This week: road trips, Isamu Noguchi, Mediterranean islands, Brahms’s Requiem & more.
American Journey: On the Road with Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and John Burroughs, by Wes Davis (W. W. Norton): As spring wanes and summer approaches, many of us will begin to plan our annual automobile adventure. Uniquely American, the road trip was in part pioneered and popularized by the automobile titan Henry Ford, the inventor Thomas Edison, and the naturalist John Burroughs. This motley crew of Gilded Age greats traveled together along the East Coast and through the Appalachian South in a series of journeys from 1913 to 1918, when roads were dirt and lodgings were sparse. Wes Davis recounts this group’s tales from the road in his new book, American Journey: On the Road with Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and John Burroughs, published by W. W. Norton. The story begins as do many road trips today: with a motivation to connect with nature. Fueled by a common appreciation for Transcendentalism, Burroughs and Ford made Emerson’s New England home the destination of their 1913 journey. —JW
Noguchi and Greece, Greece and Noguchi, edited by Ananda Pellerin (Atelier Éditions/D.A.P.): The Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi went West to East and back again. Noguchi and Greece, Greece and Noguchi, a new publication from Objects of Common Interest, a collaboration between the architects Eleni Petaloti and Leonidas Trampoukis, looks at the artist’s lifelong relationship with Greece. Synthesizing a variety of influences, Noguchi drew on Greek myth, which he first learned from his mother while growing up in Japan. Through his career he also traveled widely in Greece, sourcing his favorite Pentelic marble on trips back to New York from the East. Edited by Ananda Pellerin, in collaboration with New York’s Noguchi Museum, this slipcased two-volume set collects letters, essays, and travel photographs in an impressionistic presentation that seems only appropriate for this hybrid artist. —JP
The Met Orchestra & Chorus perform Brahms’s Requiem at Carnegie Hall (June 15): It would be easy to misread the title of Brahms’s choral masterpiece, Ein deutsches Requiem (“A German Requiem”), in terms of both nationalism and Christianity. In truth, it has no relation to the former (“German” merely distinguishing it from a Latin requiem) and a complicated relation to the latter. Brahms once said he would have been happy to call it a “Human Requiem,” in fact, and throughout its seven movements, each a setting of text from the Bible, Brahms arranges the scripture to frame a humanistic narrative of comfort, reassurance, and wonder at the transience of earthly life—the conspicuous absence of integral parts of the Roman liturgy such as the “Dies Irae” (Day of Wrath) says much about Brahms’s editorship. Hear it this Thursday evening at Carnegie Hall under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Metropolitan Opera Chorus and Orchestra, featuring the soprano Lisette Oropesa and the baritone Quinn Kelsey. —IS
Islanders: The Making of the Mediterranean, edited by Anastasia Christophilopolou (Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, in association with Paul Holberton Publishing): Those who missed “Islanders: The Making of the Mediterranean,” which closed at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum earlier this month, can still find themselves on island time with the exhibition’s attractive catalogue, brought out by Paul Holberton Publishing. This “voyage across millennia, to explore ancient Sardinia, Cyprus and Crete,” brings us face to face with objects that remain from some of the earliest stirrings of Western civilization, from bone necklaces to marble figurines, and much more besides. —BR
Podcasts:
“Roger Kimball introduces the June issue.” A new podcast from the Editor & Publisher of The New Criterion.
From the Archives:
“We’ll always have Paris,” by Renee Winegarten (March 1999). A review of A Corner in the Marais: Memoir of a Paris Neighborhood, by Alex Karmel.
Dispatch:
“The railroad muse,” by David Platzer. On “Sarah Bernhardt: The Woman Who Created the Star” at the Petit Palais, Paris.