Innholdsfortegnelse for May 11, 2017 i The New York Review of Books

JULIAN BELL is a painter and writer. His latest book is the painting sequence Genesis. PETER BROWN is the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton. His latest book is Treasure in Heaven: The Holy Poor in Early Christianity. IAN BURUMA is a Professor at Bard and the author of many books about Japan. His latest book is Their Promised Land: My Grandparents in Love and War. DAVID COLE is the National Legal Director of the ACLU and the Honorable George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center. ROBERT DARNTON , the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and University Librarian Emeritus at Harvard, is currently a Fellow at the Institut d’études avancées in Paris. SUSAN DUNN , the Massachusetts Professor…

Treasures from the Nationalmuseum of Sweden: The Collections of Count Tessin an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City, February 3–May 14, 2017. Catalog of the exhibition by Colin B. Bailey, Carina Fryklund, John Marciari, Magnus Olausson, and Jennifer Tonkovich. Morgan Library and Museum, 268 pp., $40.00 Some of us suddenly find ourselves very pleased that the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm is closed for refurbishing. It has resulted in the museum sending to the Morgan Library and Museum an unusually good loan show of paintings and drawings. Everything we see was collected, though not always for himself, by Count Carl Gustaf Tessin, a Swede whose lifetime covered much of the eighteenth century—he died in 1770 at seventy-four—and whose involvement with art gives us, with the help of the…

The Crucible of Islam by G.W. Bowersock. Harvard University Press, 220 pp., $25.00 The Garima Gospels: Early Illuminated Gospel Books from Ethiopia by Judith S. McKenzie and Francis Watson. Oxford: Manar al- Athar, 264 pp., $75.00 The Red Monastery Church: Beauty and Asceticism in Upper Egypt edited by Elizabeth S. Bolman. Yale University Press/ American Research Center in Egypt, 390 pp., $85.00 To write about the Arabian background of the Prophet Muhammad, about the origin of Islam in Mecca and Medina, and about the first conquests that led to the formation of the Arab empire (roughly between 560 and 690 AD) is to attempt to describe the first moments of a supernova—the flash of a stupendous detonation that marks the death of a massive star and the release of enormous…

Robert Rauschenberg an exhibition at Tate Modern, London, December 1, 2016–April 2, 2017; the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, May 21, 2017–September 17, 2017; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, November 4, 2017–March 25, 2018. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Leah Dickerman and Achim Borchardt-Hume. Museum of Modern Art/ Tate Publishing, 412 pp., $75.00 Robert Rauschenberg was a showman, a trickster, a shaman, and a charmer. In the retrospective that recently closed at Tate Modern in London and will be arriving at the Museum of Modern Art in New York this May, museum goers are confronted with many different things: the imprint of an automobile tire; a couple of rocks tied with pieces of rope or string; paintings that are all white, all black, or…

Elizabeth Bishop at Work by Eleanor Cook. Harvard University Press, 308 pp., $27.95 Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast by Megan Marshall. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 365 pp., $30.00 In the hands of great poets words do things they don’t for the rest of us. They “reek” “of meaning,” as Elizabeth Bishop wrote about other symbols. Bishop’s greatness is nearly universally agreed on, but her words eschew specialness, increasingly so as her work develops, always in the direction of greater directness and freedom. Bishop seems to want to domesticate out-ofthe- ordinary, difficult, uncanny things, to make them part of common experience, even when it proves impossible. In her poems, the almost nineteenthcentury rural landscape of Nova Scotia, where she spent much of her childhood; the sun-bleached midday of Key West, where…

The Schooldays of Jesus by J.M. Coetzee. Viking, 260 pp., $27.00 For any novelist, the relationship between the past and the present offers interesting choices. Although working this out often requires cunning and guile, sometimes the simplest strategy, such as a pause in the narrative for pure, unadulterated backstory, is the most effective. At the opening of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, for example, we are in Gardencourt, a house overlooking the river Thames. If this were a play or a film, we could be briskly told how and where Isabel Archer was found in Albany by her aunt, Mrs. Touchett. But James in Chapter Three of the novel will slowly take us back to the time when Isabel is visited by her aunt. It is as if…

Shepherd / W & K Galleries 58 East 79th Street, New York, NY 10075; (212) 861-4050; Fax: (212) 772-1314; shepherdny@aol.com; www.shepherdgallery.com. OSKAR KOKOSCHKA "ORBIS PICTUS" Works on Paper From May 2nd through July 28th, 2017. Bennington Museum, 75 Main Street, Bennington, VT, 802-447-1571. www.benningtonmuseum.org Gatherum of Quiddities: Paintings by Pat Adams. April 1 – June 18, 2017. For sixty years Pat Adams has approached painting with an empiricist’s concern for the nature of visual form and the intimist’s sensibility that addresses the layering complexity of being. With abstract paintings characterized by seductive colors and richly encrusted surfaces, she seeks to bring from her “gatherum of quiddities” – that stew of unnamed qualities – a visual situation that bestirs contemplation. A fully illustrated catalog will be available through the Bennington Museum. Andrei Kushnir…

