Gabriel’s Moon, by William Boyd (Grove Atlantic): Stylish is the word that came to my mind while reading Gabriel’s Moon, the newest novel from the prolific William Boyd. A tale of accidental espionage, it has the flavor of one of Graham Greene’s so-called entertainments but contains appealing depths too. Moving from Brazzaville to London to Madrid, Cadiz, and Warsaw in the 1960s, this is a cheerful Cold War romp. —BR
Niko Pirosmanashvili: A Study of His Life and Art, by Tengiz Mirzashvili & Arkady Troyanker (Unicorn Publishing Group): When Niko Pirosmanashvili: A Study of His Life and Art arrived at my door, I quite seriously thought that a small piece of furniture had just been delivered—but no, it was only this hefty doorstop of a book, the largest I now own, and the remarkable fruit of almost fifty years of on-and-off guerilla scholarship by a pair of amateur art historians. Defying all odds, Tengiz Mirzashvili and Arkady Troyanker scoured the tangled backstreets of Tbilisi and villages of rural Georgia to document the last oral sources and locations relating to Niko Pirosmani (1862–1918), the self-taught artist whose improbable journey from homeless sign-painter to avant-garde doyen I recounted in the December 2023 issue of The New Criterion. As esoteric as its subject might sound, this book holds universal appeal, for in its six hundred pages—jam-packed with beautifully printed antique photographs and full-color details of Pirosmani’s paintings—the story of Georgia and a bygone, preindustrial world of country feasts, high Easter holidays, and harvest-time revelry is told with elegiac beauty. —IS
“Neue Sachlichkeit / New Objectivity,” at the Neue Galerie, New York (through May 26): Visitors to the Neue Galerie are more often than not treated to the cream of the crop of Expressionism: Egon Schiele last winter, the exquisite Paula Modersohn-Becker last summer and fall, and the jewels of the permanent collection, to cite a few examples. So perhaps it’s high time for something different. In the centennial year of the influential “Neue Sachlichkeit” show at the Kunsthalle Mannheim displaying novel developments in German art following the First World War, the Neue has mounted a show of the same title, revisiting the group that included such artists as Otto Dix, George Grosz, Alexander Kanoldt, and Georg Schrimpf. The difference from Expressionism is clear from the name, meaning “New Objectivity” in English, but within the movement two camps duked it out: the Classicists and the Verists. The former, according to the 1925 exhibition’s curator, was “rooted in that which is timeless”; the latter, “born rather from a denial of art,” had a “primitive . . . nervous obsession with the exposure of the self.” Take your pick, and look out for James Panero’s review in a forthcoming issue of The New Criterion. —SM
“Maritime City,” at the South Street Seaport Museum, New York (opening March 12): In 2012 the floodwaters of Superstorm Sandy inundated the Fulton Street buildings of the South Street Seaport Museum, located since 1967 among what remains of New York’s storied waterfront in lower Manhattan. Now the Seaport’s historic collection has found a new safe harbor just up the block on Water Street, in the 1868 A. A. Thomson & Co. warehouse building. Renovated by Beyer Blinder Belle, this twelve-thousand-square-foot facility has been converted into three floors of up-to-date exhibition space. “Maritime City,” the Thomson building’s inaugural exhibition, now gathers 540 highlights from the Seaport’s permanent collection in a new ship-shape presentation designed by Marvel Architects that anchors four centuries of waterfront history while setting the imagination blissfully adrift. —JP
Dispatch:
“An unusual recital,” by Jay Nordlinger. On Angel Blue & Lang Lang at Carnegie Hall.
By the Editors:
“Swinburne, Rosetti, and the Power of the Erased Line”
Roger Kimball, American Greatness
From the Archives:
“Matisse: into the Twenties,” by Jed Perl (February 1987). On Matisse’s paintings.
