![](https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/meips/ADKq_NbG4SSBHAKEuuxSfzKIUsFB6-DJmVkAm_elGWE5Dbt1Eexozas7NbGrvZovj2rmfktrVNIbeCxelatxb21XjRcOXoeTSrp0kyXByovf6OWqrUWrPSSEYtM2WP5RbDsnLcBYlTQ0FhSAaDlXCS7fQ5nhCqjo3D33kAI=s0-d-e1-ft#https://mcusercontent.com/56a6350302efcdcf51cb75af4/images/b3ab9a0b-6daa-b399-e7d9-e92b2bb094de.jpg)
![](https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/meips/ADKq_NaxK_fz9jtCB2KCOW4G_z0xXDx4WvUrFTBKXW4z1fypdckbvJfc-gWlvqD-c2D7TvXbI65xLZY2ax9xXUvVvn1jRqNOI14m2zip7ZDdTgZoTUfrcNsL60i5OOfFDV7QYB__9hj3pcG_LRPhLPjwdkR3JeV8GoCiH3w=s0-d-e1-ft#https://mcusercontent.com/56a6350302efcdcf51cb75af4/images/7b813758-0c25-8390-3f35-98e28751bae9.png)
The Awe of the Arctic: A Visual History, edited by Elizabeth Cronin (Hatje Cantz): The sixth-century saint Brendan the Navigator set sail for the Garden of Eden. Voyaging north from Ireland, his crew drifted into what we now call the Arctic. There, they made landfall and held Mass, only to discover that the land underneath them was no land at all—it was the back of a massive whale, Jasconius, from whom they barely escaped. Even in this early tale of the Arctic, written hundreds of years before the first documented expedition there, the region’s lure and danger are present. Those qualities persist into our day, as The Awe of the Arctic reminds us. This new monograph, edited by Elizabeth Cronin, assembles a suite of essays on the Arctic’s exploration and its representation across artistic mediums, from the fifteenth century through the twenty-first. The collection accompanies an exhibition of the same name at New York Public Library’s Schwarzman Building—offering the perfect place to cool down as the city heats up. —LL
Art:
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Audubon as Artist: A New Look at “The Birds of America,” by Roberta J. M. Olson (Reaktion Books): Despairing of the “stiff unmeaning profiles” in the ornithological studies of his day, a young John James Audubon took to suspending his subjects with string tied around one foot, a practice long employed by still-life painters of game trophies. There would be no such portraits in Audubon’s landmark, 435-plate Birds of America—those are all atwitter, printed life-size on James Whatman’s massive double-elephant sheets—but the nature morte exercise nicely encapsulates a central concern of the artist: to depict avian life both rigorously and organically, in pictures as beautiful to art connoisseurs as they are useful to naturalists. At a time when even naturalists are now turning against Audubon, from the art-history side comes a welcome reminder of the painter’s achievement in Roberta J. M. Olson’s Audubon as Artist, cataloguing, for instance, the debts owed by Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Edward Lear, and sundry others to America’s first great watercolorist. —RE
Art:
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“Mondrian80,” Norte Maar, New York (on view June 1): When Piet Mondrian died of pneumonia on February 1, 1944, he was interred beneath an unassuming headstone in Brooklyn’s Cypress Hills Cemetery. Eighty years on, the Cypress Hills non-profit Norte Maar has gathered the work of over thirty contemporary artists, including The New Criterion’s own Mario Naves, for an exhibition curated by Jason Andrew and Max Estenger that pays homage to the abstract painter’s creative legacy. This Saturday afternoon, the gallery is organizing a pilgrimage to the gravesite, followed by the exhibition’s opening reception. —JP
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The Mozart Requiem & Sofia Gubaidulina’s Viola Concerto, conducted by Jaap van Zweden, at the New York Philharmonic (May 28): Last week, Jay Nordlinger described Sofia Gubaidulina’s Viola Concerto, programmed through tonight at the New York Philharmonic, as having “that characteristic fear, a quality of being hunted, or possibly hunted,” of the Soviet era. There is something ominous about the piece, like a creep through a haunted house, as the anxious tones of the solo viola wander into cadenzas and monologues like lonely rooms, punctuated by an unsettling motif played by the orchestra and based on a minor third. Some consolation is to be found after intermission, when the choir Musica Sacra will join for a performance of Mozart’s Requiem and Ave verum corpus. Jaap van Zweden will conduct in one of his final dates as the music director of the Philharmonic. The violist Antoine Tamestit is the soloist in the concerto. —IS
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The Ingenious Mr Flitcroft: Palladian Architect, 1697–1769, by Gill Hedley (Lund Humphries): Alexander Pope struck a blow for taste when he mocked those who are “Proud to catch cold at a Venetian door;/ Conscious they act a true Palladian part,/ And if they starve, they starve by rules of art” in his 1731 Epistle to the Right Honourable Richard Earl of Burlington. As the poet recognized, Palladianism—which Burlington had popularized through his sponsorship of the English translation of Palladio’s Quattro Libri—could sit uneasily in England, with its decorative forms more perhaps appropriate to the Italian campagna. But whether technically appropriate or not, Palladianism enjoyed a good run in Britain before being superseded by the more syncretic approaches of Robert Adam and his contemporaries. Now sadly little known, Henry Flitcroft was a Palladian who lacked pretense, employing technical fluency and economical practices to produce works ranging from the stout little Pantheon at Stourhead to the grand east front of Wentworth Woodhouse and much else besides. The art historian Gill Hedley ably brings the forgotten Flitcroft out of the shadows in a handsomely produced monograph. —BR
Podcasts:
“Music for a While #89: Ragtime & other riches”
Jay Nordlinger, The New Criterion’s music critic, talks music—but, more important, plays music.
From the Archives:
“Calasso’s memory of Antiquity,” by Dominic Green (February 2016). On Roberto Calasso’s images of the afterlife.
Dispatch:
“Drama queen,” by Mark Dunbar. On Carson McCullers: A Life by Mary V. Dearborn.