Volume 67, Number 8 (2020-05-14)

Susan Tallman

The Master of Unknowing

Gerhard Richter is contemporary art’s great poet of uncertainty; his work sets the will to believe and the obligation to doubt in perfect oscillation.

Gerhard Richter: Painting After All

an exhibition at the Met Breuer, New York, March 4–closing date to be announced; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, August 15, 2020–January 18, 2021

Gerhard Richter

an exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York City, February 28–April 25, 2020

Fintan O’Toole

Vector in Chief

To understand Trump’s incoherence, we have to take into account two contradictory impulses within the right-wing mindset: paranoia and risk.

Michael Greenberg

Emergency Responder

Prior to the pandemic, few could have predicted the astonishing performance of New York’s unloved governor, Andrew Cuomo

Jed Perl

A Rage for Clarity

Félix Fénéon: The Anarchist and the Avant-Garde—From Signac to Matisse and Beyond

an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, through July 25, 2020

Clair Wills

Ghost Story

On ‘The Mirror and the Light,’ the third volume in Hilary Mantel’s life of Thomas Cromwell

The Mirror and the Light

by Hilary Mantel

James Fenton

What He Saw in a Dream

Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Visionary Architect

an exhibition at the Petit Palais, Paris, December 11, 2018–March 31, 2019; the Menil Drawing Institute, Houston, October 4, 2019–January 5, 2020; and the Morgan Library and Museum, New York City, January 31–September 13, 2020

Jean-Jacques Lequeu: Bâtisseur de Fantasmes

Catalog of the exhibition edited by Laurent Baridon, Jean-Philippe Garric, and Martial Guédron, with the collaboration of Corinne Le Bitouzé

Matthew Aucoin

Opera at the Edge

Perhaps, in our newfound state of isolation, we can learn new ways to listen across borders, with open ears

Lear

an opera by Aribert Reimann, at the Paris Opera, November 21–December 7, 2019

Orest

an opera by Manfred Trojahn, at the Vienna State Opera, November 14–20, 2019

Heart Chamber

an opera by Chaya Czernowin, at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, November 15–December 6, 2019

Nicole Rudick

A Witch’s Demons

Bad Gateway

by Simon Hanselmann

One More Year

by Simon Hanselmann

Megg and Mogg in Amsterdam

by Simon Hanselmann

Megahex

by Simon Hanselmann

Ian Bostridge

When Turgenev Did the Cancan

The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture

by Orlando Figes

Howard W. French

Treasures of the Sahel

Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara

an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, January 30–August 23, 2020

Edward Chancellor

The Long Shadow of the Austrian School

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas

by Janek Wasserman

Nick Laird

Fun for One

a poem

Joan Acocella

The Red Shoes

Mikhail Baryshnikov has never played so undashing a hero.

The White Helicopter

a play by Alvis Hermanis, at the New Riga Theater, Riga, Latvia, opened November 21, 2019, with additional performances planned for 2020

Sean Wilentz

Abolition’s First Wave

Standard-Bearers of Equality: America’s First Abolition Movement

by Paul J. Polgar

Sanford Schwartz

With Flying Colors

Horace Pippin, American Modern

by Anne Monahan

Horace Pippin: From War to Peace

an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, July 19, 2019–December 31, 2020

Sophie Pinkham

Realists of the Soviet Fantasy

Artists like Deineka and Samokhvalov managed to produce valuable work while navigating the shoals of Soviet doctrine.

Deineka/Samokhvalov

an exhibition at the Manege Central Exhibition Hall, St. Petersburg, November 18, 2019–January 19, 2020

Dustin Illingworth

A Lost Original

Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts

by Samuel Greenberg, edited and with an essay by James Laughlin; new, expanded edition edited by Garrett Caples

Jonathan Mingle

A World Without Ice

The project before us is paradoxical: thinking on long time scales while acting with furious urgency.

The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey into Greenland’s Buried Past and Our Perilous Future

by Jon Gertner

IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate

by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Vanishing Ice: Glaciers, Ice Sheets, and Rising Seas

by Vivien Gornitz

The Hindu Kush Himalaya Assessment: Mountains, Climate Change, Sustainability and People

by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development

The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption

by Dahr Jamail

Leslie Jamison

Other Voices, Other Rooms

People told me motherhood would feel like deprivation—losing time, losing sleep, losing freedom—but in the beginning it felt more like sudden and exhausting plenitude.

Private Lives Public Spaces

an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, through July 1, 2020