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 8:08 AM, May 11, 2012 • By LIAM JULIAN“Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape” is at the National Gallery of Art through August 12. The conceit of the exhibit is that Miró was no sequestered surrealist but an artist readily engaged with politics and society—“an artist of his times,” as a wall caption puts it. Visitors reading that caption might well wonder how Miró could be anything but of his “times,” for they surely were interesting ones.
As a young man he moved in 1920 from his home in Catalonia to a Paris staggering in the fumes of World War I. The Spanish Civil War forced him to stay away from Spain, and World War II forced him to return to it; he lived for decades under Franco’s rule. Were Miró’s art unaffected by the seismic world events he experienced so directly, it would have been astonishing.
Indeed, he acknowledged as much. In 1962 an interviewer posited that some of Miró’s paintings have “a kind of brutality and violence” to them, to which the artist responded that those paintings “mark the beginning of the cruel and difficult years the world lived through.” Miró called them his “savage paintings”—they were formed, he said, from his feelings about fleeing his country’s civil war.
So yes: There is absolutely political comment in the art on display in “The Ladder of Escape.” On the whole, though, there is relatively little of it, and probably not enough on which to base an exhibition (not that this or any showing of Miró’s work requires a “base”). Perhaps Miró was just temperamentally ill-suited for canvas pamphleteering. Despite his expressed desire to “assassinate painting,” he was never a doctrinaire surrealist, no pure revolutionary. What he really wanted, in the end, was to change painting—and that, of course, he did.
Liam Julian is managing editor of Policy Review.
1:18 PM, Apr 19, 2012 • By JAY COSTSadly, Levon Helm – the drummer for the Band – died this afternoon at age 71. A terrible day for music fans everywhere, indeed. But let’s stop to appreciate Helm's great influence on American music.
Read more... The complex prettiness of Japanese art.Oct 3, 2011, Vol. 17, No. 03 • By EVE TUSHNET
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Read more... The Barnes Foundation and the brilliant, eccentric man behind it.2:39 PM, Jul 24, 2011 • By EMILY SCHULTHEISPhilanthropy magazine features Albert Barnes on the cover of its summer issue, the latest in a growing number of newspapers and magazines to run feature stories about Barnes and his museum in Pennsylvania. James Panero, writing in Philanthropy:
Read more... What Modernism looked like at the dawn of Modern Times. May 9, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 32 • By EVE TUSHNET
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Read more... 11:36 AM, Apr 26, 2011 • By KATHERINE EASTLANDWho doesn’t love an animal logo? Allen Lane knew that, in 1935, when he published the first 10 Penguin books in London. The six pence paperbacks arrived in bookshops sporting the avian logo and no other graphics, just broad bands of color at the top and bottom. General fiction had orange bands; crime fiction, green; biography, dark blue. The uniform cover font was Gill Sans-Serif.
Read more... 10:00 AM, Apr 16, 2011 • By EMILY SCHULTHEISIn case you are feeling the pain of the money you paid to the federal government this week, here is a treat from the National Gallery of Art—free audio and video podcasts! So if finances are forcing you into yet another stay-cation this spring break, you can at least enjoy some of the best cultural programming that DC has to offer, all from the comfort and economy of your own home.
Read more... 12:20 PM, Apr 10, 2011 • By DAVID GELERNTERMakoto Fujimura is one of the best painters alive; there is no finer abstract painter at work today. He is a Christian who lives in New York and paints using the traditional Japanese Nihonga technique, and Crossway has just published an elegantly produced folio of the four gospels with Fujimura’s illuminations (The Four Holy Gospels, 168 pp., $129.99).
Read more... How and when Europe took note of American art.Mar 7, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 24 • By JAMES GARDNERModern Life
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T
Read more... In search of Meindert Hobbema.Jan 17, 2011, Vol. 16, No. 17 • By JOE QUEENAN
No painter in history is more taken for granted than Meindert Hobbema.
Read more... A Lesson in Cultural Geography from Steve Martin.5:13 PM, Dec 3, 2010 • By PHILIP TERZIAN
I record with interest and, perhaps, a measure of surprise and sorrow a brief dispatch from the frontiers of culture—in this case, the hallowed precincts of the 92nd Street Y on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Suffice it to say that the 92nd Street Y is the sort of place where Charlie Rose might talk to Anna Quindlen before an appreciative audience, or Leon Wieseltier might interview himself. Culturally speaking, this is important business.
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