May 12, 2022 Issue

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Painting Herself

From the beginning, female self-portraitists have chosen to show themselves at work, as if to demonstrate that they could handle a brush as well as male artists.

The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution, and Resilience: Five Hundred Years of Women’s Self Portraits

by Jennifer Higgie

The Self-Portrait

by Natalie Rudd

Anahid Nersessian

Catastrophic Desires

The intention behind Forough Farrokhzad’s poetry, particularly her erotic poetry, was not just to express herself but to match the complexities of twentieth-century life.

Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season: Selected Poems

by Forough Farrokhzad, translated from the Persian by Elizabeth T. Gray Jr.

Julian Barnes

What Are You Looking At?

No fin-de-siècle artist was more fascinated by the artistic relevance of gawkers on the streets of Paris than Félix Vallotton.

Gawkers: Art and Audience in Late Nineteenth-Century France

by Bridget Alsdorf

Martin Filler

Burkina Faso’s Master Builder

Africa’s first Pritzker Prize winner, Francis Kéré, has a small yet remarkably original and cohesive body of work and a commitment to fostering social and democratic values through architecture.

Momentum of Light

by Iwan Baan and Francis Kéré

Caroline Fraser

‘Anxious for a Mayflower’

In A Nation of Descendants, Francesca Morgan traces the American use and abuse of genealogy from the Daughters of the American Revolution to Roots.

A Nation of Descendants: Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in US History

by Francesca Morgan

Carolina A. Miranda

Tomorrow Is Today

It is impossible to write about Prospect.5, New Orleans’s citywide art triennial, without considering the reason for its existence: Katrina.

Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow

an exhibition in various locations in New Orleans, October 23, 2021–January 23, 2022

Adam Hochschild

Who’s to Blame?

Three new books argue that disappearing jobs and widening inequality helped make possible Trump’s politics of resentment.

Wildland: The Making of America’s Fury

by Evan Osnos

Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump

by Spencer Ackerman

American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears

by Farah Stockman

David Salle

Going on Her Nerve

The idiosyncratic English artist Rose Wylie makes the process of importing things in the world to the realm of the painted feel exhilarating and new.

Gary Saul Morson

Detecting the same incompetence and self-satisfaction among the liberals of the Provisional Government in 1917 and the reformers of the post-Soviet era in the 1990s, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn feared another descent into authoritarian rule.

March 1917: The Red Wheel/Node III (8 March–31 March): Book 3

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz

Between Two Millstones: Book 2, Exile in America, 1978–1994

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated from the Russian by Clare Kitson and Melanie Moore, and with a foreword by Daniel J. Mahoney

Elisa Gabbert

In Nature

a poem

Ingrid D. Rowland

The Spell of Marble

Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s immense artistic authority was based on his theatrical skill with the chisel.

Bernini and His World: Sculpture and Sculptors in Early Modern Rome

by Livio Pestilli

Christopher Benfey

The Hum of Humanity

The autobiographical turn in Stanley Cavell’s later work illuminates his extraordinarily varied philosophical interests.

Here and There: Sites of Philosophy

by Stanley Cavell, edited by Nancy Bauer, Alice Crary, and Sandra Laugier

Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory

by Stanley Cavell

Rowan Ricardo Phillips

The God of Stories

a poem

Regina Marler

The Bucolic Heroic

Catherine Hewitt’s Art Is a Tyrant is a full depiction of the nineteenth-century painter Rosa Bonheur’s unconventional life.

Art Is a Tyrant: The Unconventional Life of Rosa Bonheur

by Catherine Hewitt

James McAuley,
Madeleine Schwartz

Macron on the Precipice

French President Emmanuel Macron is favored to win reelection, but his mixed record makes it a close race. If he loses to Marine Le Pen, France’s place in Europe may be radically altered.

Deborah Landau

Skeleton

a poem

Brian Seibert

Never the Same Step Twice

Where the previous generation of dancers arranged their steps into tidy, regular phrases, John Bubbles enjambed over the bar lines, multiplying, twisting, tilting, turning.

Sportin’ Life: John W. Bubbles, an American Classic

by Brian Harker

James Oakes

Was Emancipation Constitutional?

In The Broken Constitution, Noah Feldman argues that the Confederate states had a constitutional right to secede and that Lincoln violated the Constitution in forcing them back into the Union and freeing the slaves.

The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America

by Noah Feldman

Colin B. Bailey

A Master at Work

The Met’s exhibition of Jacques Louis David’s drawings demonstrates the ways he developed and refined the ideas expressed in his large paintings of classical history and contemporary events.

Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman

an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, February 17–May 15, 2022