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1 week ago | 
newcriterion.com | Roger Kimball |Gary Saul Morson |Renee Winegarten |Keith Windschuttle
Recent stories of note:“A Novelist Draws”Rupert Christiansen, Literary ReviewOn the island of Guernsey is a home whose owner, it is evident, was fond of excess and whimsy: walls adorned floor to ceiling with china, ceilings fitted with tapestries, ornament and pattern everywhere possible. This is the Hauteville House, the home of Victor Hugo during his exile on the Channel Islands, which is open to the public, as is the author’s equally eccentric home in Paris.
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1 week ago | 
newcriterion.com | Roger Kimball |Gary Saul Morson |Renee Winegarten |Keith Windschuttle
Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) was the most exquisite of Old Masters: he portrayed the melancholy sense that elegant pleasures are fleeting and condemned to fade. No wonder that covers of Mozart albums have been decorated with Watteau’s pictures. The Château de Chantilly’s Musée Condé holds ten Watteaus, France’s largest collection of the artist’s work outside of the Louvre.
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2 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Keith Windschuttle |Roger Kimball |Renee Winegarten |Brenda Wineapple
Poetry: Daniel Mendelsohn in conversation with Ayad Akhtar: Homer’s The Odyssey, at the 92nd Street Y (April 10): Threads from Homer’s Odyssey are “so tightly woven into the fabric of our literature and art, music and drama,” notes the classicist Daniel Mendelsohn, that “it’s with a start that we recall someone had to invent them.” It’s easy to forget that each generation has to retranslate the poem, too, if those threads are to be discerned (at least until Ancient Greek makes its way into...
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2 weeks ago | 
newcriterion.com | Keith Windschuttle |Harry Cluff |Roger Kimball |Renee Winegarten |Brenda Wineapple
When he was asked how Paul Cézanne influenced his work, Picasso declared: “He is the father of us all, a sort of God of painting.” This admiration was shared by Picasso’s coeval Cubist-in-arms, Georges Braque, and by the founding father of Fauvism, Henri Matisse, as well as by many other artists who came to prominence after Cézanne’s death in 1906. Cézanne’s contemporaries likewise appreciated his massive talent.
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2 months ago | 
quadrant.org.au | Roger Franklin |Keith Windschuttle |Timothy Cootes |Robert Murray
Who doubts reactionary forces are forever scheming to rob the public of rights, dignity and nice weather? Certainly not Age readersFeb 05 20255 minsAs a bureaucratic operator and faculty lounge warrior, the Marxist professor's talents were impressive.
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Jun 24, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | James Panero |Keith Windschuttle |Gary Saul Morson |Roger Scruton
Each year, at the end of the Royal Theatre season in Copenhagen, auditions are held for the ballet school. Children, for the most part between the ages of eight and eleven, come to the school for the entrance examination. The audition room is an old ballet studio with worn wooden floors whose walls are lined with portraits of August Bournonville, and in one corner is a bust of this nineteenth-century ballet master and choreographer who created the Danish ballet style.
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Jun 23, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | Victor Davis Hanson |James Panero |Keith Windschuttle |Gary Saul Morson
It is hard to know why the Trump and Biden campaigns decided upon June 27 as the date of the initial presidential debate. There is speculation that Trump wished to refocus attention on his campaign and away from recent legal proceedings in New York, and that the Democrats wished to get a look at Biden’s debate performance in advance of their convention in August, possibly with an eye to replacing him on the ticket if he performed badly. Both are plausible explanations.
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Jun 18, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | James Panero |Geoffrey Sampson |Keith Windschuttle |Anthony Daniels
Nonfiction:Jeremy Clarke: Spectator Low Life, The Final Years, by Jeremy Clarke (Quartet): The late Jeremy Clarke (1957–2023) might have been faced with an impossible task. Writing the “Low Life” column in The Spectator following the death of the inimitably drunken Jeffrey Bernard (famous for occasionally missing a weekly column, resulting in a byline reading “Jeffrey Bernard is unwell”), Clarke could hardly be expected to manage the louche languors of his predecessor.
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Jun 9, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | James Panero |Keith Windschuttle |Gary Saul Morson |Roger Scruton
In 2009, Lorin Maazel concluded his tenure at the New York Philharmonic by conducting a big Mahler symphony.
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Jun 7, 2024 | 
newcriterion.com | James Panero |Peter Martins |Keith Windschuttle |Gary Saul Morson
This summer, Paris is hosting the Olympic Games for the first time in over a hundred years. The Musée Marmottan Monet (MMM) is celebrating the occasion with an exhibition of works that reveal the rising interest in sports among all classes from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. The show, “En Jeu!: Artists and Sport, 1870–1930,” is endorsed by the International Olympic Committee. Sports, of course, predate even antiquity.
