Things to Read

Gombrich, Again

A PAINTER ON FACULTY SOMEWHERE emailed me to regret that Gombrich had become:
. . . a voice that is little heard at the schools in which I’ve taught. . . . “The Visual Image:  Its Place in Communication” is particularly good in throwing students for a loop; “On Art and Artists” is nice, too.  There’s only one other instructor at [Anonymous U], as far as I know, who introduces Gombrich to the students.  Otherwise, his books are gathering dust in the library. 
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Thinking of Gombrich

IS THERE AN ARTIST ANYWHERE who does not have Ernst Gombrich on the shelf? Art and Illusion, Meditations on a Hobby Horse, or—my favorite—The Sense of Order are perennial staples in the studio. If there is room for only one book, The Essential Gombrich fills the bill. His The Story of Art is a stock item in libraries across the country. Imagine my surprise, then, when I came across this footnote in Norman F. Cantor’s riveting Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century:
I have to admit that I must be almost alone in not learning anything of importance from the writings of (Aby) Warburg’s other famed student, Ernst H.
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Forgery and Fiction

VELÁSQUEZ’ ROKEBY VENUS SUFFERED VANDALISM IN 1914, when suffragette Mary Richardson took a meat cleaver to it in London’s National Gallery. (In a 1952 interview she conceded that she “didn’t like the way men visitors gaped at it all day long.”) Known also as The Toilet of Venus or La Venus del espejo, painted between 1647 and 1651, it is the only surviving Velásquez nude. ” ” This pearl of great price is the motive force behind Michael Gruber’s tour de force of psychological suspense and up-market fraud, The Forgery of Venus.  Continue Reading
Art & The Morning After

WITH THE ELECTION RETURNS LARGELY IN, this seems a good time to revisit “The Art of Obama Worship,” by Michael J. Lewis. Published in Commentary, September, 2009, the essay took off from Shepard Fairey’s iconic, Warhol-like poster of Obama in red, white and blue:
From the beginning, the Obama campaign invested much thought in its visual strategy. To portray him as a radically transformative deliverer, a figure of redemptive promise, was a natural course of action, his appearance comfortably matching his rhetoric.
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Degas On The Phone

FINALLY, THE HUMBLE PHONE BOOK is getting its due. Ammon Shea is quite likely the only person on the planet to take an interest in the one text we all rely on without ever giving it a second’s thought. He has just published The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads. In the great scheme of things, it is a small subject. But not as small as first thought would have it. At the end of the road from the first telephone directory is Facebook. Continue Reading