Edmund Burke Award Gala honoring Ronald S. Lauder, The Metropolitan Club, New York (May 2): A few tickets still remain for The New Criterion’s eleventh Edmund Burke Award Gala on May 2. This year we are honoring Ronald S. Lauder, the leading philanthropist, art connoisseur, and businessman. His efforts—which include founding Neue Galerie in Manhattan, championing cultural restitution from the Second World War, leading the World Jewish Congress, and campaigning for term limits and against gerrymandering in New York—have immeasurably advanced the cultural understanding of Jews and gentiles around the world and bettered our civic life for more than four decades.
Next Thursday is just around the corner. Secure your tickets now and join us on May 2 to hear Ronald Lauder speak on “Protecting America’s Promise.”If your datebook finds you elsewhere, please consider making a gift in honor of Mr. Lauder and The New Criterion.
Catullus: Selected Poems, translated by Stephen Mitchell (Yale University Press): “I hate and I love,” opens Catullus 85; “Perhaps you are wondering how this can be.” For Roman audiences of the early first century B.C., the coruscating poems of this miniaturist would indeed have come as a shock, displaying a level of precision and wit that, together with their often-scurrilous subject matter, had only been seen in Greek predecessors. Stephen Mitchell’s polished new translations preserve the original luster. —RE
“Wayne Thiebaud: Summer Days,” at Acquavella Gallery, New York (on view April 26): The advent of summer is particularly sweet when it comes with a helping of Wayne Thiebaud. The late, grand-manner painter of American Century marginalia will be on view at Acquavella Galleries starting this week with an exhibition that focuses on his warmest creations. “Wayne Thiebaud: Summer Days” gathers works from over six decades of the artist’s career ranging from his bathers, beaches, and balls to his cola, confections, and cones. Painted with a sugary impasto, this masterly work seems fresh and ready to melt in the summer sun. —JP
Turner’s Last Sketchbook (Yale Center for British Art): In 1845, J. M. W. Turner was five years from death, not that he knew it. It was the year that he filled his last known sketchbook, “eighty-eight leaves with sketches in watercolor and graphite on medium, slightly textured, machine-made wove paper, bound in red leather with a brass clasp.” Now the Yale Center for British Art has produced a facsimile of the book, replete with gauzy brushstrokes and stray marks, giving only the barest hint of the artist’s subject matter. The back cover of the book says that this “presentation of Turner’s sketchbook includes generous margins and blank pages to encourage further sketches, in the spirit of the artist,” but it would take bravery to put one’s own dabs next to those of the master. —BR
“Käthe Kollwitz,” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (through July 20): “Man is not here to be happy but to do his duty,” taught the cheery theologian Julius Rupp, grandfather to the artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945). So perhaps it is unsurprising that happiness is scarcely found in Kollwitz’s art, which displays a distinct and profound sensitivity toward suffering. Her response to sorrow transformed over her long career, evolving as a faith in revolutionary politics gave way to disillusionment and a new focus on the domestic sphere. A recently opened retrospective at moma traces this development and reveals much about the artist’s technique and biography. —LL
By the Editors:
“Lincoln Center cancels Mozart and goes woke—based on a historical lie”
James Panero, New York Post
Podcasts:
“Music for a While #88: Shout it out”
Jay Nordlinger, The New Criterion’s music critic, talks music—but, more important, plays music.
From the Archives:
“Brave new Huxley,” by Ellie Thermansen (March 2008). On Aldous Huxley’s letters.
