Reviews and News:
Two years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates started writing a handful of Black Panther comics. Next, he’ll take on Capitan America.
Companies are turning to (bad) poetry to sell things. Why? Because “viewers are wise to conventional advertising and are bombarded by it, so they have developed ways to filter it out…Poetry is more entertaining than most ad copy, and viewers are inclined to respond to a lifestyle or feeling rather than a hard sell. They are also more open to subscribe to that brand when responding to the emotional and human connection brought about by a poem.” Nothing says Under Armor like “The systemic structure built to keep me in place / is the stage I dance on,” amiright?
The BBC is bringing back Kenneth Clark’s Civilization. Unsurprisingly, it’s now called Civilizations, and the first episode has its share of posturing. Otherwise, it’s not bad: “Here’s one of the fundamental differences between this and its unpluralised predecessor. When Clark says at the beginning that he doesn’t know what civilisation is (‘I don’t know. I can’t describe it in abstract terms — yet’), it’s just false modesty. When Simon Schama says the same thing, it’s post-modern intellectual cowardice. He doesn’t want to venture an opinion, for who would dare when we now know that all cultures and values have equal merit, and that to ‘privilege’ one over another is ‘elitist’? This is a pity, because when he’s not being a flustered, neurotic old woman blithering on about refugee rights or the horrors of Brexit, Schama has the makings of a first-rate TV historian.”
Sviatoslav Richter was one of the greatest pianists and harshest critics. He thought Maurizio Pollini’s interpretation of Chopin was “cast in metal,” and he wrote this about a Radu Lupu performance: “Everything is so carefully calculated and weighed up in advance that there’s nothing unexpected or surprising.” But he routinely singled out one performer for thrashing: himself.
The most powerful passports.
Essay of the Day:
In The New Criterion, James Panero reevaluates the life and work of Thomas Cole:
“Cole’s remarkable life has been long overshadowed by his outsize legacy in American art. Through his protégés Asher Brown Durand and Frederic Edwin Church, Cole famously inspired the ‘Hudson River School’ of landscape painting. But this was a term Cole never knew in his lifetime. His own work, dense with allegory and narrative, shares less than one might expect with the more empirical American landscape artists of the second half of the nineteenth century. In his painted tribute of 1849, Durand immortalized his mentor in death, at forty-seven, as the ‘Kindred Spirit’ of both the poet William Cullen Bryant and the American wilderness, as Cole and Bryant look out over Kaaterskill Falls and the wilds of the Catskill Mountains. But Cole was anything but a rustic, as one might assume, or an American provincial—or even, for that matter, American-born.
“‘Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings,’ an ambitious and scholarly exhibition now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, reconsiders the New World paintings of the English-born Cole in light of his engagement with Old World art. This engagement included the Old Masters, in particular Claude Lorrain, on through Cole’s contemporaries J. M. W. Turner, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, and John Martin—all of whom he met first-hand through repeated ‘Atlantic crossings.’ By exhibiting Cole’s masterpieces such as The Course of Empire (1833–36) and The Oxbow (1836) alongside the very paintings that Cole saw in the exhibition halls and studios of Europe, ‘Atlantic Crossings’ makes the case that this renowned American artist was enriched by a surprisingly modern and worldly view.”
Photo: Co Thach Beach
Poem: Rafael Campo, “Hospice Rounds.” Read an interview with Campo—who is a doctor and a professor at Harvard—in Nautilus.
Forthcoming:
Denise Dupont, Whole Faith: The Catholic Ideal of Emilia Pardo Bazan (Catholic University, March 4): “Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921), the most important female author of Spain’s nineteenth century, was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, critical articles, chronicles of modern life, and plays. Active in the age of Catholic social teaching inaugurated by Pope Leo XIII, Pardo Bazán imagined religion as an underpinning for personal and social organization. She addressed the individual experience of faith and culture, and focused on the tension between individualism and the social aspects of religious practice. As a talented literary artist herself, Pardo Bazán was no stranger to the challenges faced by gifted, privileged members of society, particularly in the form of temptations offered by modernity and its widespread encouragement of self-seeking. She wrote repeatedly about the change of heart that may be experienced by intellectually and materially advantaged individuals, and shared details of her own spiritual journey, arguing that once the creative person redefines herself as Franciscan instrument, she is able to contribute through her art and actions to the realization of a personalist society rich in sacramentality.”
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