Innholdsfortegnelse for June 25, 2015 i The New York Review of Books

America Is Hard to See an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, May 1–September 27, 2015 If Renzo Piano seems to be putting up museums everywhere on our planet, the reasons for that success involve more than what emerges from his drawing board. He is, by all accounts, extremely pleasant company. And because he comes from a family of contractors, he has absorbed their discipline. He finishes on schedule. He finishes within budget. He draws from what has worked in earlier projects and discards what has not. However remote these considerations may seem from skillful design, they are fundamental to the practice of architecture, an art form that often involves inordinately large amounts of other people’s enthusiasm, time, and money. If any one of these…

1. It was with great anticipation that I arrived for my appointment at the editorial offices of BuzzFeed on West 23rd Street in Manhattan. Among journalists, no other website has stirred more interest, resentment, or envy. “Why BuzzFeed Is the Most Important News Organization in the World,” ran the headline atop a recent post by a widely read tech blogger. The answer boiled down to BuzzFeed’s having found a business model that allows it to enjoy “true journalistic independence.” (That model is “sponsored content”— copy that is produced jointly by BuzzFeed and an advertiser to blend in with editorial copy, with a small, inconspicuous identifier of the sponsor.) In 2014, BuzzFeed’s revenues surpassed $100 million (or so the company says—it’s privately held and publishes no financial records). Its post in…

Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River an exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, October 2, 2014–January 18, 2015; the Saint Louis Art Museum, February 22–May 17, 2015; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, June 17–September 20, 2015. Catalog of the exhibition by Nenette Luarca-Shoaf, Claire Barry, Nancy Heugh, Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, Dorothy Mahon, Andrew J. Walker, and Janeen Turk. Amon Carter Museum of American Art/Saint Louis Art Museum, 200 pp., $45.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) There is a lovely stylishness and sense of artificial ity about the paintings George Caleb Bingham made of fur traders and boatmen on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. In pictures that date mostly from the latter half of the 1840s and seem to…

Peter Doig an exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland, November 23, 2014– March 22, 2015; and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, April 17–August 16, 2015. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Ulf Küster. Fondation Beyeler/Hatje Cantz, 176 pp., $75.00 Peter Doig an exhibition at the Palazzetto Tito, Venice, May 5–October 4, 2015 At times, when the fifty-six-year-old artist Peter Doig’s name comes up in certain art world circles—a world of curators, critics, and socially responsible artists who advanced on a steady diet of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and the bitter milk of anti–“patriarchal privilege”—there’s a great hue and cry. To begin with Doig is a patriarch—he’s the father of five, white, and not dead— whose grand ambitions, and interest in beauty and scale, have next…

Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich by Peter Schweizer. Harper, 243 pp., $27.99 As Hillary Rodham Clinton pursues the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, we face a situation that is wholly without precedent in modern American electoral history. There have been presumptive nominees before, usually sitting vice-presidents—Al Gore in 2000, George H.W. Bush in 1988, and Hubert Humphrey in 1968, to name three. But even they faced competition from candidates who were certainly from the “first tier”—Bill Bradley, Bob Dole, Jack Kemp, Bobby Kennedy, and Gene McCarthy. Clinton faces no such opposition within her party. It’s good that Senator Bernie Sanders has decided to enter the race. Clinton will have to debate him, and his mere presence will…

Inequality: What Can Be Done? by Anthony B. Atkinson. Harvard University Press, 384 pp., $29.95 Toward a New Radical Reformism Anthony Atkinson occupies a unique place among economists. During the past half-century, in defiance of prevailing trends, he managed to place the question of inequality at the center of his work while demonstrating that economics is first and foremost a social and moral science. In his new book, Inequality: What Can Be Done?—more personal than his previous ones and wholly focused on a plan of action—he provides us with the broad outlines of a new radical reformism. There’s something reminiscent of the progressive British social reformer William Beveridge in Atkinson’s reformism, and the reader ought to enjoy his way of presenting his ideas. The legendarily cautious English scholar reveals a…

