This week: Kafka, Picasso, Maria Yudina, New York City landscapes & more.
Franz Kafka: The Drawings, edited by Andreas Kilcher and Pavel Schmidt (Yale University Press): In a letter discovered posthumously, Franz Kafka implored his friend, biographer, and executor Max Brod to burn his “scribblings.” Brod did not, and a collection of Kafka’s complete illustrations is now available from Yale University Press. Brod preserved Kafka’s papers through the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia and Brod’s flight to Palestine, eventually bequeathing them to his secretary, who squirreled the cache away in a Swiss bank vault. The archive of drawings was discovered in 2019 and, following a legal battle culminating in the Supreme Court of Israel, is now held with Kafka’s other papers in Israel’s National Library. The new compendium features essays on the drawings alongside Kafka’s whimsical pen-and-ink sketches. —SM
Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America, by Hugh Eakin (Penguin): Today Pablo Picasso is a household name, but for his first forty years as an artist the American public knew little about him. Hugh Eakin in Picasso’s War: How Modern Art Came to America asks when, how, and why Picasso’s art came to captivate American audiences. Eakin recounts that a collaboration between Picasso’s art dealer, Paul Rosenberg, and the new director of the recently-created Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr, to preserve Picasso’s art from destruction by the Nazis led to one of MOMA’s most influential exhibitions to date: Picasso: Forty Years of His Art, shown from November 1939 to January 1940. Once Americans came to realize the appeal of modern art through Picasso, the capital of the art world shifted from Paris to New York. —JW
Playing with Fire: The Story of Maria Yudina, Pianist in Stalin’s Russia, by Elizabeth Wilson (Yale University Press): It was possibly with Dmitri Shostakovich that the story originated: One evening around 1947, after a broadcast of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 featuring the pianist Maria Yudina, a call came to the Radio Committee offices in Moscow from a listener—Stalin himself. Delighted at the performance, Stalin needed the recording. Alas, whichever terrified clerk answered was too scared to reveal that none had been made, so Yudina and an entire orchestra were woken up and assembled and, after a feverish all-night recording session, a single disc was delivered into Stalin’s hands. After Stalin dispatched a gift to Yudina, she wrote back informing him that the money had been donated to her church. As the cellist Elizabeth Wilson writes in a new biography of Yudina (1899–1970), this well-worn legend is in all probability bunk—yet Yudina’s brave dissidence and unshakeable Christian faith through the horrors of Leninism and Stalinism are anything but legends, and her scintillating intelligence endeared her to the tight-knit circles of other persecuted figures such as Boris Pasternak and Mikhail Bakhtin. Based on decades of research, Wilson’s book is a testament to the life of an indefatigable survivor and uncompromising pianistic talent. —IS
Writing the City: Essays on New York, by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers (Library of American Landscape History): To save a city, you must appreciate it first. By founding the Central Park Conservancy, a model for public–private partnership, Elizabeth Barlow Rogers has done much to save the landscapes of New York. Yet there would be little interest in such preservation without a deeper understanding of the culture and history of what needed to be preserved. As the president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies, Rogers has written extensively about the environments of the metropolis, both natural and manmade—including for the pages of The New Criterion. Writing the City collects these essays on New York, covering such topics as the city’s geological landscape, the Hudson River and waterfront, Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery and Prospect Park, and “thirty-three new ways you can help Central Park’s renaissance.” With a preface by Robin Karson, the collection is both a historical and personal reflection on a lifetime of urban preservation. —JP
From the Archives:
“Follow the leader,” by Victor Davis Hanson (September 2013). A review of Masters of Command: Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar and the Genius of Leadership by Barry Strauss.
Dispatch:
“An hour of greatness,” by Jay Nordlinger. On a livestreamed recital by Elisabeth Leonskaja.