Reviews and News:
Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of Christ sells for $450.3 million—just a little less than the GDP of Tonga.
The National Book Award winners have been announced. Ward wins for fiction, Bidart for poetry.
Does civilization start with fishing? Brian Fagan thinks so.
Remembering Charlotte Salomon: “This year marks the centenary of the birth of Charlotte Salomon, the German Jewish artist who died in Auschwitz in 1943 aged twenty-six, a year after she had created one of the most complex, fascinating and challenging artworks of the modern era. Enigmatically titled Leben? Oder Theater? and made up of 784 paintings, this single work demonstrates a dazzling variety of painterly modes, from detailed vignettes on a single page to freely painted fields of colour with barely established figures.”
Netflix buys the rights to Jeff VanderMeer’s forthcoming novel Hummingbird Salamander.
Charles U. Zug reevaluates Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life: “If liberation and autonomy were all human beings needed to be happy—as many today profess, and as A Little Life sometimes seems to suggest—it would be difficult to explain the cloud of chronic unhappiness that hangs over Yanagihara’s very-liberated world. Is it possible her characters yearn for something which the twenty-first century world’s radical freedom cannot provide? Can art, creativity, and unconventional relationships sustain us in a world where God is dead? A Little Life depicts radical freedom as terrifying rather than liberating. Ordinary human beings—‘naked, shivering poor devils,’ to use Leo Strauss’ formula—are expected joyously to embrace a world devoid of anything higher than their own petty selves.”
Harvard professor predicts that half of American colleges and universities will close in 10 to 15 years. (HT: Miles Smith)
The pleasures of obscure library terms.
Essay of the Day:
In The New York Review of Books, Christopher Carroll revisits the work of Otto Marseus van Schrieck:
“For much of his life, the painter Otto Marseus van Schrieck (circa 1620-1678) lived beyond Amsterdam’s city walls in a marshy area known as ‘the land of snakes,’ where he had a small country house. There, Marseus kept a menagerie of reptiles, insects, and vermin for the purposes of the peculiar genre of painting he had invented—his wife later claimed that he spent so much time handling the snakes that they eventually began posing for him—which was so much in demand that when Cosimo de Medici visited Amsterdam in 1667, Marseus, not Rembrandt, was the first person he received.
“Medici had come in search of what later generations called the sottobosco, the forest-floor still life, Marseus’s eye-level portraits of the dark world of the underbrush and the creeping Lilliputian fauna that haunted it. His paintings brim with thistles, wild tulips, and ethereal white mushrooms, around which snails, snakes, salamanders, and toads go about their lives, all painted in expressive detail reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s minutely observed scenes of the grotesque and exotic. Although today Marseus is almost entirely forgotten, a new show at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe gives us a sense not just of the weird, lush beauty of his paintings, but of how they straddled the worlds of art and science, reflecting the latest scientific developments during the Dutch Golden Age—particularly a newfound fascination with the infinitesimal—even as they were shaped by Marseus’s idiosyncratic artistic whims.”
Photos: Antarctica
Poem: T.J. McLemore, “The Farm”
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