Art

Ian Marcus Corbin on values in the art world.

Amy Henderson reviews Desmond Morris’s book dishing the dirt on the Surrealists.

The wartime prime minister as leader, painter, friend.

James Gardner on Delacroix’s undeserved reputation for greatness.

Street artist Sabo may just be ‘some guy who lives in some dump,’ but he is taking on and taking down the likes of Jimmy Kimmel and Meryl Streep

Ann Marlowe visits the Pilotta museum complex—one of Italy’s overlooked gems.

Eric Gibson on Delacroix—we know him for his paintings, but he transformed modern drawing as well.

Hannah Yoest on the work of Jon McNaughton, the painter of populist rage.

James Gardner on the surprising resilience of Giacometti’s spindly statues.

Catesby Leigh on the fight to build a World War I memorial near the White House.

Reflecting on the prominence of the art.

Christopher Atamian on how Takashi Murakami unites kitsch, mockery, and tradition.

Readers may remember Fearless Girl, the 50-inch-tall bronze statue of an intrepid young girl, placed in front of the famous Charging Bull sculpture in Lower Manhattan. The girl, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio recently announced, will be moved to a new location nearby—in front of the New York…

Although he is best known for his landscapes, there is a power and tense stillness in Paul Cézanne’s depictions of his family, neighbors, and friends.

Museums have traditionally served as repositories for the past. But younger generations are avoiding the chance to slow-walk through history, so museums are exploring new ways to attract visitors.

After sleeping in a ditch on US 385, Devon and I biked 30 miles to Marathon, Texas. It was a short distance, and Devon was as cheery to get on the road as he had been the entire trip: "Dude, every day there's a new pain that makes me forget about the old pain." If Devon has taught me anything, it's…

The road from Van Horn to Marfa, Texas, is unbelievably boring. I woke up from a night in a highway motel that involved multiple trips to the McDonalds next door and A Perfect World on cable, and went straight back to—you guessed it—McDonalds. Holding my second McGriddle in one hand and my phone in…

One of the reasons most art writing is not worth reading—and there are several reasons—is the irritating habit of critics of personalizing their subject and making it all about themselves. It goes without saying that this tendency is to be strenuously resisted, if not punished, but I am about to…

What would Leonardo have done with radiography? What might Michelangelo have accomplished had 3-D modeling been available? What heights of the mind would a neo-Platonist like Piero della Francesca have witnessed if he had lived long enough to see calculus?

By acclamation the Art Institute of Chicago is already one of the great museums of the world, but earlier this month it laid hands on a work that its director called a “transformative acquisition.” The work is by the absurdist painter-provocateur-conman Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). The New York…

An impermanent high-art graffiti gallery in Queens was, for the five years since its whitewashing by a real estate developer, considered another casualty of cold-hearted capitalism. Its absence was a monument to the unwinnable war against the Man. Now the building owner who erased it has to pay…

It was one of the ironies of the George W. Bush presidency that a supposedly unlettered president should appoint to the federal government’s cultural endowments two chairmen who were the most accomplished men ever to hold their respective positions. To the National Endowment for the Arts, Bush…

In the sundry debates about the Western canon that periodically vex our culture, attention is always focused on those who have been excluded from it, with the implicit assumption that some malign force is behind that omission. Far less discussed but no less important is the question of who has…

If you’re around Washington D.C. this winter, you might want to consider swinging through the Renwick Gallery, located just a stone’s throw from the White House. A new display there, called “Murder Is Her Hobby,” features the work of Frances Glessner Lee, who used dollhouses to recreate real-life…

Nearly half a century ago, when I was a preschooler in Soviet-era Moscow, two thick magazines appeared in our home. They had plain, pale-tan covers, but I could tell they were quite special to my parents. In those magazines’ pages was a riveting story—what I could understand from my precocious…

In a March 2016 speech before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference, Donald Trump declared that if he became president, he would “move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem.” His choice of phrase—“eternal capital”—perhaps bears some…

