Katherine Eastland

Milledgeville, Georgia

Who doesn’t love an animal logo? Allen Lane knew that, in 1935, when he published the first 10 Penguin books in London. The six pence paperbacks arrived in bookshops sporting the avian logo and no other graphics, just broad bands of color at the top and bottom. General fiction had orange bands;…

Apple is all about sleek design and minimalist beauty, but if a writer were to pose with his MacAir or iPad for a photo portrait, he’d be hard-pressed to look like he’s dripping with writerly intrigue. Besides, no one looks good in the eerie blue of computer screen light. 

Twentieth and twentyfirst-century art do not always age well. Consider this Oldenberg. Or this Rauschenberg. Or, horrible visu, this shark suspended in formaldehyde. It rotted not even 15 years after it was tossed into its vitrine coffin-tank, and had to be entirely refashioned.

On Monday, the French-born American sculptor Louise Bourgeois died in her Manhattan home at age 98 of a heart attack.

Today marks the 85th birthday of the novelist and peafowl-enthusiast Flannery O’Connor. To properly celebrate the occasion, the mayor of Milledgeville, Georgia, along with others of the town’s dignitaries just proclaimed March 25th “Flannery O’Connor Day.” (A few decades ago, however, when O'Connor…

Via Matthew Milliner's terrific post yesterday, I came across a seven-part series about the relationship between beauty and conservatism, Art and Beauty Against the Politicized Aesthetic, by the young scholar and poet James Matthew Wilson. He studied under the late Thomist scholar Ralph McInerny,…

The Irish bard translates a Scots epic.

If life is like a box of chocolates, then the televised Super Bowl is like an Oreo. The chocolate wafers are the game itself, and the ads are the cream filling. If you watched those ads, you probably saw this one, heralding that Electronic Arts is bringing to an Xbox 360 and/or PlayStation 3 near…

Let us now praise famous art—and the moneyed men and women who buy it. Or so the National Gallery of Art would encourage us to do in its latest show, “From Impressionism to Modernism: The Chester Dale Collection,” which opened last weekend in snowy Washington.

While regular calendars note February 2 as Groundhog Day, it’s worth recalling that, on the literary calendar, today is the birthday of Dublin-born novelist James Joyce. On on this day in 1922, age at 40, he published Ulysses (which he pronounced “Oolissays”). February 2 was a lucky date in his…

Yesterday in Cyprus, police authorities arrested "the largest ever smuggling ring" in the island, including ten Cypriots (most likely Greek), one Syrian, and four others still unknown. They will face charges for "illegally possessing and trading in antiquities," as Menelaos Hadjicostis reported…

The latest dose of literature for the snarky smart set is here. Its title? twitterature. This brief book sums up over eighty works in the Western canon in "twenty tweets or less," each one comprising, of course, no more than 140 characters.

A Washington law firm has just issued a press release on its multi-billion dollar class action lawsuit against Turkey regarding domestic property issues in the northern third of Cyprus (aka Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, or TRNC), which Turkey seized by military force in 1974 and has…

My grandmother Eastland liked to talk, and she considered it her duty to share family history with me, her only grandchild. So whenever we visited her down in Hillsboro, Texas, she and I would sit at her kitchen table in chairs stiff as pews, and she'd speak late into the night.

Willem de Kooning, the Dutch-American painter of lurid, owl-eyed women, declared in 1950 that "flesh was the reason oil paint was invented." Using that famous sentence as its cornerstone, "Paint Made Flesh" gathers 43 figurative paintings by artists from the last 50 years, including de Kooning,…

Last week in Washington, D.C., more pressure was exerted on Turkey to recognize the widespread depredation and pillage of religious sites and objects in the northern third of Cyprus. This third, otherwise known as the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus--an illegal, unilaterally declared state…

On Sunday I popped out of the heat and into the cool of the National Gallery to see two exhibitions on Spanish art: "Luis Melendez, Master of the Spanish Still Life" (warmly reviewed for TWS here) and "The Art of Power: Royal Armor and Portraits from Imperial Spain." In the latter I found one of…

