Innholdsfortegnelse for May 9, 2024 i The New York Review of Books

Julian Bell is a painter based in Lewes, England. His book Natural Light: The Art of Adam Elsheimer and the Dawn of Modern Science was published last year. Thomas A. Clark lives in Scotland. His poetry collections include The Threadbare Coat and, most recently, that which appears. Ariel Dorfman, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Literature at Duke, is the author of the play Death and the Maiden and the novel The Suicide Museum. His novel Allegro will be published in English next year. Jarrett Earnest’s book of photographs and writing, Valid Until Sunset, was published last year. James Fenton is a British poet and literary critic. From 1994 to 1999 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford. He was awarded the PEN Pinter Prize in 2015. He is the author…

Canova: Sketching in Clay an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., June 11–October 9, 2023, and the Art Institute of Chicago, November 19, 2023–March 18, 2024. Catalog of the exhibition by C. D. Dickerson III and Emerson Bowyer, with contributions by Anthony Sigel and Elyse Nelson. National Gallery of Art/Art Institute of Chicago, 279 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) Antonio Canova was a fascinating mass of contradictions: a working-class child from the Venetian hinterland who became an arbiter of taste for the courts of Europe and a marquess in his own right; a shy man who hobnobbed with popes, kings, and learned women (and dared to give Napoleon a piece of his mind); the creator of impeccably polished marble statues and rough, vivacious models and…

In the standard telling, the story of midcentury American art is a saga of hyperbolically talented painters working large and abstractly to manifest an existential encounter between man (notwithstanding the occasional begrudged woman) and material. “What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event,” in Harold Rosenberg’s catchy 1952 formulation. Canvas-as-event became a publicity magnet, inspiring popular news items like Life magazine’s 1949 “Jackson Pollock: Is He the Greatest Living Painter in the United States?” along with decades of New Yorker cartoons. On the home front, however, in private houses and apartments, things were different. Rosenberg, in that same essay, noted that “advanced paintings today are not bought by the middle class…. Considering the degree to which it is publicized and feted, vanguard painting is…

Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant. Knopf, 414 pp., $32.50 The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet by Jeff Goodell. Little, Brown, 385 pp., $29.00 In 1957 Manley Natland, a geologist working for the California-based Richfield Oil Corporation, was sent to the Athabasca oil sands in Alberta, Canada, where he hatched a terrible plan. Extracting crude oil from tar sands is a slow, dirty, and expensive task, requiring the separation of bitumen—a thick oil substance—from the sandy peatland of the Canadian forests. Seeking a more efficient method, Natland figured that setting off nuclear bombs might make the process easier. His idea, later named Project Oilsand, was in line with the nuclear fever dreams of the late 1950s and…

Playboy by Constance Debré, translated from the French by Holly James. Semiotext(e), 172 pp., $17.95 (paper) Seen from a certain perspective, Constance Debré’s recent trilogy of novels—Playboy, Love Me Tender, and Nom (Name)—looks ready-made to appeal to audiences hungry for autobiographical tales of female self-emancipation. The books are based on events from Debré’s own life, the facts of which are as follows: born into an illustrious French family, Debré grew up to be a successful criminal defense attorney with a husband and a child, maintaining a façade of bourgeois contentment until, seemingly out of the blue, she announced to her husband that she wanted to be a writer and not a lawyer, a lesbian and not a man’s wife, and not just a lesbian but a womanizer instead of a…

Tom of Finland: Bold Journey an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, April 28–October 29, 2023. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Leevi Haapala, João Laia, and Jari-Pekka Vanhala. Helsinki: Kiasma, 157 pp., €42.00 Tom of Finland: The Official Life and Work of a Gay Hero by F. Valentine Hooven III. Cernunnos, 295 pp., $50.00 Tom of Finland: Made in Germany edited by Juerg Judin and Pay Matthis Karstens. Milan: Skira, 195 pp., $45.00 (distributed in the US byArtbook/DAP) Tom of Finland: Threesome three exhibitions at the David Kordansky Gallery, 2015–2021. Catalog of the exhibitions edited by Stuart Krimko. David Kordansky Gallery, 159 pp., $60.00 (paper) His pants are pulled down over his feet like a ruched satin shade. His hips are slung to one side in…