On Betrayal by Avishai Margalit. Harvard University Press, 332 pp., $26.95 1. Years ago, in his book The Ethics of Memory (2002), Avishai Margalit described two different kinds of philosophers: “i.e. philosophers,” who are committed to definitions and distinctions, and “e.g. philosophers,” who are committed to examples and illustrations. This is a more fruitful distinction than the standard one between Anglo- American and Continental philosophy: i.e. philosophers are indeed likely to be Anglo- American, but e.g. crosses all geographical boundaries. Margalit is very good at i.e.- ing (as this distinction, and many others, demonstrate), but he is fundamentally an e.g. philosopher. For one thing, he doesn’t use “stylized” hypotheticals (the trolley problem, the fat man on the bridge) to advance his arguments; instead, he argues through stories taken from history,…

The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communist Russia by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated from the Russian and with an introduction by Anna Summers. Penguin, 149 pp., $16.00 (paper) Fame came late to Ludmilla Petrushevska ya, one of Russia’s most admired living writers, best known for her scary stories about Soviet family life. It was not until she turned fifty, at the height of glasnost in 1988, that she emerged on the literary scene. For many years before that she had written mainly “for the drawer,” as censored Soviet writers had been forced to do since Stalin’s time. She wrote her first stories in the 1960s, when she worked as a journalist in Moscow, and turned to plays in the 1970s, when she was an editor at the main…

Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, October 7, 2016–January 22, 2017; and the Musée du Louvre, Paris, February 20–May 22, 2017. Catalog of the exhibition by Annick Lemoine and Keith Christiansen. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 276 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) Beyond Caravaggio an exhibition at the National Gallery, London, October 12, 2016–January 15, 2017; the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, February 11–May 14, 2017; and the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, June 17–September 24, 2017. Catalog of the exhibition by Letizia Treves and others. London: National Gallery, 208 pp., $40.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) The Guardian of Mercy: How an Extraordinary Painting by Caravaggio Changed an Ordinary Life Today by Terence Ward. Arcade, 183 pp., $24.99 The…

A Third Gender: Beautiful Youths in Japanese Edo- Period Prints and Paintings (1600–1868) an exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Ontario, May 7–November 27, 2016; and the Japan Society, New York City, March 10–June 11, 2017. Catalog of the exhibition by Joshua S. Mostow and Asato Ikeda, with the assistance of Ryoko Matsuba. Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 215 pp., $50.00 (paper) Lusting after pretty teenage boys was not considered shameful in pre modern Japan. Experienced older women did it. Young women did too. Older men indulged in it (as long as the boys were passive sexual partners). Adultery was not permitted, on the other hand, and it was unseemly for grown men to love other grown men. But the love of older men for young boys, a practice called…

Histoire mondiale de la France [Global History of France] edited by Patrick Boucheron. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 797 pp., €29.00 (paper) One of the bombs dropped during the current presidential campaign in France is Histoire mondiale de la France, an eight-hundred-page tome surveying 40,000 years of French history. A collaborative work written by 122 academics and directed by Patrick Boucheron, a distinguished medievalist at the Collège de France, it hardly seemed destined for the best-seller lists when it was published in January. But the French have snapped it up: 70,000 copies have been sold as of mid-March and sales are still going strong. After several decades of somnolence, academic history is a hit. Although the book owes much of its success to the talent of its authors, its publication was…

A Mother’s Tale by Phillip Lopate. Mad River, 188 pp., $24.95 “Usually I try to get patients to confront their families, but in your case I would recommend putting several thousand miles between you and them,” a therapist told Phillip Lopate in 1980. Along with his older brother and their two younger sisters, Lopate had spent his childhood in Brooklyn as an unwilling witness to a marital crime scene. Frances, their mother, complained to eight-year-old Phillip of her sexual and romantic frustrations and confided in him about her affairs. She habitually berated and humiliated their father, Albert, who responded with detachment, coldness, and passive aggression. Somehow the two stayed married for more than fifty years. Divorced in 1985, they nevertheless continued to share an apartment until Albert entered a nursing…

Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves by Marie Jenkins Schwartz. University of Chicago Press, 420 pp., $35.00 The “fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English Colonies probably than in any other people of the earth,” declared the great Irish statesman and author Edmund Burke to the British Parliament in 1775, urging conciliation and not war with the colonists. And the people of the American South, he continued, were attached to liberty “with a higher and more stubborn spirit” than those of the North. Southern slaveowners knew what bondage meant and thus valued their own freedom, including the freedom to oppress others, that much more strongly. “Such will be all masters of slaves, who are not slaves themselves,” Burke reflected. “In such a people, the haughtiness of…

Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) an exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, February 8–June 4, 2017. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Sarah Milroy and Ian A.C. Dejardin. Philip Wilson, 202 pp., £25.00 Sussex Modernism: Retreat and Rebellion an exhibition at Two Temple Place, London, January 28–April 23, 2017 Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision Catalog of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, by Frances Spalding. London: National Portrait Gallery, 191 pp., £22.50 (paper) Vanessa and Her Sister: A Novel by Priya Parmar. Ballantine, 348 pp., $16.00 (paper) Becoming Virginia Woolf: Her Early Diaries and the Diaries She Read by Barbara Lounsberry. University Press of Florida, 257 pp., $74.95; $24.95 (paper) The Bloomsbury painter Vanessa Bell, née Stephen, lived most of her life (1879–1961) in the chilly, concealing shade of…