This week: Dostoevsky, Andrei Rublev, American Cubism, Hammershøi & more from the world of culture.
The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Michael R. Katz (Liveright): In my time at Middlebury, I had the good fortune to sit in on a lecture by Professor Michael R. Katz on some key passages in Tolstoy’s War & Peace. It was a brilliant exposition, combining scholarly acumen with a deep literary sensibility. Katz is the translator of more than fifteen novels from Russia’s golden age, by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Herzen, and others. His latest effort, a new version of The Brothers Karamazov, is every bit as smart as his earlier work. Attentive to both style and substance, Katz renders all of Dostoevsky’s edges in sharp relief. —RE
Andrey Rublev: The Artist and His World, by Robin Milner-Gulland (Reaktion): The fifteenth-century monk and iconographer Andrei Rublev’s handful of surviving paintings are arguably the most important items in Russia’s artistic patrimony. Yet only the meagerest scraps of information—copied from a lost grave marker, a burnt manuscript, and the like—have come down to us about their creator. The British Slavist Robin Milner-Gulland has produced the first English monograph on Rublev, admirably sifting through those scraps, placing the artist’s work in the context of medieval Russia, and ruminating on Rublev’s outsized importance. That importance has extended to worshippers of all denominations and generations of Russian artists, most notably Andrei Tarkovsky, who brought Rublev to life on the screen as a metaphor for artistic struggle against Soviet oppression. The recent tug-of-war between art conservators and the Russian Church over The Trinity (ca. 1425–27), Rublev’s magnum opus, casts the painter’s timeless expressions of faith once more in the temporal shadow of politics. —IS
Max Weber & American Cubism, by William Agee & Pamela Koob (Rizzoli Electa): The typical story about American art is that it was without form, and void; and then Jackson Pollock said, let there be Abstract Expressionism: and there was Abstract Expressionism. The notion that the American continent failed to produce anything but the provincial or derivative until the post-war years has long pervaded art history’s study. But as a new collection of essays by William Agee and Pamela Koob argues, America’s denigration as the little-brother continent goes too far. Beginning just after the turn of the century, the authors locate in their survey of Max Weber and several American cubists a unique and vital tradition that can stand on its own. Dozens of rich plates—many reproducing works found only in private collections—fill out the text. —LL
Hammershøi: Painter of Northern Light, by Jean-Loup Champion, Frank Claustrat, Pierre Curie & Marianne Saabye (Rizzoli Electa): Reviewing a 1998 Guggenheim show of the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916), Mario Naves contended that “Hammershøi could best be described as a master of reticence.” This quietude is what gives Hammershøi’s interior scenes their power, as will be abundantly clear to readers of Hammershøi: Painter of Northern Light, a catalogue produced to accompany a 2019 show at Paris’s Musée Jacquemart-André and now translated into English. This is art that does not shout, but whispers. —BR
From the Archives:
“Pantagruelism for our time? Rabelais reconsidered,” by D. S. Carne-Ross (May 1992). On genius writing.
Dispatch:
“The French connection,” by David Platzer. On “Medieval Treasures from the Victoria & Albert Museum: When the English spoke French” at the Hôtel de la Marine.
“Antony and Cleopatra visit Chicago,” by George Loomis. On Johann Adolf Hasse’s Marc’Antonio e Cleopatra at Haymarket Opera Company in Chicago.
