Some thoughts on Notre Dame Cathedral, which caught fire Monday.
Art Deco in the Toddlin’ Town
Art Deco Chicago: Designing Modern America, distributed for the Chicago Art Deco Society by Yale University Press, provides an occasion for examining the city’s art deco history. Through five scholarly essays and 101 notable objects and buildings, Art Deco Chicago reevaluates art deco’s and Chicago’s cultural and economic contributions to the United States during the Machine Age.
Ring Master: Tolkien at the Morgan Library
Before writing The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien had been hired by Oxford and Leeds Universities to teach philology, the study of languages. The attention he paid to words was at the heart of his creative process, which goes under the microscope this winter at the Morgan Library and Museum in Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth.
Agra Culture
Today, the World Monuments Fund announced the completion of four years’ conservation work on two gardens in Agra, India.
Curious Objects: Glass Act—John Stuart Gordon and the Vitreous Curiosities of Yale
Ben Miller examines a piece of trinitite—glass formed in the 1945 Trinity nuclear test—and a stained-glass window formerly installed in Yale’s Hopper College, both featured in John Stuart Gordon’s new book “American Glass.”
Victor Hugo’s storm-swept drawings at the Hammer
Stones to Stains: The Drawings of Victor Hugo at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles shines a light on sixty-four drawings selected from the more than three thousand sheets of illustrations that Hugo left to the world.
Contemporary art confronts the Gilded Age at the Driehaus
Work by Yinka Shonibare launches a new exhibition series in March
Strange visions: surrealist photography in Mexico
Mexico’s surrealist painters and writers are well-known; perhaps less familiar are its surrealist photographers.
New Life for a Renaissance Woman from Brooklyn
Back in January, a painting at Skinner Auctions’ sale of American and European Works of Art caught the eye of journalist and historian Eve M. Kahn. It was striking: a seated, semi-nude woman wearing a long, flowing train, tightly cropped and rendered with deft, impressionistic brush strokes. Kahn was eager to learn more about the artist, Edith Varian Cockcroft (1881–1962), but the facts of the Brooklyn native’s life proved elusive.
Farther afield
In Antwerp, an arts festival toasts the legacy of Peter Paul Rubens