Thérèse Dreaming, by the Polish-French painter Balthus, is undeniably creepy. Creepy enough to launch, in this day and age, an online petition demanding it either be removed from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, or that “context” be added to the display. The museum abstained from any action,…

Of the many things that a young fellow, barely knee-high to a grasshopper, might aspire to be when he grows up, one that doesn’t often come to mind is “grifter.” Yet in my early 20s, intoxicated by the demimonde allure of pulp novels by Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford, I was reminded of a time…

There's a song I’ve started to play on the piano. It’s called “Money,” a fairly straightforward arrangement by Burt Bacharach. The only problem is Liza Minnelli’s eyes. They keep staring back at me from the opposite page.

It would be hard to invent a more pallid or inadequate title than Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer for the exhibition that has just opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Divinity, of course, is always an asset and Michelangelo is a name to conjure with. But neither of the words that…

Don't you miss baseball? Yes, the people who update you constantly, starting in November, about how many days until spring training are a little weird, and you should have an offseason, but it's easy to miss something once it's gone. To that end, Bill Kristol announced the two winners of his…

It's always a source of delight when liberal pieties collide. Which is what happened last week in Laguna Beach, California, when Art had it out with the Environment—and Art lost. What made the contretemps doubly delicious was that the art in question had been promoted as an environmental statement.

We are living through the golden age of the cinema of Sacramento. Oh, you didn’t know there was such a thing? There is. It’s new. Very new. In 2015, the Sacramento radio station NOW 100.5 could find only eight movies filmed in part in Sacramento over the previous 30 years, and in all of them it was…

There have been very few Renaissance men since the Renaissance—and they weren’t exactly thick on the ground even in their glory days. No modern figure is more worthy of that appellation than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), who was not only the greatest German poet, playwright,…

"You are no good." These were not the words Gregor Piatigorsky, a nervous performer, needed to hear as he warmed up before playing a concerto with the New York Philharmonic. The man who uttered them, the conductor Arturo Toscanini, then said, “I am no good.” The effect on Piatigorsky was immediate…

In the unpredictable and often baffling way that hip, new meaning can glom onto even the stuffiest of words, “curating” has emerged in recent years as a ubiquitous cultural tag for fashion, groceries, Instagram posts, Pinterest accounts, and much else. Grammy winner Usher “curated” a July 4…

The Berkshire Museum, a venerable, century-old museum of art and history in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, is making enormous changes to its dowdy displays. Two years of planning, 22 focus groups (uh-oh), and two multimillion-dollar fundraising drives have yielded a “New Vision,” described as a bold,…

ArtPrize is a queer sort of gallery show. There is no gallery, for one thing. Nor is there any particular curator. Instead, there is an urban core with a big pot of prize money in the middle of it.

In the world of art, Johannes Vermeer is a name to conjure with, and any exhibition of his work qualifies as a blockbuster. For the first time since 1996, a major exhibition of Vermeer and his contemporaries is coming to the National Gallery of Art. Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting debuted…

Whenever the vanguard of the Race’n’Gender Left™ meets the avant-garde of post-postmodern art, hilarity ensues. So it is with Omer Fast’s August, a recent installation in Manhattan’s Chinatown. If you’re wondering why an art show called August opened in September and will close in October, trust…

Until his death on October 14, Richard Wilbur had spent nearly half a century as America’s greatest living poet. A writer of opulent forms and playful wit, whose rhymed and measured stanzas combined the intellectual complexities of modernist verse with the familiar pleasures of an older tradition,…

Most of us think of jazz as a genre predicated on extemporization—the horn man breaking into an inspired chorus set apart from the rhythmic structure of the song, the pianist using an established chord progression for extended flights of improvisatory fancy.

