The New Republic

It is a truth universally acknowledged that as a nation's politics grow more regressive, its arts tend to become more rambunctious. This is especially true in the theater. At the same time that the newly re-elected Bush administration is eliminating all traces of opposition from its Cabinet and its agencies, the volume of dissent is being turned up again on the American stage. Let us savor this precious privilege. An administration so eager for conformity in its inner circles will eventually try to impose it on the culture and the citizenry at large. READ MORE >>

Èdouard Vuillard: Post-Impressionist Master (National Gallery of Art; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) READ MORE >>

Gershom Scholem: A Life in Letters, 1914-1982 Edited and translated by Anthony David Skinner (Harvard University Press, 512 pp., $35) Click here to purchase the book. I. I. READ MORE >>

Reviewing About Schmidt in January, I mentioned that I had not read the Louis Begley novel from which the screenplay was tenuously derived. Several people have written to say that, though they liked the film and they had read Begley's approval of it, I ought to read the book. I'm thinking it over. READ MORE >>

"Matisse Picasso," the exhibition that has now arrived at the Museum of Modern Art after packing in the crowds at Tate Modern in London and the Grand Palais in Paris, begins as a sort of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for culture vultures, a study in male bonding in the artistic stratosphere that features the somewhat older, more formal Matisse and the younger, unabashedly bohemian Picasso. READ MORE >>

"Thomas Eakins: American Realist," at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is a blandly celebratory event. This artist, whose dark, vehement temperament and tough-minded verisimilitude made him an unsettling figure in his time, and who has continued to provoke contradictory reactions up till our own day, is given an evened-out presentation, as if he were a rather dull nineteenth-century worthy. READ MORE >>

Donald Judd had his share of staunch supporters. But you are likely to meet with skeptical responses if you announce that you are captivated by his magnum opus, a composition consisting of one hundred aluminum boxes that is the linchpin of the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Chinati is where the sculptor made a permanent home for the frequently large-scale work that interested him and some of the contemporary artists whom he admired. It has an eccentric, off-the-beaten-track kind of grandeur that rubs some people the wrong way. The austere forms that Judd (who died in 1994) arranged in READ MORE >>

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One of the points brought out by the exhibition of “Abstract Painting in America” held at the Whitney Museum last spring was the fact that between 1915 and 1935 a surprising number of American painters had turned to Europe for direction. A few of them came to understand the trends that painting was taking with their European contemporaries during that time quite thoroughly— in fact, were able to produce work along the same lines that might have passed without adverse comment in any group showing of avant-garde European work of its period. READ MORE >>