Never Trust a Thin Cook and Other Lessons from Italy’s Culinary Capital, by Eric Dregni (University of Minnesota Press): In the preface to Never Trust a Thin Cook, Eric Dregni—a professor of English, journalism, and Italian at Concordia University in Minnesota—writes, “What’s the point of living in Italy if I’m not eating fantastic food at every meal?” A wag might answer that you could start with Botticelli, or Palladio, or Raphael, or . . . you get the idea. But there is no doubt that, in Italy, culinary culture is culture. Anyone who might protest should consult Dregni on his adoptive city of Modena, where the doors on the duomo (completed 1319) dole out “practical advice to local farmers, or contadini, about their duties throughout the year. In September, harvest the crops; in October, mash the grapes for Lambrusco; in February, check your balsamic vinegar, and so on.” First published in 2009 and now out in paperback, Never Trust a Thin Cook is an amusing look at the buon cibo of the bel paese. —BR
“Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946–1962,” at the Grey Art Museum, New York (opens March 2): For the opening this Saturday of its Grey Art Museum, formerly known as the Grey Art Gallery, New York University is looking beyond the New York School. “Americans in Paris,” the museum’s inaugural exhibition in its new home on Cooper Square, will focus on American artists working in France from 1946 through 1962. In the post-war years, thanks to the new GI Bill, American veterans received support to study in the city’s ateliers. Others were drawn to the freedoms of the liberated city and its resurrected artistic legacies. With 130 works ranging from paintings and sculptures to photography and more, the exhibition curated by Debra Bricker Balken with Lynn Gumpert illuminates the mid-century art scene that developed across the pond from Tenth Street with art by Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, and Kenneth Noland among the seventy artists on display. —JP
“Changes: Paintings from the 1970s,” at Hollis Taggart, New York (through March 16): “What are we to make of the art of the Seventies?” Eric Gibson once asked in these pages. Understandably hesitant to answer, he punted to the future, suggesting that something like fifty years were needed to make such a judgment. That five-decade moratorium’s end is right around the corner, and thus the timing of Hollis Taggart’s “Changes: Paintings from the 1970s” could not be better. The period is sometimes depicted as one of insecurity for the art form, one in which the Cerberus of commercialism, kitsch, and camp began to rear its ugly heads. But “Changes” presents us with a more promising side of the era. Here the versatility and verve of the decade’s painters are on full display across dozens of varied abstractions. Adolph Gottlieb, Sam Gilliam, Larry Poons, Betty Parsons, and more fill out the gallery walls in this energetic and gratifying show. —LL
Bruckner & Berg, by the Vienna Philharmonic, at Carnegie Hall, New York (March 1): Anton Bruckner successively raised the stakes with each of his last three symphonies: Symphony No. 7 (1881–83) was dedicated to “poor King Ludwig II of Bavaria”; No. 8 (1887) to “our dear, exalted” Franz Joseph I of Austria; and No. 9 (1896) “to the beloved God.” Today often performed without its unfinished finale, the completed three-movement core of the Ninth comprises what one critic called “a massive arch, two slow movements straddling an energetic Scherzo.” That is not to say that the slow movements are devoid of energy: on the contrary, they surge to perhaps the most sublime heights of any of Bruckner’s titanic symphonies; witness the tantalizing delay of tonic resolution in the coda of the first movement for evidence. Franz Welser-Möst conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in Bruckner’s final symphony this Friday at Carnegie Hall. —IS
Mahler’s Ninth, by the Vienna Philharmonic, at Carnegie Hall, New York (March 3): Bruckner called the third movement of his Symphony No. 9 his “farewell to life.” Gustav Mahler’s own Symphony No. 9 (1909) is often seen in the same light, though he nonetheless continued to compose until his death in 1911. It is indeed hard to shake the presentiment of death throughout: we can chart the path of the soul struggling for life before resigning peacefully in a slow, sublime finale in which the strings fade away pianississimo, marked “dying away,” to silence. Bruckner’s and Mahler’s farewell adagios share musical as well as thematic similarities: compare the minor ninths that open both and tug on the heartstrings, and their calm, pacific resolutions. To witness these connections, return to Carnegie Hall this Sunday afternoon for Mahler’s Symphony No. 9. —IS
“The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America,” featuring Jeffrey Rosen, at the New-York Historical Society (March 4): In the sixth century B.C., when fabulously wealthy King Croesus of Lydia asked his visitor Solon of Athens to identify the happiest man he had encountered, the ruler likely had a name already in mind: his own. Solon, instead, named a few obscure Greeks and cautioned the disappointed Croesus that, owing to the vicissitudes of tychē, fortune, he should count no man happy until he is dead. (Croesus was due for such a reversal, at the hands of Cyrus the Great.) While it’s true that the ancient Greeks and Romans set more store by fortune than we in the modern West—they worshipped Tyche/Fortuna as a goddess, after all—there is something of Solon’s wisdom in Thomas Jefferson’s prudent decision, in the Declaration of Independence, to invoke not happiness itself but the pursuit of that fickle condition. Next Monday, March 4, the constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen will be on hand at the New-York Historical Society to show how the Founding Fathers looked to Greek and Roman ideas about happiness, virtue, and of course government as a model for their own statesmanship. Both in-person and livestream tickets are available. —RE
Podcasts:
“Jeremy Black & James Panero in conversation”
On the River Thames, the rise of cities & the future of history.
From the Archives:
“Nabokov in America,” by Donald Lyons (December 1997). On the three-volume Vladimir Nabokov published by the Library of America.
Dispatch:
“A freestyle biennial,” by Julia Friedman. On what to expect from the upcoming Whitney Biennial.