Recent stories of note:
“The art of Japanese woodblock printing”
Laura Gascoigne, The Spectator
The ubiquity of Katsushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1831) is a testament to the lasting influence of nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock prints in the West. But, writes Laura Gascoigne in The Spectator, a new exhibition at the Watts Gallery in the United Kingdom provides a more accurate view of the genre, called ukiyo-e: it did not primarily portray landscapes but rather ever-changing contemporary urban life. In “Edo Pop: Japanese Prints 1825–1895,” visitors can see exemplars of ukiyo-e prints, including one of which Van Gogh himself owned a copy. While the prints assert—and celebrate—the transience of earthly life, their perennial popularity suggests that some things do last.
“‘At the Edge of Empire’ Review: Leaving Mao’s China”
Tunku Varadarajan, The Wall Street Journal
From our Western vantage point, it’s easy to condemn the actions of citizens living under totalitarian regimes. What is more challenging is to understand the impetus behind those actions—especially while remaining clear-eyed about their failures. Edward Wong, former Beijing bureau chief of The New York Times, walks this line in a new book about his father, an immigrant to the United States from Maoist China who was formerly a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army. In a review for The Wall Street Journal, Tunku Varadarajan notes that Wong cannot, like previous generations of writers bolstered by scarcity of information, shock his Western audience with descriptions of famine and cruelty under Mao’s regime. Instead, At the Edge of Empire is poignant in Wong’s simultaneous respect for his father and his moral rectitude facing the horrors in which his father participated.
“Jewish community raises funds to rescue Siena’s earthquake-damaged 18th-century synagogue”
James Imam, The Art Newspaper
About a year prior to New York City’s own rumble last spring, an earthquake shook Siena, Italy, and damaged a historic synagogue with it. Designed in 1786, the neoclassical synagogue is one of Europe’s few remaining pre-nineteenth-century synagogues still used for worship, and it attracts thousands of ticketed visitors a year as a historic site. But now that the structure is unstable—and in need of a €400,000 restoration—its ability to function is limited, and the Jewish community in the area, as well as various nonprofits and NGOs, have rallied to preserve this piece of history.