes on to describe how the painting was returned to Bishop after de Macedo Soares’s suicide. In “Tombstones for Sale” a row of white tombstones with “FOR SALE” signs written upon them shine out of the landscape she has set them in, like a collection of a child’s gleaming white milk teeth. Her assemblage “Anjinhos” touches on the theme of infant mortality in Brazil, with rows of paper-cut cherubim placed next to a small, discarded sandal.

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Where Does Innovation Come From?

Wall Street Journal
November 29, 2011

WSJ's Senior Technology Editor, Julia Angwin discusses innovation with panelists at WSJ's Ideas Market.

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