In the past 100 years, no visual artist has contributed more to the sum total of human happiness than Alexander Calder. If you think about it, this generating of happiness, to the extent to which it retains any cultural prestige these days, is seen as the domain of musicians and writers far more…

As I was leaving the theater after a screening of Frederick Wiseman’s Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, the friend I watched it with turned to me and observed, “For a documentary about a library, that movie didn’t have a whole lot to say about books.”

Can there be such a thing as a great movie that is also unsatisfying? It would seem like a contradiction in terms. After all, how can something work when it doesn’t work? And yet it does happen. The early Marx Brothers and Woody Allen pictures are disastrous pieces of storytelling, but who cares…

In the past 100 years, no visual artist has contributed more to the sum total of human happiness than Alexander Calder. If you think about it, this generating of happiness, to the extent to which it retains any cultural prestige these days, is seen as the domain of musicians and writers far more…

The Scrapbook enjoys opera. We admit it. And although we believe the Metropolitan Opera in New York to be grossly overpriced, it’s still the best opera house in the world, and so we make our way there at least once a year.

Can there be such a thing as a great movie that is also unsatisfying? It would seem like a contradiction in terms. After all, how can something work when it doesn’t work? And yet it does happen. The early Marx Brothers and Woody Allen pictures are disastrous pieces of storytelling, but who cares…

In recent years, John McPhee’s writing has become more retrospective, a natural sensibility for a man now 86 years old. A case in point was his 2010 book Silk Parachute, a collection of essays and reportage that also stood out for its uncharacteristically personal tone. From the title essay, a…

As I was leaving the theater after a screening of Frederick Wiseman’s Ex Libris: The New York Public Library, the friend I watched it with turned to me and observed, “For a documentary about a library, that movie didn’t have a whole lot to say about books.”

With all the drama of medieval jousting, or a good old fashioned tractor pull, liberal champions collided last week in separate contests: Buddhism vs. the environment and animal rights vs. art.

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) painted watercolors throughout his European childhood. Like his family, the dependents of the peripatetic Dr. Fitzwilliam Sargent, watercolors were portable and picturesque. Sargent continued to paint watercolors in the 1870s as a student in Paris and in the 1880s…

Remembering Pulitzer-winning poet John Ashbery, last of the New York school.

The publication of a new translation of the Aeneid by poet David Ferry at the age of 93 is an outstanding achievement. Having also translated Virgil’s other masterpieces, the Eclogues and Georgics, Ferry has spent two decades in the company of this great Roman poet.

During the 2016 presidential primary campaign, Jeb Bush took to calling Donald Trump the “chaos candidate.” It didn’t seem to have much effect at the time, but Bush was prescient: The chaos candidacy is now the chaos presidency. And yet, as Henry Adams once wrote, while order is the dream of man,…

When the U.S. entered World War I, the thousands of soldiers who headed to Europe were joined by combat artists attached to the American Expeditionary Force.

There was a time when I was surprised that many Americans—even fans of Turner Classic Movies—seemed to think that Alfred Hitchcock was a roly-poly Englishman who somehow ended up in Hollywood and got his start making movies there. The way the story goes, Hitchcock crossed the pond and made Rebecca…

Henry James grew up with Thomas Cole’s View of Florence from San Miniato in the family parlor. Aspiring to become a painter, James took lessons from John La Farge; he had to settle for prose. The rest of his life he sought the company of expatriate painters like Frank Duveneck, James Whistler,…

If an award were given for winning awards, it would surely go, by acclamation and universal consent, to Robert Rauschenberg, the most beribboned figure in the history of art. Not only did he win almost every award you can think of, but others were invented so that he could win those as well. Had…

Of all the unanswerable questions in the universe, there’s one that brings the brightest minds of Broadway and Hollywood to their knees: What makes one musical or movie musical a hit and another a flop? A veritable ocean of cocktails flows over this question. But during the 1940s, the Hollywood…

Of all the unanswerable questions in the universe, there’s one that brings the brightest minds of Broadway and Hollywood to their knees: What makes one musical or movie musical a hit and another a flop? A veritable ocean of cocktails flows over this question. But during the 1940s, the Hollywood…

