This week: Georgian nationhood, Greek classics in China, harmony in British art, the American landscape & more.
Georgian and Soviet: Entitled Nationhood and the Specter of Stalin in the Caucasus, by Claire P. Kaiser (Cornell University Press): In 1921, Soviet Russian troops invaded the Democratic Republic of Georgia, brutally imposing a Communist regime that maintained its grip for the next seventy years. Less than two decades later, a small cadre of Georgians—led by Stalin, that jumped-up cobbler’s son from Gori, and his right-hand man, Beria—had risen to the top of the entire Soviet Union via political gamesmanship and bloody repression. To understand this astounding trajectory better, turn to Claire Kaiser’s new book Georgian and Soviet, which comes as the result of over a decade of research in Georgian and Russian archives. In it, find investigations into the fluctuating nature of Georgian identity and nationhood throughout the twentieth century, as Georgians variously struggled under, embraced, seized, and broke free of the Soviet yoke. —IS
Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism, by Shadi Bartsch (Princeton University Press): Plato’s Politeia has come down to us as the Republic, thanks to Cicero and other Romans who referred to that work in latinized form (De republica). And in the West today, Republic has a nice democratic ring to it. But a more direct translation—the State or even the Regime—might lead one to view Plato’s project of fashioning a “city in words” in a more authoritarian light. Such is the case in China today, where ancient Greek thought is studied less often through the lens of two millennia of Western civilization than with an eye, as the classicist Shadi Bartsch explains in Plato Goes to China, to the country’s own Confucian past and Communist present. Many Chinese scholars enlist Plato and other Greeks as critics of democracy and rationalism; in other cases, the indictment of the West is more implicit. “As universities in the United States close down their classics departments,” Bartsch writes, “judging them useless, the province of the elite, or worse still, purveyors of imperialism—the Chinese are reading about Plato in Party editorials.” —RE
“Pythagorean Visions: Picturing Harmony in British Art, 1719–1753,” presented by Dominic Bate for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (February 10): The eighteenth century was the time of mathematization. The decimalization undertaken as part of the French Revolution was among the more baleful examples of this drive. More benign, though perhaps no more successful, was an eccentric group of London artists earlier in the century who attempted to approach art-making through mathematical formulas. Giles Hussey (1710–88), for instance, based his work on idiosyncratic mathematical formulas, including some whereby consonances of music corresponded to geometrical measures. But was the art any good? Find out on Friday, February 10 in a free livestreamed lecture by Dominic Bate for the Paul Mellon Centre. —BR
Topographies: Aerial Surveys of the American Landscape, by Stephen Shore (MACK Books): The photographer Stephen Shore is the ultimate camera man. From using a children’s Mick-A-Matic to a Rollei 35mm, an Arca Swiss 8-by-10 to an iPhone 5s, Shore has made stopovers at a Stereo Realist, a Graflex Crown Graphic 4-by-5, a Deardorff 8-by-10, and any number of Leicas, Nikons, Canons, Olympuses, and Hasselblads. For more than half a century his work has focused on “how” a picture is made as much as “what” is being taken. Lately this has meant floating over and looking down on his medium’s digital revolution. Since “today, we all drone,” as Noah Chasin begins his introduction to Shore’s latest publication, the photographer has now taken to the skies to create Topographies: Aerial Surveys of the American Landscape. Part formalistic, part voyeuristic, these images of dirt roads, warehouses, cemeteries, and tract homes—identified merely by their longitude and latitude—reveal the beauty in the form and function of flyover country. —JP
By the Editors:
The Bridges of Robert Adam: A Fanciful and Picturesque Tour, by Benjamin Riley (Triglyph Books).
Podcasts:
“Benjamin Riley and James Panero in conversation.” Benjamin Riley and James Panero discuss the Hilton Kramer Fellowship, the bridges of Robert Adam, and what it takes to write for The New Criterion.
From the Archives:
“Singing ceremonies,” by Robert Conquest (April 2013). On Nefertiti in the Flak Tower by Clive James.
Dispatch:
“Man of masks and shadows,” by David Platzer. On “Walter Sickert, Painting and Transgressing” at the Petit Palais, Paris.