Innholdsfortegnelse for Jun-19-14 i The New York Review of Books

Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice an exhibition at the National Gallery, London, March 19–June 15, 2014 Catalog of the exhibition by Xavier F. Salomon London: National Gallery, 272 pp., $65.00 (distributed in the US by Yale University Press) In 1909, Henry James wrote of seeing Paolo Veronese’s The Family of Darius before Alexander in London: Long regarded as among the greatest Venetian paintings, it has attracted the intense admiration of many writers, including Goethe, Hazlitt, and Ruskin, as well as James. Its acquisition by the National Gallery in 1857 was considered a triumph; Queen Victoria even made a special visit to the museum just to view the picture. It is now one of the high points in the magnificent show about Veronese on view at the National Gallery, the first…

El Griego de Toledo [The Greek of Toledo] an exhibition at the Museo de Santa Cruz and other venues, Toledo, Spain, March 14–June 14, 2014 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Fernando Marías Madrid: El Viso, 320 pp., €56.00 El Greco: Life and Work—A New History by Fernando Marías, translated from the Spanish by Paul Edson and Sander Berg Thames and Hudson, 348 pp., $95.00 For many of the four hundred years since the death of Domenikos Theotokopoulos, the artist known to his Spanish neighbors as El Greco, his work was regarded with the same disdain as that of his younger contemporary Caravaggio. If Caravaggio’s detractors vowed that, as Poussin put it, he had “come into the world to ruin painting,” the Greek who made his career in the land…

Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty by Daniel Schulman Grand Central, 424 pp., $30.00 On election night 2012, Charles and David Koch were confident of a Republican victory, as so many Mitt Romney partisans were. Pre-election polls, which showed Barack Obama narrowly but consistently ahead in a number of key states, simply had to be incorrect, infested with liberal bias; the same was surely true, they said, of Nate Silver, the statistics guru who foresaw a comfortable Electoral College win for Obama and ended up predicting every state correctly. Republicans and conservatives tend toward a kind of certitude that they, far more than Democrats and liberals, embody and represent real American values. So they spent October 2012 persuading themselves that there was…

Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., May 4–November 30, 2014 Catalog of the exhibition by Nancy K. Anderson and Charles Brock National Gallery of Art/DAP, 192 pp., $55.00; $35.00 (paper) Rethinking Andrew Wyeth edited by David Cateforis University of California Press, 232 pp., $60.00 (to be published in July 2014) Andrew Wyeth: A Spoken Self-Portrait by Richard Meryman, selected and arranged from recorded conversations with the artist, 1964–2007 National Gallery of Art/DAP, 125 pp., $29.95 1. The last time that the National Gallery devoted an exhibition to Andrew Wyeth, it was billed as a revelation but received with some resistance. This was the notorious Helga show, or striptease, as John Updike—one of the few critics to find things to admire…

Alibis: Sigmar Polke, 1963–2010 an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, April 19–August 3, 2014; Tate Modern, London, October 1, 2014–February 8, 2015; and Museum Ludwig, Cologne, March 14–July 5, 2015 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Kathy Halbreich with Mark Godfrey, Lanka Tattersall, and Magnus Schaefer Museum of Modern Art, 319 pp., $75.00 I remember quite well the first time I saw the paintings of Sigmar Polke. It was in 1982, a time when a new generation of American artists, and a generation concerned with painting—which had not been the case with young artists for years—was coming to the fore. The few paintings by Polke view at the Holly Solomon Gallery, then in SoHo, had a freakish power. Here was an only vaguely known, or…

Selected Poems by Mark Ford Coffee House Press, 149 pp., $35.00 In 1992, a book—Landlocked—was published in England that contained remarkable and immensely likable poems by Mark Ford. I wanted to write on it, but the journal I was writing for wouldn’t review a book not published in America. Frustrated, I wrote to its unknown author instead, so that my delight at the book would reach him at least privately, if not publicly. The poems in Landlocked were neither decorous (in conventional lyric ways), nor tightly tacit (Philip Larkin), nor historical (Geoffrey Hill), nor demotic (Tony Harrison), nor sensual (Seamus Heaney). They were idiosyncratic and wildly imaginative, and—to use Ford’s own words—“funny peculiar.” The author was able to do without the long sigh for the European past that had animated…

The Guts by Roddy Doyle Viking, 328 pp., $27.95 Jimmy Rabbitte learns that he has cancer. He is middle-aged now and trying not to turn into his father, Jimmy Senior. But this is the same Jimmy Rabbitte who, as a grand and brilliant lad twenty years earlier, put together a Dublin soul band called the Commitments—the band that exploded on its launch pad and gave its name to Roddy Doyle’s first and most famous novel. And this is the same Jimmy whose teenage sister Sharon (well, just twenty) got pregnant by some “disgustin’ ould fucker”—the father of one of her girlfriends—and became the protagonist of Doyle’s The Snapper. A leading role she shared with her father, Jimmy Senior, head of the noisy Rabbitte clan in a working-class suburb of North…

