English poetry is rife with metaphors concerning fire, if for the chief reason that language makes fire safe while adding dimension to its fascination. It is redundant to remind ourselves that the ancients considered fire one of four crucial elements but also useful. Fire is the great destroyer but also a […]
Sneak a peek at the palette of an artist. It will be far more interesting, and revealing, than peering inside their medicine cabinet at a party. In The Artist’s Palette, Alexandra Loske, a British-German art historian, demonstrates the game, describing fifty idiosyncratic selections and arrangements of colors, then showing us the art that […]
When I edited a city magazine, a smartass friend suggested a department called Why So Ugly? There would be no shortage of examples from the built environment. Big boxes, glass towers, strip malls—it is as though a child drew these shapes, then crafted them from whatever cheap stuff was close at hand and […]
Truckloads of paintings and artworks attempt to depict or advocate political and historical events and eras. The Romans constructed arches to commemorate military victories for the foundation and building of empire. Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) rings a collective bell inside our national head every time we see it. […]
Documentaries on subjects we have known in youth offer nostalgia and the promise of something we did not know back then. Jim Henson: Idea Man (streaming on Disney+) provides both—a celebration of the Muppets and details about their creator that many fans may not have known. The film is directed by Ron […]
If you are old enough to have seen Pulp Fiction in a theater when it came out, brace yourself: this is the film’s 30th anniversary. We are as removed from its 1994 release as we were in 1994 to the 1964 release of A Hard Day’s Night, starring four young guys from […]
The recent brouhaha—an insufficiently flippant term—over the criminal case recently dismissed by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, accusing three men of stealing handwritten pages of lyrics by the Eagles has it all. Ever since it was filed in 2022 this case has been shoved into the headlines by boring egos and sloppy […]
Except for childhood asthma no doubt exacerbated by smoking as an adult and a series of rocky marriages, Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) led a mostly idyllic life. The child of a wealthy bank president, he grew up on California’s sunny Pacific Coast. He traveled Europe as a teen, then attended a string of Ivy League […]
Of all the works currently on display at the Saint Louis Art Museum we can be surest that Anselm Kiefer’s Burning Rods will never be printed for postcards in the museum’s gift shops. A massive painting that stands about 11 feet high and stretches just beyond 18 feet wide, this dark […]
Writing is a vector to approximate The Mystery. If a writer, poet, filmmaker, or other artist has the luck to work over time, we call their multiple vectors a body of work, and it becomes the work of scholars and YouTubers to say what it all meant and why it is […]
