Innholdsfortegnelse for May 11, 2023 i The New York Review of Books

Sublime Ideas: Drawings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City, March 10–June 4, 2023. Catalog of the exhibition by John Marciari. Morgan Library and Museum/Paul Holberton, 224 pp., $60.00 Piranesi and the Modern Age by Victor Plahte Tschudi. MIT Press, 277 pp., $49.95 Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Catalogue of the Complete Etchings by Luigi Ficacci. Taschen, 787 pp., $80.00 “Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi,” mused Thomas De Quincey in his 1821 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. He wasn’t worried about the real Piranesi, long dead by then; he was considering the plight of an etched figure he understood to be Piranesi in one of the artist’s Carceri d’invenzione (Imaginary Prisons). “Creeping along the sides of the walls,” De Quincey wrote, you…

General Idea an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, June 3–November 20, 2022; and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, March 11–June 4, 2023. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Adam Welch. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada/Geneva: JRP, 755 pp., $80.00 (paper) (distributed in the US by Artbook/DAP) Ecce Homo: The Drawings of General Idea, 1985–1993 an exhibition at the Drawing Center, New York City, October 7, 2022–January 15, 2023; and MAMCO Geneva, February 22–June 18, 2023. Catalog of the exhibition edited by AA Bronson, Lionel Bovier, and Claire Gilman. Geneva: JRP, 199 pp., $55.00 (paper) (distributed in the US by Artbook/DAP) A handsome bald guywith dark features and a closely cropped beard appears in close-up against a black background. With genial authority and indefinite foreign inflection he declares: Art’s central…

Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell. Viking, 358 pp., $27.00; $18.00 (paper) In 1985 the forty-five-year-old exiled Chilean Antonio Skármeta, one of the most brilliant Latin American writers of his generation, published the novel Ardiente Paciencia, which nine years later Michael Radford made into the film Il Postino.1 The premise was enchanting. In the late 1960s, in a remote seaside village in Chile, the revered poet Pablo Neruda is waiting to hear if he has won the Nobel Prize, while Mario, the postman who might bring that news, has troubles of his own: he is unable to find the right words to win the heart of Beatriz, a dazzling young woman of a higher social status. Neruda, who has risen from the ranks of…

Good a play by C. P. Taylor, directed by Dominic Cooke, at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London, October 5, 2022–January 7, 2023; to be screened in cinemas by NTLive starting April 20, 2023 In the author’s note to his final play, Good, C. P. Taylor describes it as the story of “how a ‘good’ man gets caught up in the nightmare of the Third Reich,” a “work of the imagination” written as his own small “gesture” to revive the memory of the slaughtered Jews. The play was first performed months before his premature death from pneumonia in December 1981 at the age of fifty-two, by which time he had more than seventy plays to his name. Critics tend to agree that this play was, or would have been, a turning…

The Last Winter: The Scientists, Adventurers, Journeymen, and Mavericks Trying to Save the World by Porter Fox. Little, Brown, 306 pp., $28.00; $18.99 (paper) The air was thick and humid, delivered on a warm breeze that belonged to June, on the November morning I brought one of my daughters to a ski swap in our corner of northwest Vermont. We found her some used gear for the season ahead and, for me, a dose of dread: temperatures climbed into the seventies, breaking records across the state. But all around me the mood was upbeat among the hundreds of skiers in T-shirts and flip-flops browsing racks of boots. Vermont winters can be grindingly long. Why not enjoy the reprieve? Despite our state’s wintry associations, plenty of Vermonters fantasize about fleeing as…

Baya: Femmes en leur jardin [Baya: Women in Their Garden] an exhibition at the Institut du monde arabe, Paris, November 8, 2022–March 26, 2023; and the Centre de la Vieille Charité, Marseille, May 11–September 24, 2023. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Claude Lemand, Anissa Bouayed, and Djamila Chakour. Paris: CLEA/Barzakh/Images plurielles/Institut du monde arabe, 283 pp., €38.00* In November 1947 a fifteen-year-old prodigy from colonial Algeria named Baya, described variously as Kabyle, Berber, Muslim, and Arab, exhibited her gouaches and clay sculptures at the Parisian gallery of the art dealer Aimé Maeght. Yves Chataigneau, the French governor of Algeria, and Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the rector of the Paris Mosque, were the sponsors of the exhibition, and the opening attracted some of the most influential cultural figures of postwar Paris:…

On Thursday, July 6, 1989, I sat in bright summer sunshine on the veranda of the old vicarage in Pankow, a suburb of East Berlin, talking to Joachim, the twenty-one-year-old son of my dearest East German friends, Werner and Annegret Krätschell. The little boy I remembered had grown into a tall, strong, and angry young man, who now poured out his heart to me. He and some friends from his theological college had mounted a demonstration against the falsification of the results of local elections held just over a month before. They had been arrested and dragged by their hair across the street while—this was what most angered Joachim—nearby residents audibly supported the police from their balconies. A night in a Stasi cell and a nasty interrogation followed. East Germany…

