Jeffrey Meyers

3 weeks ago | thearticle.com | Jeffrey Meyers |Sameer Hinduja |Ali M. Mahmoud

Member ratings Well argued: 100% Interesting points: 100% Agree with arguments: 100% 3 ratings - view all The photograph of Anne’s silky black hair, bright eyes and charming smile on the cover of her brilliant and tragic Diary of a Young Girl (English edition 1952) has attracted readers throughout the world. She was born in Frankfurt and wrote in Dutch, and her name was pronounced in the German way: AH-na Frrahnk.

1 month ago | thearticle.com | Jeffrey Meyers |Ali M. Mahmoud |Sameer Hinduja

Stephen Campbell does a learned, lively and convincing demolition job in Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life (Princeton University Press, 352 pp, $37/£30, published in the UK on April 1). It removes—like Salome’s seven veils or layers of archeological encrustations—the many contemporary distortions of Leonardo and places the artist in a less fanciful but more authentic historical context.

1 month ago | thearticle.com | Jeffrey Meyers |Sameer Hinduja

Sebastian Smee’s Paris in Ruins: Love, War and the Birth of Impressionism (Norton, 2024) “attempts to knit together art history, biography, and military and social history.” It successfully describes how Paris endured a military and a political disaster in one year—the Franco-Prussian War and the siege of Paris during the Commune of 1870-71—and how these events formed the background for both an affair of the heart between Berthe Morisot and Edouard Manet and the start of the Impressionist...

1 month ago | thearticle.com | Jeffrey Meyers |Sameer Hinduja

The half-Italian, half German Kurt Suckert (1898-1957) adopted the pseudonym of Curzio Malaparte, a self-styled evil inversion of Bonaparte. His father, Erwin Suckert, was an irritable textile-manufacturer from Saxony who lived in Prato, 25 miles northwest of Florence, and married a Florentine woman. Malaparte published books in Italian and French, but didn’t know German. He did know some English and surprisingly translated his antithesis, Emily Dickinson, into Italian.

1 month ago | thearticle.com | Jeffrey Meyers |Ali M. Mahmoud |Sameer Hinduja

The catalogue for the exhibition Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature (Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, until May 11) is excellent on his doom-laden, metaphysical landscapes, but says very little about the man who created them. Norbert Wolf’s short study Friedrich (Taschen, 2012) reveals details about his character, interests and tastes, his students, finances and wife. He loved to trek in the mountains, but his travels were limited by the Napoleonic wars and his hatred of France.