If an award were given for winning awards, it would surely go, by acclamation and universal consent, to Robert Rauschenberg, the most beribboned figure in the history of art. Not only did he win almost every award you can think of, but others were invented so that he could win those as well. Had…

George W. Bush has been painting for several years now, but has only recently become an artist. His first paintings, mostly of world leaders, were remarkably well received, even by an art establishment that had hardly been friendly to his administration. And yet, although those early paintings were…

George W. Bush has been painting for several years now, but has only recently become an artist. His first paintings, mostly of world leaders, were remarkably well received, even by an art establishment that had hardly been friendly to his administration. And yet, although those early paintings were…

It wasn't long ago that painters were celebrities; when Picasso died in 1973, it was big news to everywhere. Paul McCartney wrote a song about it. In the 70s, painters and paintings were still a part of mainstream culture; around that time, though, the art world moved from modernist and…

Boston

Boston

The Scrapbook likes to think it's open to new experiences. For instance, we have concluded that the designated hitter rule won't destroy the institution of baseball. The Scrapbook is worldly.

To start off the new year, I bought my family three museum memberships. My kids take music lessons, we attend plays and concerts, and our trips to the big city almost always include a historical, cultural, or artistic experience. We are above-average consumers of "the arts." If Congress eliminates…

Georges Rouault (1871–1958) was born with a bang. A shell struck Rouault père's home during the Commune, and Madame went into labor. Of his birth, Rouault said, "In the faubourg of toil and suffering, in the darkness, I was born. Keeping vigil over pictorial turpitudes, I toiled miles away from…

To start off the new year, I bought my family three museum memberships. My kids take music lessons, we attend plays and concerts, and our trips to the big city almost always include a historical, cultural, or artistic experience. We are above-average consumers of "the arts." If Congress eliminates…

London

Wall Street's three-and-half-ton bronze Charging Bull has stood frozen in mid-charge, to meet oncoming traffic just above the bottom of Broadway for nearly 30 years. It's a symbol, the artist Arturo Di Modica would say, of achievement and optimism—of the American capitalist's unbridled bravado.…

Partly because France surrendered to the Nazis before any harm could be done to Paris, Paris is the art capital of the world. Consequently, it has an impractically large number of great museums. Tourists can't reasonably be expected to visit all of them—Paris has a dozen or so museums dedicated…

We opened the New York Times last week, and were sadly unsurprised to read an article that began thusly:

A photograph of 14-year-old Emmett Till's mutilated face snapped during his open-casket funeral in Chicago made international news in the fall of 1955. For supposedly flirting with a white woman (the woman finally admitted this year that she'd lied in her testimony) while visiting Southern…

Elliott Green's "Human Nature" is one of the early hits of the 2017 art scene. Showing at the Pierogi Gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (it closes March 26), Green's show won praise from critics across the spectrum, including the New York Times, and the more specialized art press. His…

New York

Signs inside in this season's hot-ticket exhibit encourage visitors, or "viewers," as art critics still insist on calling them, to be the show. It's a concession, common nowadays across the art world, to the fact that most people's vanity overwhelms their interest in fine art: Museums might as well…

Auguste Rodin— almost the last great figure sculptor—shares a rare distinction with history's two greatest visual artists, Leonardo and Michelangelo: Like the Mona Lisa and Michelangelo's (first) David, Rodin's "Thinker" is ubiquitous; every person in the western world, no matter how uninterested…

Who knew that in the age of America First, the greatest threat to Hispanic communities in the United States wasn't marauding bands of ICE agents wielding mass deportation orders or the construction of a border wall? No, the scourge is Art.

Who knew that in the age of America First, the greatest threat to Hispanic communities in the United States wasn’t marauding bands of ICE agents wielding mass deportation orders or the construction of a border wall? No, the scourge is Art.

