Sunday links

4th November 2018

Links to articles and videos that have caught my eye over the past week or so – thanks, as always, to those who alerted me to many of them.

• A long overdue light on black models of early modernism: a good Roberta Smith review for The New York Times , giving you a vivid sense of visiting the show, of what looks like a fascinating exhibition, Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today, currently at Columbia University’s  Wallach Art Gallery but coming (expanded, and with Manet’s ‘Olympia’) to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris next summer. Above, a detail from Frédéric Bazille’s ‘Young Woman With Peonies’, 1870, from the National Gallery of Art, Washington. For more, here’s a short video with curator Denise Murrell:

• Six glimpses of the past: for The New Yorker (of course), Janet Malcolm is rather marvellous on photography and memory (and the sixth section, about her father, is especially touching).

• Pots, pans and pondering in Chardin’s domestic scenes: for Apollo, Kathryn looks carefully, and writes wonderfully, about two companion pieces by Jean-Siméon Chardin, ‘The Cellar Boy’ and ‘The Scullery Maid’, in the Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow.

• Lessons with Bazin – six paths to a poetics: a wonderfully rich 2009 essay by David Bordwell spinning off from the ideas of French theorist André Bazin, newly presented in a revised form.

• It’s a Wonderful Life – 4K restoration: the trailer for what will be, as it every year but never before in 4K (courtesy of Park Circus), an essential part of Christmas:

• Fantastique – the dream worlds of French cinema: Virginie Sélavy introduces a season at BFI Southbank.

• Fanny and Alexander – the other side: a lovely Molly Haskell essay on Ingmar Bergman’s great, great family saga.

• Jerome Kuehl 1931-2018: Taylor Downing pays tribute, thoughtfully and movingly, to the great historian and television producer, Jerry Kuehl.

• Happy Birthday, Harold – thoughts from Pinter at the Pinter’s memento mori: a terrific post from Catriona Fallow at the ‘Harold Pinter: Histories and Legacies’ research project, in part about ‘memory, memorialisation and – to borrow theatre scholar Marvin Carlson’s term – “ghosting”.’

• How Rudyard Kipling became a master of imperial gothic: Andrew Glazzard for the New Statesman is good on the author who is much more interesting and complex than most of us think.

• The ghost story persists in American literature. Why?: a fine essay for The New York Times by Parul Sehgal:

In the modern ghost story, especially the American kind, something different occurs. Ghosts protest norms — slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration — the norms that killed them… These ghosts are of America’s making. And in testifying to their deaths at the hands of police, poverty and racist violence, they lead us back to the nation’s foundational crimes of chattel slavery and genocide — as well as its energetic amnesia.

• How a woman becomes a lake: for The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino reflects on Ovid and rape in these dark and dismal days.

• Thomas Heatherwick’s Coal Drops Yard – shopping in the Instagram age: a nuanced essay about, in part, the privatisation of public space by Rowan Moore for the Guardian.

• Let our algorithm choose your Halloween costume: very good on machine learning by Janelle Shane for The New York Times.

• Bruce Springsteen – Land of Hope and Dreams (Springsteen on Broadway – Official Audio): audio only (trailing Springsteen on Broadway, released 14 December), but wonderful nonetheless – and all the more essential as America faces up to its future on Tuesday.