What Does a Jew Look Like? by Keith Kahn-Harris and Robert Stothard, with a foreword by Stephen Bush. Nottingham: Five Leaves, 75 pp., £12.99 (paper) [Wandering Photographer] by David Serry. Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi/Netanya: Association for Society and Culture, Documentation and Research of Yemenite Jews, 168 pp., 129 Recently, when friends have asked what I am working on and I’ve told them that I am reviewing a British photo-essay book called What Does a Jew Look Like?, they have reacted with a nervous giggle. This has sometimes been followed by “Wow!,” “Oy,” or an ominous “Uh-oh.” The uneasiness stems, I think, from the question itself, not its possible answers. What a Jew looks like has been a subject, indeed obsession, of Jews and non-Jews, of antisemites and Zionists, of novelists and…

The branch grows into my vaginaand exits my mouth.Like sellers of fine carpets, leaves unfoldtheir new colors at my lips.The lovers walk the scrawny pathto visit at their assigned hours.The one who is meanest is the one I most love.He brings me a fish full of needles.I am happy to providefor everyone whatever they need,as everything outsideswirls thickly and dark.My holes rotate positions.A strong stain is createdby the fears of others.It tints the sky; her lilac iris watches. I’m stuck here, herewhere I have asked you to come.You are no friend.My only one is the dog there.The good blood drippingfrom his mouth, fast like a trill,is a novel full of ideas.The wind’s iron fingernailsbrush back sweetly my hairfrom my face. It’s true,we gave something upthat was not ours to give.Is…

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, February 25–July 28, 2024. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Denise Murrell. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 331 pp., $65.00 (distributed by Yale University Press) Manhattan was the capital of the twentieth century and Harlem as the Mecca of the New Negro helped to make it so. In Black Manhattan (1930), James Weldon Johnson, poet and NAACP executive secretary, recounts Negro Harlem’s coming into being as a real estate speculation story. He makes it seem as though Negroes were eager to be bought out and leave the Tenderloin district as plans for Pennsylvania Station at the beginning of the twentieth century assured their displacement. Meanwhile, by 1905 Harlem, with its yacht club and opera…

Until August by Gabriel García Márquez, translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean and edited by Cristóbal Pera. Knopf, 129 pp., $22.00 Many years later, as I faced the deadline for writing this review, I was to remember that distant afternoon when Gabriel García Márquez showed me the Spanish manuscript of Chronicle of a Death Foretold and then gently refused to let me read the novel until its forthcoming publication. We were spending a week together in August 1981 at the Mexican resort of Cocoyoc, along with eight other jurors awarding a literary prize for the best book on militarism in Latin America,1 and Gabo (as everyone called him) was bubbling with enthusiasm at having completed what he considered his masterpiece. “I can’t let you even have a peek,” he…

pace out the terrainbait the line with herringplant kaletalk about the weatherseparate rumorfrom intelligencephrase against the pulse bog has suffered damagethe drained sites proneto scrub invasion slow the water flowraise the water tablerewet cracked peat brash crushingstump flippingground smoothing who cares for the lapwingwho for the tufted vetchwho cares for the dingy skipperwho for the dune gentianwho cares for the barn owlwho who who when a gaze picks outthe shape of a deerfrom the surrounding moorit is as if somethingwithin the deeran embarrassment of contenthad risen to the surface from assumptions and preferencesfrom caution and suspicionfrom constant self-referencefrom easy recognitionthe flight across the heather daily island lifeis to delayto differ or deferdally or varyisland life daily present bewilderment tensepresent translucent tensepresent somnolent tensepresent truculent tensepresent effervescent tense white-tailed eagle cruisingone…

Fashioned by Sargent an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, October 8, 2023–January 15, 2024, and Tate Britain, London, February 22–July 7, 2024. Catalog of the exhibition by Erica E. Hirshler, with Caroline Corbeau-Parsons, James Finch, and Pamela A. Parmal. MFA Publications, 247 pp., $65.00 The Music Lovers This is the painter John Singer Sargent, writing in 1880 to his friend Vernon Lee after a trip to Spain and North Africa: You wished some Spanish songs. I could not find any good ones. The best are what one hears in Andalucia, the half African Malagueñas & Soleàs, dismal, restless chants that it is impossible to note. They are something between a Hungarian Czardas and the chant of the Italian peasant in the fields, and are generally composed of five…