Zeitschrift | Ausgabe
The New York Review of Books 60 (2023), 3
“Edward Hopper’s New York,” the sumptuous exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, gives us one more chance to retire—at least for a decent interval—those once glamorous words that have come to dominate, and increasingly suffocate, our experience of Hopper’s paintings: alienation, loneliness, voyeurism, the uncanny. Such neon abstractions give us the illusion that we have dispelled the puzzlement we often feel in front of Hopper’s strange compositions. What they actually do is give us license to stop looking at the pictures, causing us to miss crucial aspects of his achievement, such as his pervasive and peculiar sense of humor. A painter who features an ad for Ex-Lax in a moody nocturne of a corner drugstore isn’t just concerned with alienation.
CONTENT
Christopher Benfey
Buildings Come to Life
In Edward Hopper’s paintings of New York, human figures often seem outgrowths of their architectural surroundings.
Edward Hopper’s New York
an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, October 19, 2022–March 5, 2023
Vanessa Barbara
Brazil at the Crossroads
Lula’s election comes as a relief to many Brazilians, but in this historically violent and unequal country, a void in the democratic field endures.
Frances Wilson
Very Free and Indirect
The intensity of experience that Katherine Mansfield sought in her short life is matched by the formal obliqueness she discovered in her stories.
All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything
by Claire Harman
Matthew AucoinPerformance as Immolation
The conductor Carlos Kleiber’s aesthetic was founded on the interplay between voluptuous refinement and an impulse to violence.
Corresponding with Carlos: A Biography of Carlos Kleiber
by Charles Barber
Carlos Kleiber: Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon
12 CDs and 1 Blu-ray disc (2018)
Alan Felsenthal
Self-Portrait
a poem
Hermione Lee
The Soft-Power Brokers
A new history focusing on the English Rothschilds tells how the women were centrally involved in business, politics, social welfare, and culture—all while caught between the advantages of wealth and the burdens of anti-Semitism and sexism.
The Women of Rothschild: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Famous Dynasty
by Natalie Livingstone
Farnoosh Fathi
from ‘Twenty Collars’
a poem
Andrew Butterfield
A ‘Magic Mirror’ of Venice
The first-ever exhibition outside Italy of the works of Vittore Carpaccio is a bracing introduction to the artist who best captured the imaginative grandeur and the ceremonial refinement of early-sixteenth-century Venice.
Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice
an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., November 20, 2022–February 12, 2023; and the Palazzo Ducale, Venice, March 18–June 18, 2023
Larry Rohter‘Bad for Business’
In Harsh Times, Mario Vargas Llosa grieves for the path Guatemala might have taken had the United States and the United Fruit Company not intervened in 1954 to overthrow the reformist president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán.
Harsh Times
by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West
Michael Hofmann
Found Poem
a poem
Tim FlanneryMonotreme Dreams
Australia’s egg-laying monotremes and pouch-carrying marsupials may seem to be outliers, but they’re as well suited to their environment as any other mammal.
Platypus Matters: The Extraordinary Story of Australian Mammals
by Jack Ashby
Koala: A Natural History and an Uncertain Future
by Danielle Clode
Ursula LindseyRape and Resistance in Egypt
A new book recounts the heroics of activists who organized to protect women from sexual violence during the Egyptian revolution and to assert their right to participate in the country’s political life.
Radius: A Story of Feminist Revolution
by Yasmin El-Rifae
Marina Warner Nothing More Wondrous A recent comparative study of medieval Christian and Islamic culture suggests that marvels offer common ground; wonder is a shared delight, a shared motive.
Medieval Marvels and Fictions in the Latin West and Islamic World
by Michelle Karnes
T.H. Breen Commanders and Courtiers The Howe family achieved an influential position of power in late-eighteenth-century Britain, propelled by the shrewd social intelligence of the Howe women.
The Howe Dynasty: The Untold Story of a Military Family and the Women Behind Britain’s Wars for America
by Julie Flavell
Timothy Garton Ash Ukraine in Our Future Ukraine faces extraordinary challenges, but it also presents a challenge for Europe—and a great opportunity.
Unmaking Imperial Russia: Mykhailo Hrushevsky and the Writing of Ukrainian History
by Serhii Plokhy
Der Krieg gegen die Ukraine: Hintergründe, Ereignisse, Folgen [The War Against Ukraine: Background, Events, Consequences]
by Gwendolyn Sasse
The Zelensky Effect
by Olga Onuch and Henry E. Hale
The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine’s Past and Present
by Serhii Plokhy
Letters