The World of Late Antiquity: CE 150–750, by Peter Brown (Thames & Hudson): In the first century B.C., the Roman poet Horace described how “captive Greece captured her savage conqueror, and brought the arts to barbarous Latium.” Three centuries later, as the historian Peter Brown related in The World of Late Antiquity (1971), this cross-cultural current had reversed course: it was the Greek world of the Eastern Mediterranean, the real “cultural power-house of Late Antiquity,” that by the end of the 200s A.D. had “made the Roman empire its own.” Now, a fully illustrated paperback edition from Thames & Hudson reproduces Brown’s landmark study—informed by his “generous, synoptic” vision of Late Antiquity, as Amit Majmudar put it in a recent review—for the next generation of readers. —RE
The Lives of Lee Miller, by Antony Penrose (Thames & Hudson, September 3): Lee Miller dazzled both in front of and behind the camera. As a young woman, she was scouted as a model by none other than Condé Nast; she then studied photography under Man Ray in Paris, hobnobbing in the Surrealist scene; and during World War II, she became a war correspondent for Vogue (in one famous episode, breaking into Hitler’s bathroom on the day of his suicide and tracking dirt into his bathtub). A reissue of The Lives of Lee Miller, the 1985 biography by her son Antony Penrose, is sure to entertain photography lovers and history buffs alike. —SM
“Masterworks: A Journey Through Himalayan Art,” at the Rubin Museum of Art (through October 6): Twenty years and four days after its opening on October 2, 2004, the Rubin Museum of Art will welcome visitors to its West Seventeenth Street location for the final time. With its galleries wrapped around a six-story elliptical staircase—a feature preserved from the building’s past life as a department store—the museum’s focus is Himalayan art, and its quiet, low-lit interior trains all attention on the lush, richly detailed, and mostly religious (especially Buddhist) objects in its collection. With sculpture, textiles, furniture, and paintings dating from the seventh century A.D. onward, “Masterworks” presents a final opportunity to apprehend the Rubin’s enthralling offerings before it is reborn as a so-called global museum, loaning works for exhibition and facilitating research but without a permanent space of its own. —SM
“‘Ancient Art as an Investment’: A Strange, Cautionary, and Ongoing Tale,” with Elizabeth Marlowe, at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (September 19): Art and commerce have always sat uneasily next to each other, being to a degree codependent (a degree treated with disdain by many artists), and history is full of tales of artists unhappy with their earnings—think of Greco purportedly complaining that “As surely as the rate of payment is inferior to the value of my sublime work, so will my name go down to posterity as one of the greatest geniuses of Spanish painting” and his poor relations with Pope Pius V, which foreshadowed his monetary dispute with Spanish clerical authorities for altarpieces in Toledo. But the unhappiness works in the other direction, too, with those who treat art as a business opportunity often stymied by forces beyond their ken. On September 19, Elizabeth Marlowe, a professor of art history at Colgate, will discuss “a decades-long antiquities investment scheme orchestrated by a very well-known Manhattan dealer and an insurance salesman based in Detroit” that “did not end well for most of the participants.” This talk presented at the Institute of Fine Art’s landmark James B. Duke House “will examine the risks and ethics of the financialization of antiquities, and also raise questions about the relationship of museums to the art market.” For those unable to attend on the day, a simulcast will be available. —BR
Dispatch:
“Austrian-led Pennsylvanians in Austria,” by Jay Nordlinger. On a concert of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, under Manfred Honeck, at the Salzburg Festival.
From the Editors:
“The Left’s Swift Shift after RFK Jr.’s Trump Endorsement”
Roger Kimball, American Greatness
Archive:
“Kandinsky’s hocus-pocus,” by Mario Naves (December 2009). On “Kandinsky” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