Bible Illuminated

Remember those buses last December that were side-slapped with slogans like "Why believe in god? Just be good for goodness sake"? Well, the British Humanist Association has decided to start something similar across the pond. The new ad campaign, funded by the association, has won the support of…

The Washington Post reports that the original red-and-blue Obama "HOPE" collage by Shephard Fairey is headed to the National Portrait Gallery. It's a grand, and domineering, 60 by 44 inch artwork. The iconic collage is a gift from Tony and Heather Podesta, superlobbyists in Washington whose late…

George de Forest Brush (1855-1941) is far from being a household name, but his early paintings of Indians garnered him the attention, admiration, and purse of the 19th-century art world. Little of this work has been seen in public, however, since private collectors bought the paintings as soon as…

So Obama didn't make the cover of Newsweek today. Instead, a traditional-looking Bible with a rainbow ribbon bookmark did. The attendant story, penned by Lisa Miller, makes "the religious case for gay marriage" and is called "Our Mutual Joy." Here's the first graph: Let's try for a minute to take…

Art and China's Revolution

Art and China's Revolution

Last month the North Korean pianist Kim Cheol Woong gave two special performances in Washington, D.C. He first played at the State Department and then, near nightfall, in the dim, chandeliered rooms of the Polish Embassy. His purpose wasn't to win laurels or make a name for himself. There weren't…

A few years ago, the LOL cat was born. Yes, that's right, as in "Laugh Out Loud" cat. In case you don't know what a LOL cat is, check out this website. It's chock full of oddball photos of cats--fat cats, fluffy cats, scary cats, behatted cats--paired with oddball pidgin-English phrases. You either…

Exit the hullabaloo of American politics for five skinny minutes. Why? Well, to see history happen: Across the pond, Queen Elizabeth II just posted her first YouTube video at Google's British headquarters in London. And, of course, someone YouTubed her majesty YouTube-ing. Check it out here. You…

When McCain cut his gaze over at Obama last night and gruffly called him "that one," I had one wish: that Latin was still with us. You see, there's a silver dollar Latin word McCain could have pulled out of his pocket: the great demonstrative pronoun, iste. It's my favorite word in Latin, second…

If you've been reading the Arts section of any newspaper, you've probably read about Damien Hirst's auction at Sotheby's, (in)famous for bypassing galleries and dealers and for racking in so many pounds-111.5 million, to be exact. Hirst named the show "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever," but Lee…

Recordings of bin Laden reciting his penwork were found on some of the 1,500 cassettes discovered in Kandahar, Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks. Flagg Miller, an assistant professor at University of California, Davis, has been studying them and will publish his findings next week in the…

Photini Philippidou reports that there's a Pakistani protest song "Ye Hum Naheen", Urdu for "This Is Not Us", seeking to redefine Islam as anti-terrorist. The song has stirred 62.8 million Pakistanis to sign a petition, either by name or thumbprint, saying that true Muslims don't support terrorism.…

DEBORAH WYE, CHIEF CURATOR of prints and illustrations at the Museum of Modern Art, laments that German expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938) is still "not so well known in the States as he should be." And so she has organized a show devoted to a single chapter of his work: the Berlin…

In case there isn't enough talk about celebrity in America, here's some extra fare from England. And it¹s not about Obama, or Paris, or Britney. It's about Kate Moss. Today the British Museum announced that 'Siren,' a nearly $2.8 million, 110-pound solid gold statue of Kate will grace the Greek…

We've already heard from the major newspapers that Kayne West, Fergie, and friends are going to make the pilgrimage to Denver for the upcoming Democratic National Convention. But only Bloomberg has reported that the convention has chosen a "composer in residence." Amram, 77, has collaborated with…

The iTunes store just died in China. And it's all because the U.S.-based Art of Peace Foundation compiled an album for Olympians to download, for free, in the name of "compassion and non-violence ... overcom[ing] intolerance and oppression." The album is called Songs for Tibet and features songs by…

School House to White House: The Education of the Presidents

INSIDE THE NATIONAL GALLERY'S WEST BUILDING, a banner proclaims: "Fabulous Journeys and Faraway Places: Travel on Paper 1450-1700." Perhaps some might skip this invitation in search of something more contemporary. But that would be a mistake.