New Criterion articles from February 1999

New Criterion archives from February 1999

Notes & Comments: February 1999.(deteriorating standards at the University of Chicago and The New York Times)
February 1, 1999... Only the life of the mind The University of Chicago, founded in 1892 by John D. Rockefeller, long had the reputation of being one of the most serious undergraduate colleges in the country. Students who applied to Chicago knew about its...

Liberals & totalitarianism.
February 1, 1999... A liberal is, by definition, one whose aim is the furtherance of ever greater political liberty, freedom of thought, and social justice. A number of those who thought of themselves as, and were thought of as, liberals became apologists for...

Jackson Pollock & the New York School, II.(American abstract expressionist painter)
February 1, 1999... Somewhere deep in every American heart lies a rebellion against the old parenthood of Europe. --D. H. Lawrence, 1923. Until well into the 1940s, Jackson Pollock's painting remained locked in a struggle to master and overcome the...

The magic of contradictions: Willa Cather's lost lady.(American novelist)
February 1, 1999... First published in 1923, when Willa Cather was almost fifty years old, A Lost Lady occupies a special place in her rich and varied body of work. Though it never gained the wide popular appeal of My Antonia or Death Comes for the Archbishop,...

The art of the Baule people.(African sculptors)
February 1, 1999... It is comforting to remember, given the depressing results of postmodernism's refusal to make distinctions between the detritus of popular culture and anything else, that part of what made Modernist art modern--and radical--in the first place...

Seaweed weather.
February 1, 1999... For three days we've been enveloped by rain thrashing the house, flattening the sand dunes. Battleship waves are crashing in tiers of porcelain, dove-white foam that turns dirty-brown as it's strewn over mountains of...

The body's colloquy.
February 1, 1999... Inspiration to mind Small bird, flying each day to the well in search of water within your reach, one dawn, the bucket will be hauled full so you can bathe and drink your fill, unsure on what disposition the gift...

Sweet cure.
February 1, 1999... A man, with a dozen small pieces of paper compared to my two, knew I was waiting behind him at the pharmacy xerox machine, and might have said: "You have so few? Please go ahead" but feigned ignorance. I sighed,...

Coarseness & crudeness & correctness.(declining cultural standards)
February 1, 1999... During the French Revolution the aphorist Chamfort remarked that if you wanted to make sure that you were not going to encounter something more disgusting in the course of the day, you had to start off by swallowing a toad. In Britain right...

Five painters.(Painting exhibitions of work by Ben Shahn, Jacob Lawrence, Lester Johnson, Brice Marden, and Neil Blaine at New York City's The Jewish Museum, DC Moore Gallery, Peter Findlay Gallery, the Whitney Museum, and Tibor de Nagy Gallery)(Review)
February 1, 1999... The retrospective of paintings by Jackson Pollock at the Museum of Modern Art was organized as an effort to define a figure whose place in twentieth-century art has long been formidable. In its scale and presentation, the MOMA show milks both...

Meaningless enchainments.(Review)
February 1, 1999... Dance is always called the ephemeral art, and it's never more ephemeral than the moment you sit down to write about it. Critics go to the theater armed with all kinds of paper. Some have those long, skinny, nifty reporters notebooks (the beat...

History Potomac style.(journalism and politics in the 1990s)
February 1, 1999... Though a pity, it is wonderfully appropriate that the American journalistic culture is almost never looked into except by journalists, for narcissism is its salient characteristic. Indeed, for anyone without the journalist's penchant for...

The Triumph of Love.(Review)
February 1, 1999... Triumph demands a procession and in Geoffrey Hill's new collection--in reality, a single long poem in 150 sections--a throng of notables from all epochs ambles, in jostling simultaneity past our gaze.(1) Not surprisingly, poets predominate,...

Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography.(Review)
February 1, 1999... Matthew Sturgis Aubrey Beardsley: A Biography. The Overlook Press, 405 pages, $29.95 It is startling to realize that if Aubrey Beardsley had been fortunate enough to live out his biblical three score years and ten, he would have survived...

From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents.(Review)
February 1, 1999... David Gress From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents. The Free Press, 610 pages, $28 Not the least important insight of David Gress's frequently important and always useful book is that the cultural vandals who have been...

November 1916: The Red Wheel/Knot II.(Review)
February 1, 1999... Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn November 1916: The Red Wheel/Knot II. Translated by H. T. Willetts. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1010 pages, $35 Nearly sixteen years after its publication in Russian and more than a decade after it appeared in a French...

Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse.(Review)
February 1, 1999... Nirad C. Chaudhuri Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse. Oxford, 137 pages, $15.95; $8.95 paper Nirad Chaudhuri is the author of two of the greatest books to have come out of the Anglo-Indian encounter, The Autobiography of an Unknown...

Friends Talking in the Night: Sixty Years of Writing for "The New Yorker".(Review)
February 1, 1999... Philip Hamburger Friends Talking in the Night: Sixty Years of Writing for "The New Yorker." Knopf, 4-24-pages, $30 In 1939 Philip Hamburger, then twenty-five and fresh from the Columbia School of Journalism, joined the staff of The New...

Cyril Connolly: A Life.(Review)
February 1, 1999... Jeremy Lewis Cyril Connolly: A Life. Jonathan Cape/Pimlico, 653 pages, $50; $19.95 paper To the writer Cyril Connolly, his own flawed character was a limitless literary goldmine, a dark gift beyond measure. In Enemies of Promise (1938) and...