- Book Review: The Poems of Jesus Christ Translated by Willis Barnstone
Posted on 09 May 2012 in Books, Non-Fiction Reviews, Religion
As Barnstone notes in his introduction, Aramaic has verse forms that are difficult to render in Western languages like Greek, Latin and eventually English. The Gospels, the “Good News” of Jesus, were written down and shared with the rest of the world in prose, not poetry. A vital link to the actual words of Jesus was lost.
- The Dawn of Egyptian Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Posted on 30 Apr 2012 in Art, Art & Design, Egypt
The statue is nicknamed “The Lady of Brussels” because its home museum is in Belgium. It is one of the oldest free-standing statues in the world, dated to around 2695 BC. The “Lady” certainly has her charms. She is wearing one of the extraordinary wigs that were such a noteworthy item of feminine beauty in Ancient Egypt. But her restrained, submissive pose somehow disappoints when contrasted with the energy and mysticism of the mysterious “Bird Woman,” created a thousand years earlier.
- Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Posted on 17 Apr 2012 in Art, Art & Design, Religion
The Metropolitan Museum exhibition charts the fascinating, if complex, process of cultural transformation that took place throughout the Middle East during the seventh to ninth centuries. For all of the thrust-and-parry military campaigns that took place, a spirit of mutual accommodation often characterized relations between the Byzantine Empire and the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates that governed the Islamic world for much of the Middle Ages.
- John Constable: Oil Sketches from the Victoria and Albert Museum
Posted on 04 Apr 2012 in Art, Art & Design, Great Britain
Constable’s approach to landscape painting, however, was far more than an exercise in nostalgia. Instead, he rooted his appreciation of nature in the “here and now” of everyday life. Through paintings like Hampstead Heath, Branch Hill Pond, Constable presented scenes of human beings interacting with nature, not despoiling it. With these works, he bequeathed a sense of the precious nature of the world around us, in whatever age and place we call home.
- The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Posted on 27 Mar 2012 in Art, Art & Design
Explaining the daring additions of paintings by Matisse and Picasso to the Stein collection, Leo wrote a friend in the United States, “All our recent accessions are unfortunately by people you never heard of so there’s no use trying to describe them, except that one of those out of the salon [the Matisse] made everybody laugh except a few who got mad about it and two other pictures are by a young Spaniard named Picasso whom I consider a genius of very great magnitude.”
- Book Review: May the Road Rise Up to Meet You by Peter Troy
Posted on 14 Mar 2012 in Books, Fiction Reviews, Historical Fiction
Troy’s novel has much to recommend it, including sensitive character delineation and powerful narrative set pieces. But all Civil War fiction is faced with the almost insuperable task of trying to heal wounds that just go on festering, of finding some sort of redemptive meaning for unparalleled carnage. From the first great Civil War novel, John De Forrest’s Miss Ravenel’s Conversion, published in 1867, the problem for the Civil War novelist is to find a middle ground of hope and harmony upon which the survivors can rebuild their battered lives.
- Rembrandt and Degas: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Posted on 06 Mar 2012 in Art, Art & Design
But before he retreated into his private realm of race horses and ballet dancers, Degas was fully engaged with the contest of light and shadow in the spirit of Rembrandt. Degas was greatly affected by Rembrandt’s drawing skill, and the accomplished way that he reproduced his line art in etchings and dry point. The etchings of the Dutch master were an education in themselves.
- Book Review: The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination
Posted on 29 Feb 2012 in Art, Biography, Books, Great Britain, Non-Fiction Reviews
It was at Oxford University that Burne-Jones found divine beauty and William Morris. They shared a love for medieval themes, what we now call Gothic Revival, and were attracted to the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Founded in 1848, the Pre-Raphaelites were a loose confederation of young artists in revolt against the false veneer of academic art.
- Art Review: Van Gogh Up Close, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Posted on 12 Feb 2012 in Art, Art & Design
Indeed, if you can manage it in the crowded museum galleries, select a painting, perhaps Wheatfield from 1888, with its characteristic high horizon line. Study it from across the room. Then move closer and you will see an amazing transformation, an act of alchemy, in which the inner life of plants, trees, underbrush, even clouds and drops of rain are revealed.
- Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia
Posted on 31 Jan 2012 in Art, Art & Design
This exhibition of the works of Henry Ossawa Tanner is the first major reappraisal of the great African-American painter in a generation. On display in the PAFA exhibit are over 100 of Tanner’s works, including twelve paintings never shown in a previous retrospective. Drawings, photographs, prints and the only two surviving sculptures created by Tanner are featured, along with his paintings.
- Art Review: The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Posted on 10 Jan 2012 in Art, Art & Design
In his Portrait of a Young Man, painted in 1478, Antonello fused the psychological intensity of Byzantine icon painting with a close regard for his subject’s unique, personal identity. Antonello died the year after he painted Portrait of a Young Man, but with this and a handful of similar works, he blazed a trail for all of the great portrait painters who came after him.
- Book Review: Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith
Posted on 15 Dec 2011 in Art, Biography, Books, Non-Fiction Reviews
For an artist who vied with Rembrandt in painting self-portraits, van Gogh seldom allowed himself to be photographed. The one surviving photo, from his days at Goupil’s, shows a scowling, tousled haired young man with troubled, searching eyes. It is the face of a man destined to be a prophet or a lunatic.
- Art Review: Transition to Christianity, Onassis Cultural Center, New York City
Posted on 13 Dec 2011 in Archeology, Art, Art & Design, Religion
After Christianity was recognized as the official state religion of the Roman Empire in 380, a number of Christian groups, notably monks in Egypt, changed roles from martyrs to persecutors. A magnificent head of Aphrodite, dating to first century Athens, bears the marks of Christian vandalism. The eyes and lips have been chipped to “blind” and “silence” the deity. A cross was then inscribed on the forehead of Aphrodite.
- Book Review: Verdi and/or Wagner: Two Men, Two Worlds, Two Centuries by Peter Conrad
Posted on 28 Nov 2011 in Biography, Books, Germany, Italy, Music, Non-Fiction Reviews, Opera
Perhaps, the best way of approaching Conrad’s book is to regard it primarily as a meditation on creativity. As with opera itself, where passion and empathy lead, intellectual appreciation will follow. The key insight of this fine book is easy enough to grasp. In an age of strutting nationalism, both Verdi and Wagner gave the world music that ultimately transcends the limits of borders or political ideology, regardless of how subsequent regimes used it.
- Book Review: Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon by Martin Kemp
Posted on 21 Nov 2011 in Books, Design, Non-Fiction Reviews
The Vietnam War had been shredding bodies and hopes for so long that it hardly seemed possible that a single image of human conflict could pierce through the war’s futility and touch our hearts. And then photographer Nick Ut captured “The Girl in the Picture” on film. He aimed his Leica M-2 camera and with one quick “click,” Phan Thi Kim Phuc, became a symbol of the horror of the Vietnam War and by extension all wars.
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