Painter Robert Falk s Triumphant Return to Moscow
The huge retrospective at the Tretyakov is a revelation. Bay of Balaklava, 1927 State Tretykov Gallery
The exhibition of painter Robert Falk (1886-1958) in the New Tretyakov Gallery begins with a comment about the leader of the U.S.S.R. “Nikita Khrushchev was not prepared for this kind of painting,” it reads.
The painting in question was “Nude in an Armchair.” In 1962 the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, called it “perverted.” It was being shown at an exhibition dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the Moscow Union of Artists. “For the present this kind of creativity is considered indecent,” said Khrushchev, whose taste leaned more to red banners and official portraits.
Robert Alter on Nabokov’s Literary Invention
March 17, 2021
Vladimir Nabokov remains one of the most polarizing of the major novelists who have written in English. His admirers are passionate about him. These include both critics and many novelists in England, America, and elsewhere. Some gestures of imitation have been made by other writers, though as is generally the case with writers of the first order of originality Proust and Kafka come to mind these efforts have not been very successful. On the opposing side, there are some readers who cannot abide Nabokov, finding little in his work but coy literary devices, mannered or overwrought prose, and a pervasive archness.
Vintage: London 2019
Francis Mulhern
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Serious noticing is fundamental to the work of significant writers; it is how they ‘save life from itself’, James Wood maintains, in the essay that gives his new collection its title and foremost emphasis. But the phrase has a dual reference, also denoting what Wood would say he does himself in much, perhaps most of his own writing: reviews, not of the ephemeral kind aptly called ‘notices’ but relatively long, considered critical pieces better designated ‘essays’. His subtitle makes the claim without hesitation, and it is not irrelevant that it echoes one of the most distinguished examples of the genre, T. S. Eliot’s
Alex Kitnick on the discontent with museums
Caravaggio,
The Inspiration of Saint Matthew, 1602, oil on canvas, 9 8 1/2 x 6 2 1/2 .
“WHEN DISCONTENT WITH MUSEUMS is strong enough to provoke the attempt to exhibit paintings in their original surroundings or in ones similar, in baroque or rococo castles, for instance, the result is even more distressing than when the works are wrenched from their original surroundings and then brought together.” This is Theodor Adorno in his great essay “Valéry Proust Museum,” first published in German in 1955, a moment of reckoning and reconstruction. Though Adorno doesn’t specify why the attempt to return and repatriate is more upsetting than the original rift and reassembling of modernity, it is clear that we are in a similar moment of discontent again today and that we, too, must consider our desires and the effects they might produce.
I Ask For Inspiration
Where is inspiration? Where does one look for it? How does one search for it without altering its divine fire?
There will be many who are stimulated by the current state of affairs and those who will record with great detail how the shattered world around them has devoured their life at home. Some will express it through words, some through music; there will be sculptures carved and paintings made, all echoing the paralyzing effects of the present. So, when and if all these people are finished with their creative processes, I will ask: “where did you find your inspiration to create?”