'Beauty," Camille Paglia once wrote, "is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature." But as today's high-culture world descends into the morass of identity politics, beauty itself has surrendered to…

‘Beauty," Camille Paglia once wrote, "is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature." But as today's high-culture world descends into the morass of identity politics, beauty itself has surrendered to…

Nearly every year, I attend a Christmas service, even though I'm Jewish. Every year, the officiant delivering the homily points out that Christmas occurs in winter, bringing us hope in dark hours. As he says, "Perhaps it is the winter of your life."

If you leave out writers and composers, there are only two serious contenders for title of greatest artist in history: Michelangelo and Leonardo. They tie for the title of greatest painter; Michelangelo is in sole possession for the title of greatest sculptor. In fact only one Leonardo sculpture…

Nearly every year, I attend a Christmas service, even though I’m Jewish. Every year, the officiant delivering the homily points out that Christmas occurs in winter, bringing us hope in dark hours. As he says, "Perhaps it is the winter of your life."

Whatever Gary Vikan, former director of the Walters Museum in Baltimore, thinks of the larger world, he has a somewhat jaundiced view of the art world itself, or at least that corner of it that forms his main area of expertise, medieval and Byzantine art. And the impression we are left with from…

Who is the greatest Spanish artist who ever lived? Though it's light on writers and composers, and has only the one architect—Gaudi—Spain has a rich history of great painters; Goya, Dali, Miro, Juan Gris, El Greco. Really, though, there are only three contenders for the Spain's-greatest-artist…

The photos of the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey in Ankara shocked many people. Jerry Saltz, the senior art critic for New York magazine, was mesmerized by their artistry.

New York

The Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act passed the Senate in a late-night session Friday, rolling through with unanimous support. A bipartisan bill from its inception, the HEAR Act will likely become federal law and institute a universal reset of the statutes of limitation for Holocaust-era art…

New York

New York

New York

The greatest painting in Paris is not the Mona Lisa. It's a different portrait by a different renaissance master, conveniently located only a hundred feet away from the Mona Lisa, in an adjacent Louvre gallery. It's Rafael's Baldassare Castiglione.

In today's 24/7 media age, the public image of a president—or president-elect!—is inescapable. But how did Americans perceive their presidents before mass media captured them for wide distribution? What was the everyday citizen's visual conception of a leader whose visage was understood only…

In 1514, King Manuel I of Portugal gave Pope Leo X a white Indian Elephant named Hanno. When Hanno arrived in the Vatican—after sailing from Conchin, on India's southwest coast, to Lisbon and from Lisbon to Rome, he was an enormous sensation. He marched in parades and gave audiences. He was…

In today’s 24/7 media age, the public image of a president—or president-elect!—is inescapable. But how did Americans perceive their presidents before mass media captured them for wide distribution? What was the everyday citizen's visual conception of a leader whose visage was understood only…

London

Two years ago, I wrote a piece in these pages about my multi-year struggle to see Gianolorenzo Bernini's greatest bust—possibly his greatest sculpture—his Constanza, which lives on the top floor of the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence, the national sculpture museum. The Bargello, whose…

When the National Gallery's East Building opened last weekend after three years of renovation, no discerning visitor could miss the influence of one critic. In 1998, THE WEEKLY STANDARD's Andrew Ferguson read I.M. Pei's then twenty-year-old design as a mark of the age—an unpromising one. Above all…

A bipartisan bill to reset the statute of limitations on Nazi-looted art claims made by Holocaust survivors and their heirs passed the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday morning.

If you’re a denizen of D.C. (or visiting here) looking for something smart to distract you from the presidential race—and who isn't?—you're in luck. Not only has Satchmo at the Waldorf, a play by longtime Scrapbook friend and TWS contributor Terry Teachout, opened in Washington; less than two weeks…

If you’re a denizen of D.C. (or visiting here) looking for something smart to distract you from the presidential race—and who isn't?—you're in luck. Not only has Satchmo at the Waldorf, a play by longtime Scrapbook friend and TWS contributor Terry Teachout, opened in Washington; less than two weeks…

The Met museum in Manhattan has turned a large part of its Asian art floors over to a temporary exhibition of all the finest Chinese paintings from its vaults: "Masterpieces of Chinese Painting From the Metropolitan Collection" will be on until October 11.

