New Criterion articles from December 2001

New Criterion archives from December 2001

Notes & comments: December 2001.
December 1, 2001... The New Criterion on art Although The New Criterion has never before published a special art section, there is a sense in which we like to think that every issue has contained one. From our first number, in September 1982, we have...

A malign legacy. (The survival of culture: IV).
December 1, 2001... Wherever on this planet ideals of personal freedom and dignity apply, there you will find the cultural inheritance of England. --Karel Capek Most of the world for most of the time has lived under tyranny. Choice does not come into the...

The man who created MOMA.
December 1, 2001... A work of art is an infinitely complex focus of human experience. The mystery of its creation, its history, and the rise and fall of its esthetic, documentary, sentimental, and commercial values, the endless variety of its relationships to the...

Wrong turns.
December 1, 2001... Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of painting.... It was a sort of nihilism to which I am still very sympathetic. --Marcel Duchamp, 1946 INANE adj. Lacking sense or substance; empty. --The American Heritage...

The realism of Thomas Eakins.(Critical Essay)
December 1, 2001... I would have them taught facts and things, rather than words and signs. -- Stephen Girard, 1831. My honors are misunderstanding, persecution & neglect, enhanced because unsought. --Thomas Eakins, 1894 At first blush, the...

Sculpture in the void: Giacometti at MOMA.
December 1, 2001... These days, Alberto Giacometti is seen as the paradigm of his generation of Europeans--born in 1901, he died in 1966. He is regarded as the artist whose work best sums up the mood of the ravaged, postwar world and the tense decades of the...

Developing in reverse: Signac at the Metropolitan.
December 1, 2001... In his happiest moments [Signac] succeeded in giving the modern picture--that makeshift with which we beautify our dwellings--a brilliant and even ideal form, making it a beautiful spot on the wall, that lends itself readily to a frame, and...

Bruegel the Elder.
December 1, 2001... The exhibition of Bruegel the Elder's drawings and the engraved prints derived from them at the Metropolitan Museum of Art offers a true feast for both connoisseurs and iconographers. (1) The exhibit is of special importance to connoisseurs, as...

The various Alex Katz.
December 1, 2001... The painter Alex Katz is a curious figure in the annals of postwar American art. Throughout his fifty-year career, he's been perpetually situated to the side of the art world's mainstream, yet never so far to the side that he isn't in the thick...

Poem ending with a variation on a line by Charles Wright. (Poems).(Poem)
December 1, 2001... Poem ending with a variation on a line by Charles Wright Winter, and sleeves of grey bone hang limp in the wind. The tortured sun has cut its own throat. This late in this late century nothing is new or news. We nod...

Courtyard looking toward Artemis from the west cloister. (Poems).(Poem)
December 1, 2001... Courtyard looking toward Artemis from the west cloister --Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Unarmed Artemis, your mouth opened in awe or slight surprise, you stand surveying the scene in this most modern...

Remembering Grand Isle. (Poems).(Poem)
December 1, 2001... Remembering Grand Isle They brought me here before my memory. And yet each time I see where once I came, My recollection is peremptory. Past perfect and the present are the same. I see and I have seen the myrtles...

Gallery chronicle. (Art).
December 1, 2001... One could say that John Koch (1909-1978) painted as if modernism--Manet included --simply never occurred, but such a statement fails to account for the vehemence of his rejection of most twentieth-century art and the pointedness of his...

Exhibition note. (Art).(landscape photography, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2001... "Along the Nile: Early Photographs of Egypt" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. September 11-December 30, 2001 Unlike the Description de L'Egypte--the engraved and textual squawk-box published between 1809 and 1828--the early...

"Dallas" auf Deutsch. (Music).(life of composer Richard Wagner)
December 1, 2001... If the tenor of the vast abundance of books about the works of Richard Wagner is indicative of anything, it is that it is impossible to approach the man and his work with a light heart. His operas impose on any listener a profound seriousness...

Came the farce of worryism. (The media).(media coverage)
December 1, 2001... "You know things really are getting back to normal when cable news networks break into Osama bin Laden coverage to bring viewers a good old-fashioned car chase" wrote Lisa de Moraes in The Washington Post of November 8. Actually, it was a truck...

All over the map. (Verse chronicle).(religious poetry criticism)(Critical Essay)
December 1, 2001... Joseph Brodsky tried to write a poem every Christmas, concentrating the vanishing energies of the year on a day when even unbelievers may be forgiven a twinge of belief--that is what myths are for. Nativity Poems collects the nineteen poems he...

W. G. Sebald: the past is another country. (Books).(Critical Essay)
December 1, 2001... How strange it is, to be standing leaning against the current of time. --W. G. Sebald, Vertigo Travel, Kierkegaard claimed, is the best way to avoid despair. But for the German writer W. G. Sebald, it leads, as often as not, from one...

Marcel Proust: The Complete Short Stories. (Books: proust before proust).
December 1, 2001... Joachim Neugroschel, translator Marcel Proust: The Complete Short Stories. Cooper Square Press, 201 pages, $25.95 When, in 1896, Marcel Proust published his first book, he was twenty-five. It was a disparate collection of tales, prose...

War Diaries, 1939-1945. (Books: prosecuting a war).
December 1, 2001... Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke War Diaries, 1939-1945. University of California Press, 763 pages, $40 In 1980, in his valedictory lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History, Hugh Trevor-Roper discussed the events of 1940, when the world...

Latin: Or the Empire of a Sign. (Books: defensor linguae).
December 1, 2001... Francoise Waquet Latin: Or the Empire of a Sign. Verso, 346 pages, $30 At the Jesuit high school in Manhattan that I attended, my freshman year, 1985, was the first in which Latin was no longer the language required for the first two...

Chelsea: galleries & garages. (Notebook).
December 1, 2001... There is a pathetic story of a man from Connecticut who, a few years ago, took his Porsche to be repaired in the Chelsea district of Manhattan, only to find that an art gallery--and a big one, too--had usurped the space where his garage had...

Translating Octavio Paz. (Letters).
December 1, 2001... To the Editors: Stephen Schwartz's review of my translation of Octavio Paz's Itinerary ("Liberated by America;' February 2000 has only recently been drawn to my attention. His comments naturally reflect his taste, his literary ear, and his...

Correction.
December 1, 2001... In William Jay Smith's review of Hannah Green's Little Saint ("Golden Spark, little saint" September 2000), the novelist and poet Richard Elman was mistakenly referred to as Richard Ellmann. It was the editors' mistake. We regret the error.