Josef Albers’s photographs of carved stone façades and symmetrical courtyards pay homage less to the square than to the genius of Mayan or Zapotec engineering—as well as the power of strong diagonals. Mexico provided Albers with an alternate classical tradition. The show includes several rigorous line studies clearly inspired by the ziggurats of Monte Albán and Chichén Itzá. Compared to his best-known work, Albers’s early geometric abstractions and many of the Mexican paintings are distinctly free-form (some, from the 1930s, might be described as jazzy), and are frequently concerned with the representation of three-dimensional space. By 1950, Albers is concentrating almost entirely on flatness, rectangles, and the interaction of color.
Books
A Sketched Guide to Michelangelo
There are three extremely horny artists with exhibits at the Met right now. Rodin (a last name artist), David Hockney (arguably a full name artist), and Michelangelo (a first name artist). It’s fun to watch people look at the work with extremely studious expressions on their faces. Although it would be nicer if there were fewer people.
Rulfo: Immortal Scribe of the Dead
Against the grain of the baroque, overwrought style that had seemed to define Latin American literature, each word of Juan Rulfo’s fiction emerges as if extracted from the soil, leaving readers to apprehend what is held back, to divine the vast unspoken world of extinction, the final silence that awaits us all. Without Rulfo’s groundbreaking work, which blended the regional realism and social critique then in vogue with high-modernist experimentation, it is hard to imagine that Gabriel García Márquez could have composed One Hundred Years of Solitude.
In the Cauldron at Midnight
Can a woman be a muse and an artist? In theory, yes. In practice, the roles seldom overlap comfortably. “All that means is you’re someone else’s object,” as Leonora Carrington put it. Although her early self-portrait, The Inn of the Dawn Horse, conveys an exhilarating self-confidence through both the central figure and the animal surrogates around her, especially the galloping white horse, her Portrait of Max Ernst, which depicts the German Surrealist as his alter ego, Loplop, the Bird Superior, bears a mixed message: he carries a tiny horse trapped in a lantern, and the white horse behind him is frozen stiff.
A Modern Greek Tragedy
Did Greece have any way of breaking out of Germany’s grip? The common criticism of Yanis Varoufakis’s period in office is that he was an intellectual who took the knife of logic to a political gunfight. He was ill equipped from the start. His memoir, Adults in the Room: My Battle with the European and American Deep Establishment, is at pains to show that this interpretation is mistaken.
‘Black Panther’: Choose Your Weapons
Movies often flatten real African cultures into two-dimensional imagery—stereotypes in stereo, a quilt of clichés. But Wakanda, as everyone keeps reminding us, doesn’t exist. This gave Ryan Coogler free rein to create a country in the subjunctive mode: what if…? Given a blank canvas, he chose to sculpt and embroider various materials, genres, and tones. Black Panther is Shakespeare meets Shaka Zulu, Too $hort in Timbuktu.
Words to Live By
From the moment of my diagnosis, I pondered the nature of love: Had I left my sons enough of it? Does love endure? Is love bankable? I stumble upon the answer courtesy of an illness that forced me to look back on a childhood marked by loss and love’s absence. In an orphan’s life such as my own, I only now see that if you’re parentless and live on your wits, you look out for love, take it if you find it, look out for more. But you don’t bank the love; you live off reserves, and do not accrue funds. My sons, by contrast, are emotionally entitled; they default to a state of happiness whose roots reach deep, deep into the constancy of love.
Luther vs. Erasmus: When Populism First Eclipsed the Liberal Elite
Erasmus was an internationalist who sought to establish a borderless Christian union; Luther was a nationalist who appealed to the patriotism of the German people. Where Erasmus wrote exclusively in Latin, Luther often used the vernacular, the better to reach the common man. Erasmus wanted to educate a learned caste; Luther, to evangelize the masses. For years, they waged a battle of ideas, with each seeking to win over Europe to his side. But in a turbulent and polarized age, Erasmus became an increasingly marginal figure: the archetypal reasonable liberal.
Congo for the Congolese
Beneath Congo’s soil lies an estimated $24 trillion in natural resources, but this wealth is also the source of untold suffering. Today, more Congolese are displaced from their homes than Syrians, Iraqis, Yemenis, or Rohingyas, yet their miseries are all but invisible, in part because the identities and aims of Congo’s myriad combatants are mystified by layers of rumor and misinformation, which serve the interests of those who profit from the mayhem. But pieces of the puzzle sometimes emerge.
Roth Agonistes
During his early writing years in Chicago, Philip Roth began each morning by shouting at the young face peering out from the mirror at him: “Attack! Attack!” The force of Roth’s attack, sustained for more than a half-century, is what made his retirement so startling. It is also the quality that, more than anything, sustains his Why Write?: Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013.
Sig Nordal 