Mar 08 2025
Anselm Kiefer makes paintings that seem to have survived something. Their surfaces crack, burn, crumble, rust, and accumulate. Straw projects from paint. Lead hangs heavily from walls. Flowers dry and darken. Books become too heavy to open. Fields stretch toward uncertain horizons beneath scorched skies, while ruined buildings and abandoned interiors seem caught between archaeology …
Mar 05 2025
Pier Paolo Pasolini never seemed interested in making life easier for his audience, his critics, his political allies, or himself. He was a poet who became a novelist, a novelist who became a filmmaker, a Marxist who remained fascinated by Christianity, an atheist who made one of cinema’s most moving films about Christ, and an …
Mar 03 2025
Ronald Searle could make a line look exhausted, furious, elegant, nervous, pompous, half-starved, or completely unhinged. His drawings rarely sit quietly on the page. Buildings lean, noses stretch, limbs bend at improbable angles, schoolgirls advance like small armed revolutionaries, cats appear to have survived several nights of bad decisions, and respectable institutions begin to collapse …
Mar 02 2025
Lou Reed wanted rock and roll to carry the weight of literature without losing the excitement of three chords played loudly in a small room. Across more than five decades, he wrote about people rarely given much space in mainstream popular music, pushed electric guitars toward abstraction and noise, celebrated the possibilities of a perfectly …
Feb 27 2025
Rolly Crump belonged to a generation of Disney artists who were asked to do something almost unprecedented: take the visual imagination developed inside animation studios and turn it into physical places people could walk through. In Crump’s hands, that challenge produced spinning kinetic sculptures, strange clocks, talking tikis, haunted contraptions, psychedelic patterns, theatrical shops, enchanted …
Feb 21 2025
Few twentieth-century artists moved as comfortably between ancient mythology and the modern machine as Hans Erni. Human bodies, horses, birds, mathematical diagrams, airplanes, scientific instruments, athletes, planets, and abstract lines could all occupy the same visual world. Rather than treating art and science as opposing forces, Erni spent much of his extraordinarily long career searching …
Feb 19 2025
Some film music announces itself with enormous orchestras, booming percussion, and melodies designed to tell an audience exactly what to feel. Shigeru Umebayashi often takes the opposite approach. A few strings, a slow waltz, a repeated phrase, or a melody that seems to circle endlessly around an unresolved emotion can become more powerful than an …
Feb 13 2025
Imagine entering a room where the distinction between furniture, floor, walls, ceiling, lighting, and sculpture has almost disappeared. The carpet climbs into upholstered platforms. Curving forms rise from the floor like strange geological formations. Lamps glow inside fields of saturated red, orange, purple, and blue. There may be no conventional chair at all, because the …
Feb 10 2025
Before Bob Dylan became Bob Dylan, before folk music collided with rock and roll, and before Greenwich Village became permanently associated with acoustic guitars and politically charged coffeehouse songs, Dave Van Ronk was already there. With a booming, rough-edged voice, a sophisticated guitar style, an encyclopedic knowledge of traditional music, and a personality large enough …
Feb 05 2025
“There it is, Wendy! Second star to the right and straight on ’til morning.” Peter Pan On February 5, 1953, audiences were invited to leave London behind, think happy thoughts, and fly toward the second star to the right. Walt Disney’s Peter Pan transformed J. M. Barrie’s enduring story of the boy who refused to …
