Richard Siken can add yet another trophy to his mantelpiece. It was announced last week that his book Crush, winner of the 2004 Yale Younger Poets prize and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry, has been included among the Spring 2006 Book Sense Picks Poetry Top
William Wegman: Funney/Strange, the first retrospective of Wegman’s work to appear in over fifteen years, opened last week at the Brooklyn Museum. Best known and beloved for signature photographs of his troupe of weimeraners, Wegman is also an immensely important figure in the contemporary art world. The exhibition reveals the
“This book is about manliness,” begins the preface of a provocative new book by Harvey C. Mansfield, William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Government at Harvard University. What is that? It’s best to start from examples we know: our sports heroes, too many to name; Margaret Thatcher, the British prime
Goya’s Last Works, the first exhibition in the United States to focus exclusively on the final phase of Goya’s career, opened last week at the Frick Collection in New York. According to the review of the exhibition which appeared in the New York Times, The compact Frick show is
(From Chapter 2 of America at the Crossroads by Francis Fukuyama) In the period leading up to and following the Iraq war, an enormous amount of ink was spilled on the subject of neoconservatives and their alleged capture of the Bush administration. The story is endlessly fascinating because it appears
The Art of Frederick Sommer, winner of the 2005 Golden Light Award, Book of the Year, continues to receive accolades and enthusiastic reviews in publications across the country. American Photo (Jan/Feb 2006) includes the book among the “Best Photo Books of the Year,” and says, “This hefty retrospective of Sommer’s
Thomas Eakins was misunderstood in life, his brilliant work earned little acclaim, and hidden demons tortured and drove him. Yet the portraits he painted more than a century ago captivate us today, and he is now widely acclaimed as the finest portrait painter our nation has ever produced. This book
“The scale and drama of the largest of these works takes your breath away. This is art as theatrical spectacle.” The works so acclaimed are a series of monumental black-and-white paintings of the London cityscape by John Virtue (b. 1947), former Associate Artist of the National Gallery, London (2003-2005). These
The stunning retrospective of the works of Jacob Van Ruisdael and the accompanying catalog by Seymour Slive, Jacob Van Ruisdael: Master of Landscape, receive a substantial review in the most recent edition of The New York Review of Books. What Jacob van Ruisdael’s standing was in his own time is
Called “the first great woman in history,” Hatshepsut reigned for two decades during Egypt’s early New Kingdom in the fifteenth century BCE. First acting as regent for her young nephew Thutmose III, in 1473 BCE she assumed the title Pharaoh and exercised the full powers of the throne as senior