Although Raphael for much of the last five hundred years has been celebrated as a prince of painters, today he is widely dismissed as no more than a kind of chief courtier: supreme in grace and rhetoric, yet mannered and unnatural, even insincere. But Raphael seems so abstract and remote because we have so little direct contact with him. “Raphael: The Drawings,” on view at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, provides a rare chance to see up close a wide array of the artist’s works from throughout his life, and the effect is thrilling and revelatory.
bookreview
Liu Xiaobo: The Man Who Stayed
Like late-nineteenth-century scholar Tan Sitong, Liu Xiaobo threw his weight behind a cause that in its immediate aftermath seemed hopeless—in Liu’s case, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. But with time, history vindicated Tan; I wonder if it will do the same for Liu.
The Passion of Liu Xiaobo
Liu Xiaobo felt haunted by the “lost souls” of Tiananmen, the aggrieved ghosts of students and workers alike whose ages would forever be the same as on the night they died. His “final statement” at his trial in December 2009 opens: “June 1989 has been the major turning point in my life.” In October 2010, when his wife Liu Xia brought him the news of his Nobel Peace Prize, she reports that he commented, “This is for the aggrieved ghosts.”
Waking Up to the Trumpian World
After months of talk about what it would take to get Trump impeached, analysts are calling this the “smoking gun” that could actually bring his downfall. Why does the occasion feel so momentous (other than because we want it to be)? After all, we learned only that Don Jr. said in confidence roughly the same thing that his father said for all the world to hear. But the news has been as shocking as it has because, after all this time, we still have not learned to take Trump’s public utterances seriously.
The Radical Success of Comme des Garçons
Known for her voluminous, monochromatic, and architectural silhouettes, Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo makes designs that appear to be more concerned with novelty and sparking interest and dialogue than with straightforward attraction or luxury. One gets the sense, wandering the Met and walking the streets of New York City alike, that her label, Comme des Garçons, is one of the few that have built a viable business while truly challenging industry norms.
Louis Kahn’s Endangered Floating Concert Hall
To the Editors: I read Martin Filler’s sweeping survey of Louis Kahn’s life and work with great interest. Louis Kahn has been on my mind lately—not for the striking creations that testify to his decades as “America’s master builder,” so many of which I know and love, but for his brief tenure as a shipwright.
Shakespeare’s Pornography of Power
Measure for Measure invites updating, but it’s in the nature of the work that whatever contemporary analogies are invoked cannot quite make sense of what happens. The play is a perpetual questioning machine, exquisitely functional, set to a relentless tempo, yet a machine that bristles and crackles in its joints with contradiction and discomfort.
The Class Renegade
Those of us who move from the provinces pay a toll at the city’s gate, a toll that is doubled in the years that follow as we try to find a balance between what was so briskly discarded and what was so carefully, hesitantly, slyly put in its place. More than thirty years ago, when I was in Egypt, I met a cultivated English couple who invited me to stay in their house in London on my way back to Ireland. They could not have been more charming.
The Perennial Student
What is a shadow? Nothing in itself, you might say: a mere local lack of light, in a space that is otherwise lit up. Light, which allows us to see and know the world, is the normal precondition for picturing things. Cast shadows may help us interpret a picture by indicating where light comes from and where objects stand, but if you survey art history, you find the majority of painters giving them minor parts at most. A minority, however, turns these assumptions upside down, treating shadow as the preexistent condition and light as its shock interruption.
South Korea’s Real Fear
The primary worry in South Korea has not been its bizarre and militaristic neighbor to the north; most Koreans are by now long used to living within close firing range of Pyongyang and do not think it will attack unless provoked. What really worries them is that the new US president doesn’t know the complexity of the situation—and is too contemptuous of the State Department to be instructed.
Sig Nordal 