Recent links of note:
“Cataloguing Egon Schiele: a digital work in progress”
David D’Arcy, The Art Newspaper
The expressionist painter Egon Schiele died of influenza one hundred years ago at the age of twenty-eight, leaving behind an impressive body of work that is still being catalogued today. Many of the Vienna-based artist’s works were later looted by the Nazis, and their provenance came under dispute after World War II. So Jane Kallir, whose grandfather published the first catalogue raisonné of Schiele’s oils in 1930, is attempting to combine and clean up this catalogue and two others that have been created in the past century—by putting them all online. Kallir’s project presents an upside to the digital revolution: a book of Schiele’s works would be expensive, unwieldy, and likely out of date before it hit the shelves, but an online archive can be kept current “in real time,” Kallir says. Currently, the site hosts Schiele’s oils, prints, and sculptures, with his drawings and watercolors forthcoming in 2019. For more on Schiele, read Andrew L. Shea’s review of a recent show of works by Schiele and Gustav Klimt at the Neue Galerie in New York and Karen Wilkin’s earlier essay on an exhibition of his works at the Museum of Modern Art.
John Banville, Literary Review
In his new biography, Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know, the writer Colm Tóibín follows his literary patrimony back to Dublin, where Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce, that great trinity of Irish writers, were born. Although artistic talent can’t be traced entirely to one’s inheritance, whether genetic or cultural, there is much in this triple biography of these writers’ fathers that points directly to the sons’ later work. Sir William Wilde emerges as the “Eminent Victorian” (as his chapter’s title puts it), a doctor eventually outed for sexual scandal. The painter John B. Yeats—unsurprisingly for the father of a man who created mythologies, religions, and entire worlds in his writing—was a lay art theorist and magnificent letter writer who fleshed out an entire aesthetic program in his letters to his son. And John Stanislaus Joyce plays the role of the drunkard, leading James to write a line that continues to resonate for Irish writers, including Tóibín: “It’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father . . . ” Look for Richard Tillinghast’s review of the book in an upcoming issue.
“The Green Room podcast: Auctions, sculptures, and horse flesh—the best art exhibitions in 2018”
Dominic Green, James Panero, Benjamin Riley, and Andrew L. Shea, Spectator USA
Delacroix at the Met, Corot at the National Gallery, and the five-hundredth anniversary of Tintoretto’s birth—2018 was a great year for art, with excellent exhibitions at galleries large and small. Dominic Green hosts our own James Panero, Benjamin Riley, and Andrew L. Shea in his Green Room podcast, rounding up this year’s best in art (and its worst: Pulitzer Prize–winner Jerry Saltz’s recent cover story in New York magazine comes under fire, as well).
From our pages
Nic Rowan