Ear Hustle a podcast created by Nigel Poor, Earlonne Woods, and Antwan Williams. Radiotopia/PRX, available at earhustlesq.com This Is Ear Hustle: Unflinching Stories of Everyday Prison Life by Nigel Poor and Earlonne Woods. Crown, 301 pp., $28.00; $18.99 (paper) The San Quentin Project by Nigel Poor, with contributions by Reginald Dwayne Betts, George Mesro Coles-El, Rachel Kushner, Michael Nelson, Ruben Ramirez, Lisa Sutcliffe, and others. Aperture, 167 pp., $45.00 In “Looking Out,” an early episode of the Pulitzer Prize–nominated podcast Ear Hustle, hosts Earlonne Woods and Nigel Poor interview Ronell Draper, who goes by Rauch (pronounced “Roach”). About forty years old and incarcerated at California’s San Quentin State Prison, Rauch is known for his aromatic dreadlocks and his menagerie of pets: gophers, rabbits, a praying mantis, snails, swallows—even, for a…

Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982 an exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, February 12–July 2, 2023. Catalog of the exhibition by Leslie Jones, with contributions by Bronaċ Ferran, Patrick Frank, and others. Los Angeles County Museum of Art/DelMonico/DAP, 271 pp., $75.00 Signals: How Video Transformed the World an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, March 5–July 8, 2023. Catalog of the exhibition by Stuart Comer and Michelle Kuo, with contributions by Erika Balsom, Aria Dean, and others. Museum of Modern Art, 187 pp., $45.00 Technological innovation is the hot-button topic of two major exhibitions that opened almost simultaneously earlier this year in art museums on opposite sides of the United States. “Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982,” an elegantly shaped…

On March 26 Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, announced that he was firing his defense minister, Yoav Gallant. The previous day, Gallant, a former navy commando, had demanded that Netanyahu halt the government’s plan to overhaul the country’s judiciary—a plan that threatens to dismantle as much as reshape it. The proposal, unveiled by the justice minister, Yariv Levin, in early January, would give the governing coalition control over the appointment of judges, limit the Supreme Court’s ability to annul legislation through judicial review, and enable Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, to override decisions made by the court. Levin committed to passing each plank of the plan as a bill of its own in quick succession. Since January opponents of Levin’s proposal to subordinate the judiciary to the Knesset have…

Recycling Beauty an exhibition at the Fondazione Prada, Milan, November 17, 2022–February 27, 2023. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Salvatore Settis with Anna Anguissola. Milan: Fondazione Prada, 559 pp., $90.00 (paper) (to be distributed in the US by DAP in July) The single exposed corner of my house in Rome is shielded by the battered stub of an ancient column. The marble cylinder, with its worn fluting, must have been sunk into the sandy soil of Trastevere, the ancient neighborhood trans Tiberim (across the Tiber), sometime in the fourteenth century to deflect wayward carts and their heavy axles, but it deters wayward delivery trucks and wobbly tourists on electric scooters just as reliably. Virtually every corner in the oldest parts of Rome has a similar protector, most of them bits…

In the nave of the Roman parish church of San Lorenzo in Lucina, a plaque was erected in 2010. It commemorates the burial there four hundred years before of Adam Elsheimer, a painter from Frankfurt who had arrived in Europe’s art capital in early 1600. The plaque belatedly salutes an artist’s artist who “opened the eyes of his time to the essence and beauty of nature.” This phrasing intrigues rather than explains—what previously unseen essence was that?—but what is sure is the impact of Elsheimer’s narrative compositions: those who leaned on them ranged from Claude Lorrain in Rome to Rembrandt in Amsterdam and the Mughal artist Payag in Agra. At the head of these admirers was Peter Paul Rubens, a fellow northerner who had likewise passed through the Porta Flaminia,…

La Peinture impressionniste et la décoration [Impressionist Painting and Decoration] by Marine Kisiel. Paris: Le Passage, 380 pp., €35.00 Le Décor impressionniste: aux sources des Nymphéas [Impressionist Decor: The Sources of the Water Lilies] an exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, March 2–July 11, 2022. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Sylvie Patry and Anne Robbins. Paris: Hazan/Musée de l’Orangerie, 285 pp., €45.00 Two recent publications offer a dramatically new approach to the history of Impressionism: Marine Kisiel’s La Peinture impressionniste et la décoration and Le Décor impressionniste: aux sources des “Nymphéas,” edited by Sylvie Patry and Anne Robbins, the catalog of a superb exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris in 2022. They cover the same terrain, focus on the same works by the same artists, and…

Needle at the Bottom of the Sea: Bengali Tales from the Land of the Eighteen Tides translated from the Bangla by Tony K. Stewart, with contributions by Ayesha A. Irani. University of California Press, 410 pp., $24.95 (paper) “On land a tiger, in the water a crocodile” (dangay bagh, jale kumir), a much livelier version of our “Between a rock and a hard place” or even “Scylla and Charybdis,” is an old Bengali saying about the dangers of the Sundarbans (“beautiful forests” or “mangrove forests”). This is an area of swamps and wild, jungly islands created by the braided tributaries of three of the largest rivers in the world, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, and the Meghna, at the delta of the Bay of Bengal in Northeast India. (The area is…