Humanities

Beauty & freedom, guise & dolls: Warhol & Mapplethorpe

The exciting exhibition Warhol & Mapplethorpe: Guise & Dolls opened this weekend at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford. Focusing on New York in the 1970s and early 80s, the exhibition explores the vibrant and tumultuous era of change through the work of Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe, both of

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Sneak peek: On becoming an art collector, from an interview with Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner

For more than 30 years, Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner have devoted themselves to contemporary art, and through their passion and acumen have assembled an extraordinary collection. This fall, the Whitney Museum of American Art is publishing a handsome, illustrated volume that is the first to document the collection

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Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape in Context

On Saturday, October 17th, the legendary Old Vic Theatre of London opened their first preview for Eugene O’Neill’s 1922 tour de force of American theater The Hairy Ape, directed by Richard Jones and starring Bertie Carvel as O’Neill’s antihero Yank Smith. The Old Vic asked Yale University Press biographer Robert

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Can Xue and the Difficulties of Love

John Donatich—  “Can modern man, in today’s society, still fall in love?” This seems to me the central question in the work of Can Xue.  Granted, this might come as a surprise—that a writer who is so rigorously experimental and unapologetically demanding is obsessed with such a personal concern. But

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In Bed with the Avant-garde: The Peggy Guggenheim Story / Interview with Francine Prose by David Ebony

David Ebony— An eccentric heiress with an all-consuming passion for avant-garde art and artists, Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) just happened to change the course of 20th-century art during her tumultuous lifetime. She befriended, sometimes bedded, and often financially supported some of the most important artists and writers of her day. She

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Art + Science: The Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot

This piece at the intersection of Art + Science is a post written by a former Yale University Press intern after she visited the 2012 exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center, The Islands of Benoît Mandelbrot: Fractals, Chaos, and the Materiality of Thinking.  The book that accompanied the exhibition shares its title,

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Bringing Modern Architecture to Oxford

Elain Harwood— It’s very easy to take England’s universities for granted, to think that just because Oxford and Cambridge are ancient the others must be too. In fact, most of the noble red-brick institutions in our provincial cities were developed after 1900, and their neo-Elizabethan towers owe more to those

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Coming to America: Politics and the Pope

The eyes of the world, or at any rate its cameras, have been focused on the first pope of the Americas on his first visit to the United States, hot-foot from a tumultuous welcome in communist Cuba. The Argentinian pope’s key role in the thawing of half a century of

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Balmoral Castle, Tourism, and Cultural Icons

Margot Maley– A few weeks ago, Queen Elizabeth began her summer holiday at Balmoral, the royal family’s Scottish estate. Located in the northeast of Scotland about an hour west of Aberdeen, Balmoral has been a privately-owned vacation residence for the royal family since Prince Albert purchased the property for Queen

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The Absurdity of Existence: Franz Kafka and Albert Camus

Absurdist literature is notoriously difficult to read. Take, for example, Kafka’s short story, “The Metamorphosis,” in which the main character turns into a giant cockroach. Critics have produced countless different theories to explain the significance of Gregor Samsa’s transformation—and this diversity of interpretive meanings, John Sutherland proposes in A Little

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