Recent links of note:
“Van Gogh’s spectacular output: 60 paintings in six weeks, but he could not sell them”
Martin Bailey, The Art Newspaper
Next week, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam will open “Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise: His Final Months,” a new exhibition on the vast amount of art produced by the painter during the final chapter of his life. In May 1890, Van Gogh moved to the small Parisian suburb of Auvers-sur-Oise to be closer to his new doctor, Paul Gachet, recommended to him by his brother, Theo, who also lived nearby. Theo and his wife, Jo, had named their newborn Vincent earlier that year; a June 1890 sketch of the baby by the artist will be on view. Having left the asylum at Saint-Rémy where he had lived for a year, the artist embarked on a period of prolific creation in his new surroundings, producing a total of seventy-four paintings. Forty-eight of them will be on view in the exhibition, a big achievement for the curators, writes Martin Bailey for The Art Newspaper. The exhibition is a rare opportunity to view little-known paintings within the proper context of the other art Van Gogh made while in Auvers. Completing around two paintings per day, Van Gogh depicted gardens, cottages, portraits of Gachet, and landscapes of rolling, yellow hills of wheat, based on his “memories of the North.” This fall, the exhibition will move to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where it will remain until February 2024.
“The sacred Coronation”
William Gulliford, The Critic
Tomorrow morning, the Archbishop of Canterbury will crown the King of the United Kingdom in a ceremony that dates back to the year 1066. A number of landmarks will be crossed by the event: it will be the first British coronation of the twenty-first century, the fortieth coronation to be held in Westminster Abbey, and the first crowning of a monarch named “Charles” in 363 years. In a feature for the May issue of The Critic, William Gulliford writes, the coronation will define the monarchy’s symbolic place within British culture for the twenty-first century. To many around the world, the idea of a monarch appears outdated. A common complaint leveled against the event itself questions the religiosity of the event as unfit for the country’s broadly secular society. In the seventy years since the last coronation, the public has forgotten that, at its core, the coronation is a religious service, writes Gulliford. Indeed, Charles will be invested not only as the king of the United Kingdom, but also as the head of the Church of England. All major U.S. news outlets will be providing coverage for the event on Saturday, which begins promptly at 6 a.m. Eastern Time.
“Justice Samuel Alito: ‘This Made Us Targets of Assassination’”
James Taranto and David B. Rivkin Jr., The Wall Street Journal
The Supreme Court, once seen as the nation’s most trustworthy institution, is under a vicious siege by ideologues seeking to derail the Court’s legitimacy and upend the Constitution. In a recent interview with James Taranto and David B. Rivkin Jr. of The Wall Street Journal, Justice Samuel Alito defended the Court against the recent attempts to intimidate it. The May 2, 2022 leak of his draft of the Dobbs decision, Alito laments, has made him and his cohort of justices the “targets of assassination”—indeed, immediately after the leak, a crazed, armed individual was arrested outside Justice Kavanugh’s home. The sordid affair has served to derail the working relationships of those on the bench: the leak “created an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. . . . It was damaging,” as Alito described. The Left’s pitiful response to the Court’s rulings in recent years has put our system of democracy as we know it in peril, and the Court, which relies on a form of judicial mystique for credibility, is ill-equipped to fight it alone.