Reviews and News:
The triumph of Piero: “Piero was one of those pioneering masters from the circle of Italian humanists who not only practiced their craft as architects and painters, but also wrote theoretical treatises reflecting on their work. We do not know exactly how many essays Piero wrote on mathematics and geometry—Vasari speaks of ‘many’—but only three have survived. The presumably early Trattato dell’abaco treats arithmetic and algebra. The late De prospectiva pingendi takes up the practical problems of perspective still being debated at the time. Its first sentence is frequently quoted: ‘Painting contains three main principles, which we call drawing [disegno], measurement [commensuratio], and working with color [colorare].’ Piero’s pictures, invested with so much emotion by modern viewers, are based on a computational foundation of mathematics and solid geometry.”
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In April 1816, Lord Byron left England. He would never return.
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Catherine Brown reviews two new translations of the work of Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya (or Teffi): “These two books also reveal new sides to her. One is her Christianity: in Memories we learn that her most treasured possessions are her icon and her cross. In ‘Before a Map of Russia’, a poem written in exile and printed at the beginning of Memories, she describes making the sign of the cross in front of a wall map of her home country (‘I gaze at your countenance as if at an icon’). Her faults also become clear. She isn’t an intuitive mother to her daughter, Valya (‘We were not well matched’). She values female beauty and disdains female ugliness to a degree that will feel odd to many readers today. She can also be unworldly. When faced with officials, she cannot remember the day or even the year. She also forgets her name. She has a horror of public speaking and gives an account, worthy of Kingsley Amis, of checking in on a performance of one of her plays, only to discover when she arrives at the theatre that she is supposed to be giving a talk on the new medium of cinema, about which she has nothing whatever to say. She rushes home, takes her phone off the hook, buries herself in her bed and tells us only, ‘How fortunate it is that everything in the world comes to an end.'”
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John Quincy Adams’s “radical devotion to American republicanism.”
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John King turns to politics in his latest novel, The Liberal Politics of Adolf Hitler, where “a totalitarian EU superstate rules the world. The federal elite loots the treasures of Greece, imposes a mad neoliberalism upon entire countries, and punches surveillance implants into the hands of its subjects, which can only be removed by amputation. History has been rewritten so that Hitler and Stalin become early Eurostate pioneers taken down by the villainous Little Englander Churchill. The federal regime marries a crazy capitalism (just about every public utility has been sold to various corporations) with crazy liberalism: paedophilia is legalised and Jimmy Savile rehabilitated as a permissive hero. Only a loose network of rebel forces in the shire towns (known as ‘GB45’) stand against the Euro totalitarianism.”
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Jessa Crispin, founder of the recently halted Bookslut, gives the “professional, shiny, happy plastic version of literature” a poke in the eye in an interview with Vulture: “I see the Millions used on book blurbs now. They’re so professional, and I mean that as an insult. I didn’t want to become a professional. It’s like using the critical culture as a support to the industry rather than as an actual method of taking it apart.”
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Essay of the Day:
In ArtNews, M. H. Miller explains how one of the most trusted art galleries in New York began selling fakes:
“Domenico and Eleanore De Sole live most of the year in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Domenico is originally from Calabria, and he grew up in a military family, moving all around Italy. He got a law degree from Harvard in 1972, but he’s no longer a member of the bar. He made his fortune in the fashion industry, first as the CEO of the Gucci Group, and then as a cofounder of Tom Ford International with the label’s namesake. Eleanore describes herself as ‘Domenico’s unpaid secretary.’ They are collectors and major patrons of the arts. Domenico currently serves as the chairman of the board of directors at Sotheby’s, but when it comes to their art purchases, Eleanore makes all the decisions. Still, they would not describe themselves as art experts per se. Domenico is more comfortable talking about handbags.
“On a trip to New York in November 2004, the De Soles visited the Knoedler & Co. gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan for the first and last time. They went there to inquire about buying a work by artist Sean Scully, who had been represented by Knoedler off and on for years, and met with Ann Freedman, the gallery’s president. She told them she did not have any work by Scully available, but she did have a painting—right there in her office—that she said was by Mark Rothko.
“Freedman explained that a private Swiss collector had owned the work, and that his family wanted to remain anonymous. After short deliberations, the De Soles wanted to buy the painting. They paid Knoedler $8.3 million, the most the couple had ever spent on a work of art by a wide margin. The invoice for the Rothko lists the buyer as Laura De Sole, the couple’s oldest daughter, so that it would be clear that the painting would go to her after the De Soles died, and not her younger sister, Rickie. ‘They fight,’ Domenico said of his daughters. (Eleanore was slightly more morbid. After the couple was dead and buried, she said, ‘I didn’t want to roll over in my grave.’) The family planned on owning the work for a long time.
“More than a decade after that meeting at the gallery, and two years after their Rothko was revealed to be a fake, the De Soles would tell a jury that Freedman and Knoedler had knowingly conned them out of seven figures. But, Domenico would testify, back in 2004 he and his wife had ‘no reason to believe someone was lying’ to them. After all, they were dealing with Knoedler—’the most trusted, oldest, most important gallery,’ he said.”
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Image of the Day: Supercell
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Poem: Eric Smith, “The Shed”
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