Volume 68, Number 8 (2021-05-13)

Ingrid D. Rowland

Light in the Palazzo

Hidden away and neglected for decades, works from the world’s greatest private collection of ancient sculptures are finally on public display in Rome.

The Torlonia Marbles: Collecting Masterpieces

an exhibition at the Capitoline Museums, Rome, October 14, 2020–June 29, 2021 (currently closed due to Covid-19 restrictions)

Matthew Aucoin

A Dance to the Music of Death

Thomas Adès turns fleetingly recognizable musical elements into unstable, volatile substances tending toward evanescence and escape.

The Exterminating Angel

an opera by Thomas Adès, with a libretto by Tom Cairns in collaboration with the composer; performed by Amanda Echalaz, Audrey Luna, Alice Coote, Joseph Kaiser, Rod Gilfry, Christine Rice, Iestyn Davies, and others; the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Thomas Adès

Adès Conducts Adès: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra and Totentanz

performed by Kirill Gerstein, Mark Stone, Christianne Stotijn, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra

Sarah Blackwood

Children’s Lib!

A new biography of Louise Fitzhugh, creator of Harriet the Spy, recovers her queer, radical life.

Sometimes You Have to Lie: The Life and Times of Louise Fitzhugh, Renegade Author of Harriet the Spy

by Leslie Brody

Mark Lilla

The Writer Apart

Who is the “nonpolitical” man Thomas Mann tried to defend even as he couldn’t escape politics?

John Banville

His Own Worst Enemy

In Van Gogh’s letters, his tone is consistently that of a man still aflame after a violent argument.

Vincent van Gogh: A Life in Letters

edited by Nienke Bakker, Leo Jansen, and Hans Luijten

Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him

by Mariella Guzzoni

John Ashbery

From The History of Photography (1993)

a poem

Leslie Jamison

The Self Unmoored

The heroine of Susan Taubes’s novel Divorcing moves like a fugitive: a woman who has left her marriage and abandoned the structure of a recognizable plot line.

Divorcing

by Susan Taubes, with an introduction by David Rieff

Tim Flannery

Why Did They Vanish?

Recent advancements in archaeology and genetics have granted us previously unimaginable insights into Neanderthal life.

Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art

by Rebecca Wragg Sykes

Jed Perl

See More, Think More

The art historian Leo Steinberg tried in his writings to reconcile a passion that was inarguably subjective with a desire for something like objectivity.

Michelangelo’s Sculpture: Selected Essays

by Leo Steinberg, edited by Sheila Schwartz

Michelangelo’s Painting: Selected Essays

by Leo Steinberg, edited by Sheila Schwartz

Renaissance and Baroque Art: Selected Essays

by Leo Steinberg, edited by Sheila Schwartz

After Michelangelo, Past Picasso: Leo Steinberg’s Library of Prints

an exhibition at the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas, February 7–May 9, 2021

Rachel Nolan

‘I’ve Lost Everything to the Beast’

Formed in Los Angeles by refugees fleeing US-backed violence in El Salvador, MS-13 has wreaked havoc in Central America.

MS-13: The Making of America’s Most Notorious Gang

by Steven Dudley

Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas

by Roberto Lovato

The Hollywood Kid: The Violent Life and Violent Death of an MS-13 Hitman

by Óscar Martínez and Juan José Martínez, translated from the Spanish by John B. Washington and Daniela Ugaz

State of War: MS-13 and El Salvador’s World of Violence

by William Wheeler

Iman Mersal,
Robyn Creswell

C.V.

a poem

Colin B. Bailey

Masterpieces Unmediated

The installation of the Frick Collection in Marcel Breuer’s Brutalist building is satisfying, elegant, thoughtful, and respectful at every turn.

The Sleeve Should Be Illegal and Other Reflections on Art at the Frick

edited by Michaelyn Mitchell, with a foreword by Adam Gopnik

Holbein’s Sir Thomas More

by Hilary Mantel and Xavier F. Salomon

Constable’s White Horse

by William Kentridge and Aimee Ng

Rembrandt’s Polish Rider

by Maira Kalman and Xavier F. Salomon

Vermeer’s Mistress and Maid

by James Ivory and Margaret Iacono

Gouthière’s Candelabras

by Edmund de Waal and Charlotte Vignon

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Ange Mlinko

‘And You Give Yourself Away’

Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s obsession with the eighteenth-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chronaill amounts to a search for second sight, a vision to deepen the reality of her own life.

A Ghost in the Throat

by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Martin Filler

Planning an Aryan Paradise

The Nazis had ambitious plans for reshaping Norwegian architecture and infrastructure.

Hitler’s Northern Utopia: Building the New Order in Occupied Norway

by Despina Stratigakos

Legacies of the Nazi Camps in Norway: Falstad 1941–49

by Trond Risto Nilssen and Jon Reitan

Kathe—Always Been in Norway

by Espen Søbye, translated from the Norwegian by Kerri Pierce, with an introduction by Sarah Wildman

Rumaan Alam

Return of the Nameless Man

The wit and exuberance of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer and its sequel, The Committed, entice the reader to reflect on colonialism, war, and racism.

The Sympathizer

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Committed

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

Hilton Als

Remembrance of Things Past

Catherine Opie is interested in where her subjects are on the inside at the moment she’s taking a photograph.

David S. Reynolds

When Slaves Fled to Mexico

A new book tells the forgotten story of fugitive slaves who found freedom south of the border.

South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War

by Alice L. Baumgartner

Andrew Delbanco

Kubrick’s Human Comedy

Though Stanley Kubrick was often characterized as icy, his life and filmography reveal that his heart was as large as his mind.

Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker

by David Mikics

Ursula Lindsey

Ancient Egypt for the Egyptians

Europeans made—and carried away—many of the most famous discoveries of the “Golden Age of Egyptology,” but Egyptians today are beginning to reclaim their own past.

A World Beneath the Sands: The Golden Age of Egyptology

by Toby Wilkinson

Barra and Zaman: Reading Egyptian Modernity in Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy

by Youssef Rakha

Secrets of the Saqqara Tomb

a documentary film directed by James Tovell