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1 month ago | 
newyorker.com | Jackson Arn
It may be a lazy critic cliché to write that an artist’s life was itself a work of art, but we are dealing with a man who let a wounded stork convalesce in his bed while he slept on the floor. As a teen-ager, he became a sailor and voyaged from the south of Russia to India and Egypt. Later, he made extra rubles boxing at the circus. He talked his way into Picasso’s studio by pretending to be a blind musician.
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1 month ago | 
newyorker.com | Shauna Lyon |Sheldon Pearce |Helen Shaw |Jackson Arn
Another traditionally feminine medium, porcelain, is the star and possible villain of “Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition (March 25) takes a wary view of its own contents, which span half a millennium, arguing that the West acted out its daydreams of a docile Orient one cup-and-saucer at a time.
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2 months ago | 
newyorker.com | Jackson Arn
As genres go, Italian still-life painting isn’t a ghost town, exactly, but it evokes more than its share of dust and tumbleweeds. It’s just a fact that French fruit bowls and Dutch lemon peels get a bigger chunk of the textbook than anything of the kind from the Bel Paese.
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Jan 1, 2025 | 
newyorker.com | Jackson Arn
A millennium ago, India was still a Buddhist headwater. Various schools flowed north and east, to China and Japan, but one, Vajrayana Buddhism, left its richest deposits on the Tibetan Plateau. It’s a nice irony of this show that remoteness can speed up transmission: the Himalayas were uncrossable for a quarter of the year, but travellers needed to get through all the same, and many of them spent months near the southern side of the mountains, waiting out the snow and soaking up Buddhist culture.
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Nov 20, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Jackson Arn
If you remember anything about this painting, may it be that the dog’s name is Noble. The black poodle in the bottom left greets us as a silhouette with a few shiny parts: teeth, eye, damp nose, pink tongue. The teeth could crack bone; the tongue wants to be friends. Not a very dignified pose for a creature called Noble, but humans love to saddle animals with teasingly grand names—Rex, Princess, King, Queenie.
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Nov 10, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Jackson Arn
The venue was the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s Duggal Greenhouse, all thirty-five thousand square feet of it. Hillary and Bernie debated here in 2016. The building used to be a boat-assembly plant, which made the festivities oddly apt, since tattoos have always thrived on water: sailors marked themselves and shipped their skins to every latitude, and most of the world’s historic tattoo capitals (San Francisco, Venice, Yokohama, New York) are port cities where a thousand cultures sloshed.
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Oct 15, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Jackson Arn
Chop down a poplar tree. Other kinds of wood could work, too, but poplar is an especially soft one, and your task is to trim it into thin planes. These you’ll need to coat in a barrier of plaster and animal glue—naked wood is highly absorbent, and you can’t have it drinking down everything you put on it. Wait until the barrier has dried. Sand. Repeat until you have a perfectly smooth surface.
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Oct 6, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Jackson Arn
But this show is not about chairs, except for a single introductory piece. It is about watercolor, and ink, and paper, and how a group can embrace the visual with a bottomless appetite and somehow be world-famous for simplicity. To describe one work as Sister Polly Jane Reed’s drawing of the house of Holy Mother Wisdom, a Shaker spiritual entity, would not be incorrect.
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Sep 15, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Jackson Arn
In September, 1870, while Prussian soldiers were trying to starve Paris into surrender, Claude Monet was in Normandy with his wife, Camille, and their son, Jean, looking for a boat out of France. They weren’t alone. Every day, hundreds of people went down to the docks in the hope of escaping the Franco-Prussian War; only later would Monet learn that some of his best friends had shoved through the same crowd. By November, he and his family had reached London, though they spoke no English.
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Aug 12, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Jackson Arn
It begins with not one, not two, but three prologues, each spiked with a different kind of horror. First, a scrolling text suggesting that this all really happened to the “five youths” we are about to meet, even though it didn’t. Second, glimpses of cadavers in oily Caravaggio light, culminating in a long, sociopathically calm shot of the ruined graveyard where they’ve been dug up. Third, footage of solar flares, combined with reports of nationwide disaster.