Rendez-vous with Art by Philippe de Montebello and Martin Gayford. Thames and Hudson, 248 pp., $35.00 “I don’t believe art has redemptive qualities.” The demur comes from Philippe de Montebello, who, having served as director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an unparalleled thirty-one years before his retirement in 2008, must by any reckoning be one of the most eminent figures in the art world. Before asking why he of all people should make such a statement in Rendez- vous with Art, a book about aesthetic pleasures, one might try to define the proposition he is declining. What would it mean for art to have redemptive qualities? It might mean that art has a necessary and structural part in human affairs, comparable to Christ’s in a religious scheme of…

The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933–1973 by Mark Greif. Princeton University Press, 434 pp., $29.95 These are dark times for the humanities, or so we are often told. We have had the melancholy litany drilled into us: the best students are gravitating to the sciences; funding for nonscientific research is drying up; good jobs are scarce for graduates with degrees in English or art history. Ah, Bartleby! Ah, the humanities! So shrill are the jeremiads that one might think the fate of humanity itself is somehow at stake in the decline of English departments. Amid so much ritualistic handwringing, it is encouraging to come across the work of a young scholar that offers clear-eyed insight into the origins of the current malaise, while…

We do not think of Tolstoy as a comic writer, but his genius permits him to write farce when it suits him. There is a wickedly funny scene in Anna Karenina that directly precedes the painful scenes leading to Anna’s suicide. It takes place in the drawing room of the Countess Lydia Ivanovna, who, almost alone among the novel’s characters, has no good, or even pretty good, qualities. She embodies the kind of hysterical and coldhearted religious piety that Tolstoy was especially allergic to. “As a very young and rhapsodical girl,” he writes, she had been married to a wealthy man of high rank, a very goodnatured, jovial, and extremely dissipated rake. Two months after marriage her husband abandoned her, and her impassioned protestations of affection he met with a…

To understand Picasso’s major works of the early 1930s we must go back to his youth at La Coruña, on Spain’s north Atlantic coast, where his father, Don José, was director of the local art school. Don José Ruiz Blasco had three children: Pablo and two girls, Lola and Conchita. Over Christmas 1894, Conchita, aged seven, contracted diphtheria. Serum had been ordered from Paris but weeks would pass before it arrived. Fourteen-year-old Pablo so adored his sister that he vowed to God that he would never paint again if her life were spared. He did paint again and the serum failed to come in time. Conchita died on January 10, 1895. According to Françoise Gilot, Picasso had never divulged the secret of his broken vow to anyone but the women…

When, after World War II, James A. de Rothschild offered his Buckinghamshire house, Waddesdon Manor, together with its principal contents and a suitable endowment, to Britain’s National Trust, the consensus among those involved in making the decision to accept or not was that the house itself was hideous. Hideous! What mattered were the contents. Waddesdon (built in the early 1880s) surprises, and still has the capacity to offend, British taste, by appearing like a Loire château set down in the English home counties— or to put it more precisely, by appearing like a nineteenth-century take on the châteaux of the Loire, borrowing here a little from Chambord, there from Blois and Maintenon and the since-demolished, fabulously turreted Château de Mouchy. The British have long nursed a strong affection for the…

This essay by Mark Strand was originally written for The New York Review of Books as a review of the exhibition of Edward Hopper’s drawings at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2013. It was found as a handwritten text in his notebook after he died in November 2014 and transcribed by his literary executor, Mary Jo Salter. —The Editors 1. Paints and scrapes, paints and scrapes to get something right, the something that is not there at the outset but reveals itself slowly, and then completely, having traveled an arduous route during which vision and image come together, for a while, until dissatisfaction sets in, and the painting and scraping begin again. But what is it that determines the success of the final work? The coincidence of vision—his…

Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit an exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts, March 15–July 12, 2015. Catalog of the exhibition by Mark Rosenthal and others. Detroit Institute of Arts, 248 pp., $50.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) Can a museum director who retired in 1945 possibly matter in 2015? The answer is yes, if we are talking about William R. Valentiner, the German art historian who came to the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1924 and during the dark days of the Great Depression transformed an undistinguished institution into one of America’s most important museums. It was Valentiner who in the early 1930s arranged both the purchase of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Wedding Dance, one of the grandest paintings in an American collection, and the creation…