"Hello, I'm looking for the Hirst exhibit?"

I spent a couple weeks this summer museum-hopping. Art museums, mostly, and while I don’t know much about painting or sculpture, I know what I like, and I know what I don't like, and I don't like people who go museum-hopping. Present company excluded.

The two paintings—side-by-side Adam and Eve panels, a diptych in delicious Northern Renaissance detail—went to Hitler's chief underling, the fat philistine and stolen-art hoarder Hermann Göring, in 1940. And now, according to a California District Court decision, they'll stay in a Pasadena's Norton…

"There’s nothing to be embarrassed about," Donald Trump spokesman Jason Miller told CNN when asked about his boss's reaction to the New York Post's publication of nude photos of his wife, Melania. "She's a beautiful woman."

Florence is one of the two or three cities that sit on top of the art world. It has most of Michelangelo's greatest sculptures, all of Botticelli's greatest paintings, Bernini's greatest bust, and the two best Italian-Gothic churches. It has the lions' share of the world's great 13th, 14th and 15th…

The rulers of Saudi Arabia have announced a new program for cultural renovation of architecture associated with the life of Muhammad. As described in the leading pan-Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat, a Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage (SCTH) has begun planning rehabilitation of sites in…

In Celebration of Paul Mellon, a showcase of the great philanthropist's "most treasured works on paper," is a fine collection of art by the great American, English, and French masters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There isn't much linking the pieces at this exhibition at the National…

A state museum in Munich returned Nazi-looted paintings to Nazi officials rather than the rightful owners after World War II, according to charges from a British NGO. Researchers with the Commission for Looted Art in Europe found that after the war, the Bavarian State Painting Collections sold art…

There is no shortage of researchers and educators who tell us that art is good for our health and well-being, our quality of life, and as a means for understanding ourselves and others. Where too many people come up short is paying to get into art museums—$25 at the Boston's Museum of Fine Arts and…

"This is the death of fractional gifts," Manhattan art assets advisor Ralph E. Lerner told the New York Times in 2006, just a few weeks after Congress enacted the Pension Protection Act, which (among other provisions) placed certain limits on the length of time that collectors may take deductions…

Among many lost treasures of pre-war Berlin's Bode Museum, a collection of Renaissance sculptures by the likes of Donatello, Luca della Robbia, Andrea del Verrocchio, and Francesco Laurana was just another casualty—until a team of art historians found 59 of the collection in Moscow.

Beginning with its debut issue in September 1995, The Weekly Standard has featured on its pages the work of a small army of top-notch artists, among them John Kascht, who produced many early covers—including that original cover likeness of Newt Gingrich—and who now has some 19 pieces of art in the…

In April, four colleagues rarely in alignment—Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn of Texas, Chuck Schumer of New York, and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut—jointly proposed a bill to give heirs to Nazi-looted art their day in court. The Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (HEAR) Act, now awaiting…

Wednesday at sundown Yom HaShoah began. This Holocaust Day of Remembrance honors six million dead so that the world may never forget. "Hatred," a story written by Zuzana and Karel Tausinger in 1971 and published today in Mosaic, movingly illustrates the painful necessity of remembering. And earlier…

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In 540 BC, three Roman boys, Titus Tarquin, Arruns Tarquin, and their cousin Brutus – so dubbed because he was considered as dumb as a brute – were trekking to the Oracle at Delphi. Surely the oracle would predict that one of the Tarquin boys would be king; after all, they were the sons of Tarquin…

Istanbul

CULTURE WARS, CHAPTER 36.