Innholdsfortegnelse for May 15, 2025 i The New York Review of Books

Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy an exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City, October 25, 2024–May 4, 2025. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Erica Ciallela and Philip S. Palmer, with a foreword by Colin B. Bailey and an afterword by Tamar Evangelestia-Dougherty. Morgan Library and Museum/DelMonico/DAP, 303 pp., $49.95 The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray. Berkley, 341 pp., $28.00; $17.00 (paper) Belle Greene by Alexandra Lapierre, translated from the French by Tina Kover. Europa, 524 pp., $28.00; $18.95 (paper) Becoming Belle da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian Through Her Letters by Deborah Parker. Florence: I Tatti, 170 pp., $25.00 (paper) (distributed by Harvard University Press) Belle da Costa Greene has long been a prominent figure in the world of rare…

Since Donald Trump was inaugurated on January 20, my days mostly look like this: I wake up and check my phone for the latest unprecedented executive action the Trump administration has announced. I do some research and try to figure out whether the action is lawful. (It usually isn’t.) I call colleagues who are experts in the area of law that’s being flouted—immigration, independent agencies, federal science funding, employment, free speech, and so on. I organize my thoughts and draft a short essay for my Bloomberg opinion column explaining what’s wrong with the action and why it matters. I almost always conclude by predicting what the courts will do when a lawsuit is filed. If some lower court has already ruled, I analyze what it said and whether the Supreme…

Tacita Dean: Blind Folly an exhibition at the Menil Collection, Houston, October 11, 2024–April 19, 2025 Blind Folly, or How Tacita Dean Draws by Michelle White. MACK/Menil Collection, 109 pp., $20.00 (paper) Tacita Dean edited by George Baker and Annie Rana. MIT Press, 297 pp., $30.00 (paper) Base Matter and Uncommon Solvent: Drawings, Prints, Collages and Objects, 1986–2024 by Tacita Dean. MACK, 615 pp., $190.00 In 2001 the British artist Tacita Dean made a three-minute-long 16mm film called The Green Ray. It begins with a countdown of flashing numbers: 11… 10…9…8…7…6…5…4…3…There is no 2 or 1. Just black, then sky, sun, and sea: a sunset over the Mozambique Channel, seen from a beach on the western coast of Madagascar. At the center of the square image is the sun. For…

Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Always to Return an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery and the Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C., October 18, 2024–July 6, 2025. Catalog of the exhibition by Josh T. Franco, Charlotte Ickes, Julie Ault, Joshua Chambers-Letson, and Teresita Fernández. Radius, 312 pp., $60.00 (to be published in October 2025) This isn’t really my language, but the language I learned. So I’m reluctant to give something a name that is imposed on me. —Felix Gonzalez-Torres Nearly thirtyyears after Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s death at the age of thirty-eight, his artworks are instantly recognizable. His stacks of paper, his piles of hard candy, and his strings of lightbulbs all play with geometric form, serial repetition, and outsourced fabrication in ways that helped to redefine minimalism. Gonzalez-Torres altered its impersonal language by…

All the King’s Horses: Vitruvius in an Age of Princes by Indra Kagis McEwen. MIT Press, 364 pp., $40.00 As perennial best sellers go, the treatise known as Ten Books on Architecture by the Roman writer Vitruvius is not, perhaps, the most predictable. It includes some gripping stories, certainly, many of them military, like the the Carian queen Artemisia’s surprise naval attack on Rhodes aboard the Rhodians’ own ships or the thwarted siege of the same city by the Macedonian general Demetrius Poliorcetes, the proverbial “Sacker of Cities,” whose gigantic war machine, the “City-seizer” (Helepolis), churns to an ignominious halt in a pool of muck created overnight by the mass emptying of Rhodian chamber pots. These vignettes, however, are little gems inserted to brighten long passages about what kind of…

Moby-Dick an opera with music by Jake Heggie and a libretto by Gene Scheer, directed by Leonard Foglia, at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City, March 3–29, 2025 Since Moby Dick has inspired barely quantifiable spin-offs and variations in every medium—movies (notably by John Huston), theatrical versions (notably by Orson Welles and recently by Robert Wilson), radio plays, television miniseries, paintings (by Jackson Pollock, Frank Stella, Sam Francis), multiple comic books and children’s adaptations (including a pop-up book for toddlers), at least one musical and one water ballet, a cantata by Bernard Herrmann, a celebrated drum solo by Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham, and countless jokes, posters, cartoons, and greeting cards—it is surprising that until the composer Jake Heggie and the librettist Gene Scheer’s Moby-Dick there has apparently been no opera.…

