“Mario Naves: Gratitude and Expectation,” at Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York (through February 17): Hard-edge abstraction finds its soft spot in Mario Naves’s latest work, on view at New York’s Elizabeth Harris Gallery. For his ninth solo show at the Chelsea gallery, the painter and longtime art critic for The New Criterion bends his color-rich forms into wheels and curves. Some of these compositions are tondi—round panels spread across the gallery wall. Others resemble mechanical diagrams, with circles appearing as spinning gears and belt-like lines turning the forms around them. All are enigmatic. A studied surface treatment of push-and-pull and a keen negotiation of negative and positive space invite deep investigation. —JP
Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective, by Margit Erb & Michael Parillo (Thames & Hudson): “For the perfect flâneur,” wrote Baudelaire, “it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.” Setting up house in the “heart of the multitude” is precisely what the photographer Saul Leiter (1923–2013) did when he moved to a small East Village apartment in 1952, and the multitude became his subject—though it’s unlikely Baudelaire would have approved of Leiter’s choice of medium. Nevertheless, Leiter came to know and capture the restive ebb and flow of New York’s streets better than almost anyone. And though Leiter was certainly a New York photographer, his work is defined by its formal excellence just as much as its storied subject matter. That excellence is on full display in Margit Erb and Michael Parillo’s Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective, an abundant survey of Leiter’s street, fashion, and experimental photography, as well as his intimate portraiture. —LL
Art and Architecture of Sicily, by Julian Treuherz (Lund Humphries): In the summer of 1943, the Allied troops took North Africa and moved north to Italy, leading the MP and diarist Chips Channon (1897–1958) to remark to the American-born London hostess Laura Corrigan, “Isn’t it wonderful about Sicily?” Mrs. Corrigan replied: “Sicily who?” Such ignorance of Italy’s largest island, the one being kicked by the boot, can be remedied by close study of Julian Treuherz’s Art and Architecture of Sicily, out now from Lund Humphries. Treuherz posits that the “artistic diversity of Sicily stems from its position in the centre of the Mediterranean. It was a staging post between east and west, between Greece and the Iberian Peninsula; and between north and south, separated from mainland Europe by five kilometres of the Straits of Messina, and on its south coast, only 150 kilometres from North Africa.” According to Treuherz, this heady stew resulted in an art and architecture that, while related to that of its neighbors and conquerors, was entirely Sicily’s own. Look, in this extensively illustrated survey, to the strange pattern of rustication on Palermo’s Porta Nuova (1583) for proof. —BR
“Reading Anna Karenina with Gary Saul Morson,” presented by the 92nd Street Y (January 19–April 26): A popular new year’s resolution—mine more than once, I fear—is to read a chapter of Tolstoy’s War & Peace every day: at this pace one will finish the book on December 27 in most editions (some translations actually have an even 365 chapters). The idea is that smaller doses, administered daily, can give the reader a sharper feeling for this realist masterwork’s sweep and scale. But there are options for those readers, like myself, who prefer their Tolstoy in bigger helpings: to wit, a new course led by the eminent Slavist Gary Saul Morson at the 92nd Street Y, treating not War & Peace but Anna Karenina in eight meaty sessions. The live classes are held online, and the session on Part I will take place not this Friday but next (January 19)—meaning there’s ample time to gorge on those first 130-odd pages, if you’re so inclined. —RE
By the Editors:
“Claudine Gay was bad for Harvard, but Harvard is bad for the country”
Roger Kimball, The Spectator World
Dispatch:
“Throwbacktastic,” by Jay Nordlinger. On a concert of the New York Philharmonic.
From the Archives:
“Proust before Proust,” by Renee Winegarten (December 2001). A review of Marcel Proust: The Complete Short Stories.