Jed Perl

1 month ago | newcriterion.com | Stephen Schwartz |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Victor Davis Hanson |Jed Perl

Recent stories of note:“The wish list: objects at Tefaf Maastrict 2025 to suit every collector’s taste”Aimee Dawson, The Art NewspaperStarting tomorrow, in the Netherlands’ southern panhandle, TEFAF Maastricht will be in full swing. The annual international art fair is known as a hub for Old Master sales, and many American curators and collectors have undoubtedly already decamped there for the week, seeking treasures for their walls.

1 month ago | newcriterion.com | Stephen Schwartz |Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn |Victor Davis Hanson |Jed Perl

Franz Kafka published little during his life and shared the manuscripts of his novels and short stories mostly with confidants in his literary “Prague Circle.” After contracting tuberculosis, Kafka burdened his closest friend, Max Brod, with destroying his writings after his death. When Kafka died in 1924, he left Brod a letter reiterating his wishes: “Everything in my estate . . .

Oct 17, 2024 | nybooks.com | Jed Perl

Ralph Ellison’s papers in the Library of Congress include hundreds of photographs that the novelist took over many years, mostly as a serious amateur and also, for a brief period in the late 1940s, as an aspiring professional. They range from the striking black-and-white studies of street life in Harlem that he made when he was in his thirties to elegant Polaroid images of flowers and still lifes from his later years. They aren’t great photographs.

Aug 29, 2024 | nybooks.com | Jed Perl

There is no question that “Jenny Holzer: Light Line,” currently at the Guggenheim, is a spectacle. Holzer’s LED display, with her signature cryptic and not-so-cryptic sentences and sentence fragments snaking up the museum’s ramp, turns the monumental rotunda that Frank Lloyd Wright designed more than sixty-five years ago into an advertisement for herself.

Jun 27, 2024 | nybooks.com | Jed Perl

Jean Hélion, whose paintings and drawings are the subject of a resplendent retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, saw art as perpetual experimentation. From the hard-edged geometric abstractions with which he first established a reputation in the 1930s to the immense triptychs devoted to a Parisian street scene, a flea market, and the political upheavals of May 1968 that are his climactic achievements, Hélion was always testing the limits of what a painter could do.