Scott Burton: Shape Shift an exhibition at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, September 6, 2024–February 2, 2025, and Wrightwood 659, Chicago, October 3, 2025–January 31, 2026. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Jess Wilcox and Heather Alexis Smith. Pulitzer Arts Foundation/Wrightwood 659, 144 pp., $50.00 (to be published in September 2025) (distributed by Yale University Press) Álvaro Urbano: Tableau Vivant an exhibition at SculptureCenter, Long Island City, September 19, 2024–March 24, 2025 Scott Burton: Collected Writings on Art and Performance, 1965–1975 edited by David J. Getsy. Soberscove, 258 pp., $18.00 (paper) Queer Behavior: Scott Burton and Performance Art by David J. Getsy. University of Chicago Press, 402 pp., $45.00 In the center of downtown Pittsburgh a tawny metal and smoked glass tower faces the intersection of Grant Street and…

The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice, and Courage by Philippe Sands. Knopf, 203 pp., $27.00 Diego Garcia by Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams. Semiotext(e), 263 pp., $17.95 (paper) Like all laws that govern our countries, states, and communities, international law did not fall from the sky. It was conceived and established by a small cadre of Western powers against a backdrop of imperial expansion. It rationalized decades of pillage and domination by seeing non-Western peoples as uncivilized and therefore incapable of self-government. The world has changed since then, and so have its legal institutions: top posts at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and other major international organizations are routinely occupied by men and women from African, South American, and Asian countries, many of them postcolonial. Yet the…

Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, April 20–September 13, 2025. Catalog of the exhibition edited by Lynne Cooke. National Gallery of Art/University of Chicago Press, 283 pp., $32.50 Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, March 5–June 16, 2024. Bulletin on the exhibition by Iria Candela and Joanne Pillsbury. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 47 pp., available at metmuseum.org/met-publications/weaving-abstraction People like playing with string. The wheel gets more press as an invention, but the loom predated it by millennia; the Paleolithic humans who hunted mammoths also tied nets. My great-grandmother tatted, my grandmother embroidered, my mother had a fling with macramé, my generation knits. Meanwhile the menfolk were busy…

Booster Shots: The Urgent Lessons of Measles and the Uncertain Future of Children’s Health by Adam Ratner. Avery/Penguin Random House, 261 pp., $30.00 So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs—and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease by Thomas Levenson. Random House, 422 pp., $35.00 At a campaign event in Madison Square Garden shortly before the 2024 election, Donald Trump announced his plans for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: “I’m going to let him go wild on health. I’m going to let him go wild on the food. I’m going to let him go wild on medicines.” Indeed, many of Kennedy’s past ideas and claims about health and disease can be categorized as “wild.” From 2016 to 2024 he was the chair of Children’s Health Defense, an advocacy…

This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud. Norton, 428 pp., $29.99; $18.99 (paper) Once upon a time, I thought of “history” and “story” as distinctly divergent terms: “history” implied a conscientious accounting of facts, whereas a “story” might involve facts but more often promised invention—a myth, a fairy tale improvised at bedtime, a lie. Then I moved to Italy. In Italian, storia is the word for both “history” and “story,” such that The Neverending Story and History of Western Philosophy both have storia in their titles, despite one being a novel set partly in “Fantastica” and the other a heavily footnoted doorstop by Bertrand Russell. (In other Romance languages, it’s a word closer to “history” that does this double duty, such as the French histoire.) Further muddling matters, according to…

Arlene Shechet: Girl Group an exhibition at Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York, May 4–November 10, 2024. Catalog of the exhibition by Eric Booker, Nora Lawrence, Kate Nesin, Anne Reeve, Arlene Shechet, John P. Stern, and Sheena Wagstaff. Storm King Art Center/Gregory R. Miller, 171 pp., $55.00 (distributed by Artbook/DAP) Wood, stone, metal, clay. Before our current, more profligate era, sculptors generally employed one material at a time. The techniques associated with each—carving, casting, welding, forming—have all been available but used singly. Choosing one material would seem to preclude the others; rarely have artists thought to combine two or more in a single work. (The culture of installation art is a different branch of the tree.) The sculptor Arlene Shechet works in the high modernist tradition using traditional…

The more you know about Surrealism, the more you realize there’s much more to know. That may be exactly what André Breton, the movement’s instigator and ringleader, wanted us to feel. A movement that celebrates the power of the unconscious and the unknown needs to remain open-ended. So we can hardly be surprised that in the hundred years since the publication of Breton’s “Manifesto of Surrealism” in 1924 the fundamental principles and ambitions that animated Breton and his many friends and collaborators haven’t become any clearer. Not that people don’t keep trying to nail things down. The centennial brought a torrent of books and exhibitions, including a lollapalooza of a show last fall at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, a version of which will open at the Philadelphia Museum of…