This week: On Paul Nash, Hans Holbein, the Philadelphia Orchestra & more.
Paul Nash: Designer and Illustrator, by James King (Lund Humphries):One of the highlights of the 2016/17 exhibition calendar was “Paul Nash,” a survey of the British artist’s multifarious output held at Tate Britain. We saw Nash in various guises, especially as a countryside mystic and chronicler of the haunting realities of World War II. Now a new book shows Nash in another cloak, as the subtitle has it: “designer and illustrator.” Detailing Nash’s work in book illustration, government propaganda, and even pottery, James King’s study, with abundant reproductions, adds to our understanding of this remarkable twentieth-century artist. —BR
“Holbein: Capturing Character” at the Morgan Library (February 11 through May 15): “Capturing Character” is an apt title for the major exhibition of Hans Holbein opening this week at New York’s Morgan Library. The German painter was among the most sought-after portraitists of the early sixteenth century, working in Basel, Switzerland, and then in England, where he served as a court painter to Henry VIII. For those who know Holbein only through those doubting Thomases—More and Cromwell, his dueling portraits in the Frick Collection—this exhibition will reveal the artist’s range in both subject and materials, from the design of prints and books to jewelry. Through his sumptuous artistry and precise style, Holbein captured the character of the Northern Renaissance. —JP
The Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall (February 8): The writer James Agee (1909–55) was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, though he spent most of his adult life in New York, where he made a modest name for himself as The Nation’s film critic, the screenwriter for classic films such as The African Queen, and the photographer Walker Evans’s collaborator on the freeform documentary book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Even as he sat writing in his office on the sixty-first floor of the Chrysler Building, Agee dreamed of the South, of his childhood there, and of its strange spirit of place that could never leave him. It is from this dreaming that the prose poem “Knoxville, Summer of 1915” arose, written in a mere hour and a half in 1938 and included as a preface to Agee’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel A Death in the Family, published posthumously in 1957. “Knoxville” is a supreme evocation of Southern childhood, of childhood in general, and of the sorrow that lurks in the shadows of emergent consciousness. The composer Samuel Barber arranged excerpts from Agee’s song-like prose in 1947 for voice and orchestra. Hear “Knoxville” performed together with other American works by Valerie Coleman, Florence Price, and Matthew Aucoin this Tuesday at Carnegie Hall. Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra together with the Met soprano Angel Blue. —IS
“Hemingway in Paris,” a lecture series by Kirk Curnutt at the 92nd Street Y (February 11, 18, 25, and March 4): Just over a century ago, a twenty-two-year-old Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley, moved into a matchbox apartment in Paris’s Latin Quarter. After covering the Greco-Turkish War and other important subjects as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, Hemingway returned to Canada in 1923 with Hadley for the birth of their son, Jack. But the future novelist was soon bored, writing in a letter to his sister Marcelline, “we are both homesick for Paris where there are few bath tubs, no electric fixtures, but very nearly all the charm, all the good food, and most of the good people in the world.” Plotting to break their lease and sail back to France without telling their landlord, the Hemingways held a secret goodbye party in their Bathurst Street rooms and instructed each guest to take home a piece of furniture. Paris, it seems, could inspire what Toronto could not: in rapid succession, Hemingway published The Torrents of Spring (1926) and The Sun Also Rises (1926). Kirk Curnutt, a professor of English at Troy University and the author of a number of books on Hemingway, will discuss the author’s time in Paris and its impact on his work in this four-part lecture series hosted by the 92nd Street Y. —JC
New podcast:
“Roger Kimball introduces the February issue.” A new podcast from the Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion.
From the archives:
“The Cones of Baltimore,” by Eric Gibson (October 1986). On the biography Dr. Claribel & Miss Etta by Brenda Richardson.
Dispatch:
“Distant planets” by Isaac Sligh. On a concert of Britten, Elgar, and Holst by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.