To the Editors: In Neurophilosophy I made the point that if you want to understand the mind, you need to understand the brain.1 In his review of my recent book Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain, Colin McGinn gibbles up this simple message [NYR, April 24]. Here is the thing: there is a difference between a necessary condition and a sufficient condition. Oxygen is a necessary condition for burning wood; it is not a sufficient condition. Sufficiency requires much else besides, including bringing the wood to a kindling point, and so forth. When I said it is necessary to understand the brain in order to understand the mind, I am talking about a necessary condition. I am not talking about a sufficient condition. In fact, I have famously argued…

Sloviansk—Every now and then I can hear distant explosions and bursts of gunfire. But most of the time, here in the center of Sloviansk, which since early April has become eastern Ukraine’s separatist stronghold, everything is quiet. Since the small town is chopped up by barricades and many businesses and factories have closed down, there is not much going on, so that when the wind blows you can hear it shimmer the leaves of the silver birches that line the streets. If you were looking for war here, it would be hard to find. Ice creams are still getting through the checkpoints around town and there is a steady stream of people buying them. As I chose a chocolate bear, Irina, aged fifty, who sells them, told me that she…

The USA Freedom Act a bill passed by the House of Representatives, May 22, 2014 Supporters of the National Security Agency inevitably defend its sweeping collection of phone and Internet records on the ground that it is only collecting so-called “metadata”—who you call, when you call, how long you talk. Since this does not include the actual content of the communications, the threat to privacy is said to be negligible. That argument is profoundly misleading. Of course knowing the content of a call can be crucial to establishing a particular threat. But metadata alone can provide an extremely detailed picture of a person’s most intimate associations and interests, and it’s actually much easier as a technological matter to search huge amounts of metadata than to listen to millions of…

Degenerate Art: The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi Germany, 1937 an exhibition at the Neue Galerie, New York City, March 13–September 1, 2014 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Olaf Peters, with a preface by Ronald S. Lauder and foreword by Renée Price Prestel, 320 pp., $60.00 As he had lived, Cornelius Gurlitt died at eighty-one early in May, in thrall to a trove of inherited art he kept hidden for decades mostly at a modest apartment in Munich. The announcement last year of the collection’s discovery by German authorities yanked the reclusive Gurlitt from the shadows. Stories about him busied the front pages of newspapers for weeks. He seemed a figure out of Sebald or Kafka. He had never held a job, kept no bank accounts, was not…

Wilson by A. Scott Berg G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 818 pp., $40.00 Georges Clemenceau famously compared Woodrow Wilson to Jesus Christ (and not to Wilson’s advantage); John Maynard Keynes thought he was a booby; Richard Nixon, surprisingly, admired him and had his desk brought into his office at the White House (although with the capacity for missteps that dogged Nixon, the desk turned out to belong to someone else). American liberals have tended to idolize Wilson as someone who had big ideas and wanted to set the world to rights while conservatives blame him for everything from the Federal Reserve to the United Nations. Glenn Beck predictably loathes him and today’s Europeans tend to cast him as the worst type of moralizing American whose noble sentiments cloak sheer self-interest. Yet the…

The Mother Court: Tales of Cases That Mattered in America’s Greatest Trial Court by James D. Zirin, with a foreword by Robert M. Morgenthau American Bar Association, 325 pp., $29.95 Later this year, the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York will celebrate its 225th anniversary. Sometimes called the “Mother Court” because it is older than even the US Supreme Court, the Southern District is, with fifty sitting judges, the largest and busiest federal trial court in the country. It has long enjoyed a reputation for excellence that may be almost as great as its judges (of which this writer is one) would like to imagine. But it was not always so. In its early years, the court, even though encompassing the entire state of New…

Walden Warming: Climate Change Comes to Thoreau’s Woods by Richard B. Primack University of Chicago Press, 253 pp., $26.00 Henry James once called Concord, Massachusetts, “the biggest little place in America,” and for its role in both political and literary history the title is probably forever secure. Concord was the site of the second battle of the American Revolution (and the first victory for the colonials), and a few generations later it witnessed a baffling outbreak of literary virtuosity. The Author’s Ridge in the town’s cemetery is as close to an American Pantheon as we will ever have, with the graves of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau. In any other town Ephraim Bull, the developer of the Concord grape, would have been a…

Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation by Robert Bartlett Princeton University Press, 787 pp., $39.95 In Search of Sacred Time: Jacobus de Voragine and the Golden Legend by Jacques Le Goff, translated from the French by Lydia G. Cochrane Princeton University Press, 214 pp., $29.95 In November 1231 Elizabeth of Thuringia, daughter of the king of Hungary and widow of Louis IV, Landgrave of Thuringia, died in the city of Marburg, aged twenty-four. Married before she was fifteen, Elizabeth bore three children to Louis before his death while on crusade in 1227, when she was just twenty years old. Even during her affectionate marriage her piety had been characterized by midnight prayer vigils, lavish works of charity, and acts…

