Reviews and News:
You may recall that last week French president Emmanuel Macron agreed to loan the Bayeux Tapestry to Britain. (The work depicts the Battle of Hastings and other events.) Like many young technocrats eager to appear nice, he may have promised too much, too quickly. Curators said that in order to move the 224-foot and extremely fragile embroidery “a host of major technical and conservation issues” would have to be overcome: “Curator Pierre Bouet, who cares for the tapestry at the museum, said he thought ‘it was a hoax’ when he first heard of the plan.” Still, a week that finds heads of state and journalists discussing history and art is a good one.
That goodness continues this week, with Emily A. Winkler providing a history of the embroidery and a brief discussion of its varying interpretations: “It was probably commissioned by Odo of Bayeux – famous as William the Conqueror’s half-brother, Earl of Kent and Bishop of Bayeux – and made in Canterbury by English seamstresses. The Bayeux Tapestry is not, in fact, a tapestry (a woven textile) but an embroidery made of linen and wool yarn. Some art historians have campaigned to rename it the ‘Canterbury Embroidery’, to acknowledge its probable place of production. Both within and beyond the scholarly world, the Bayeux Tapestry has attracted varying interpretations. Taking sides – or trying to determine the degree of Englishness or Normanness it conveys – has been difficult to resist. The tapestry was long thought to be a piece of Norman propaganda, celebrating a Norman achievement. Wolfgang Grape’s The Bayeux Tapestry (trans. David Britt, 1994) proclaimed the tapestry to be a Monument to a Norman triumph. On the other hand, more recent work has stressed its English production, revealing the subtle English sentiments in the tapestry’s artwork. The historian Stephen D. White has recently cautioned against reading it as an English or Norman story, showing how the animal fables visible in the borders may instead offer a commentary on the dangers of conflict and the futility of pursuing power.”
Did you know that in 1970, ten Israeli prisoners in Egypt translated The Hobbit into Hebrew? I didn’t. It was published in 1977 with the help of the Israeli Air Force.
What exactly did Garrison Keillor do and when? We still don’t know all the details, but it was more than simply placing his hand on a woman’s back.
Jean Honoré Fragonard’s happy nostalgia: “Unlike what is known about Fragonard’s turbulent relationships with some of his most prominent patrons, the fantasy portraits communicate a far more reassuring cordiality. In them, Fragonard is indulging in the rich vein of nostalgia for a chivalric age, the bon vieux temps of the reign of Henri IV, also to be found in certain aristocratic theatricals of his day.”
Where magazines go after they die: “The Hyman Archive was confirmed as the largest collection of magazines in 2012 by Guinness World Records; then, it had just 50,953 magazines, 2,312 of them unique titles. Now, a year and a half after Mr. Hyman was interviewed by BBC Radio 4, donations are pouring in, and amid them Mr. Hyman and his staff have carved out space for an armchair and a snack-laden desk. (The rest of the foundry is a storage facility used mostly by media companies to house their film archives and the obsolete technology with which they were made.)”
Essay of the Day:
At Law and Liberty, Samuel Gregg revisits the life and work of “anti-Keynes” French economist Jacques Rueff:
“2018 marks the fortieth anniversary of the death of a Frenchman who genuinely merits the title ‘statesman of finance.’ Jacques Rueff isn’t a household name today. Yet he was the first economist elected to the Académie Française and has good claim to being France’s most distinguished twentieth-century economist. Known during his lifetime as ‘l’anti-Keynes,’ Rueff was not only one of the gold standard’s most articulate exponents. He is widely credited for saving France sixty years ago from serious economic problems which had reduced his country to being Europe’s sick man.
“Like several twentieth-century free market economists who achieved prominence in that century’s first half, Rueff’s intellectual interests went far beyond economics. In his case, they ranged from physics to theology. Rueff stands out, however, by virtue of the fact that he was consistently involved in the formation of government economic policy to an extent unrivalled by any of his fellow pro-market advocates.”
Photos: The rooftops of Tel Aviv
Poem: Julie Kane, “Second Time Around”
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