(On painting the vault of the Sistine Chapel) 1509 I’ve grown a goiter from this trap I’m in, as cats do from foul water in Lombardy, or some such place, wherever it may be. My stomach’s almost up against my chin, My beard points skyward, at my nape the store of memory dangles, I’ve grown a harpy’s breast, and from above, my dripping brush, for jest, transforms my face into a mosaic floor. And while my haunches press into my gut, my ass serves as a steady counterweight. My feet tread blindly somewhere down below. In front I feel my skin stretched lengthwise, but in back it crimps and folds. This is my state: arched and indented like a Syrian bow. Not to be trusted, though,…

Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe an exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, February 21–September 1, 2014 Catalog of the exhibition edited by Vivien Greene Guggenheim, 352 pp., $60.00; $40.00 (paper) An enormous exhibition of the Italian Futurist movement occupies the snail-shell of the Guggenheim Museum this spring and summer. The Futurists were dedicated to motion—but not the meditative pace that Frank Lloyd Wright’s ramp imposes on the viewer; more the revving of a Lamborghini, or better yet a Ducati motorcycle, relentlessly powering up, up, up and away, its engine knocking, spewing exhaust, mowing down everything in its path. The Futurists believed in the machine, in making a great big fuss, in being young. For a brief moment, they were arguably the most influential aesthetic provocateurs…

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by William Easterly Basic Books, 394 pp., $29.99 One standard definition of “international development” is that it is the global effort by rich and poor countries alike, working in tandem, to dramatically reduce extreme poverty and want. At the same time, such development should foster the economic growth of poor countries so that they will eventually be able to catch up with rich ones. Then they will share what Walt W. Rostow, the intellectual father of the so-called modernization theory that dominated the Western development world in the 1950s, called the promise of abundance. It is that promise, or, more exactly, the claim that such a promise could ever have been fulfilled by applying any of the…

Mad Music: Charles Ives, the Nostalgic Rebel by Stephen Budiansky ForeEdge, 306 pp., $40.00 Charles Ives, the crazy and brilliant patriarch of American music, loved a good cacophony. In the public imagination (to the extent that he inhabits it) he is associated with collisions of marching bands in different keys and other sorts of acoustical suffering. At the outset of his excellent new biography, Stephen Budiansky summons up this confrontational Ives and his “characteristic pose”: “‘a fighting stance, his right hand raised and a finger of scorn’ thrust at some imaginary antagonist.” It’s a vivid but misleading way to begin. Ives had many enemies, including himself, but his real impulse was affection: a desperate affection for the past, and for the joys and possibilities of music-making. Ives was born in…

Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace by Nikil Saval Doubleday, 352 pp., $26.95 1. If we are what we eat—a notion that seems irrefutable in today’s food-fixated United States—then another corollary, at a time when personal identity often derives more from professional pursuits than private matters, would be that we are where we work. Whether that means a mahogany-paneled corner suite atop a high-rise corporate banking headquarters in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, or a Silicon Valley campus designed to feed the infantile appetites of tech geeks, or a hipster freelancer coworking facility recycled from an abandoned architectural relic of some long-ago economic boom, there has never been more diversity in the settings where American office employees spend their workdays. In Cubed, his impressive but substantially flawed study of the…

Piero della Francesca: Artist and Man by James R. Banker Oxford University Press, 276 pp., $39.95 Piero’s Light: In Search of Piero della Francesca: A Renaissance Painter and the Revolution in Art, Science, and Religion by Larry Witham Pegasus, 354 pp., $28.95 Scholarly spats are the salt of art history, lending it savor. The pettier, one may feel, the more piquant. Readers of these pages will have enjoyed the recent review by Sanford Schwartz of a little exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, “Piero della Francesca: Personal Encounters.” The show brought together five small panels by the quattrocento master, including a newly restored Saint Jerome and a Supplicant from the Accademia in Venice. The “supplicant”—and presumably the panel’s commissioner—that Piero portrays here in profile is a man of affairs in a…

The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos by Patrick Leigh Fermor, edited by Colin Thubron and Artemis Cooper New York Review Books, 362 pp., $30.00 1. “We shall never get to Constantinople like this.” This rueful aside, which comes toward the end of the first of the three books that the late Patrick Leigh Fermor devoted to his youthful travels on foot across Europe in the early 1930s, was to prove prophetic. “Like this” ostensibly refers to the author’s weakness for detours. By this point in A Time of Gifts—written some four decades after that remarkable journey and first published in 1977—it is late in 1933, and the high-spirited, precocious, poetry-spouting eighteen-year-old, long since expelled from school (“a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness,” a housemaster clucked),…