El Greco, The Burial of the Count Orgaz, 1586, detail
Latest Notebook Entries »
- Tuesday, January 21, 2020 Morning Search This morning, the urge to draft. Paged through some photos from the summer. A blurred and distorted picture, from inside a church in Venice. Had I seen this painting? By the other photos, it must have been from San Giacomo dell’Orio, across from the apartment where we stayed. But I could not recall it. So beautiful, though, and familiar as if through ... more»
- Tuesday, September 10, 2019 A Shawl for Morisot Last summer, the summer of 2018, I was immersed in the work of Berthe Morisot. I spent three days in Québec City, at the Musée national des beaux-arts de Québec, at the revelatory Morisot retrospective, which I reviewed for Apollo Magazine. https://www.apollo-magazine.com/berthe-morisot-comes-into-her-own/ I was one of the critics who called for a reconstitution of our understanding of Impressionism with Morisot centrally placed. I ... more»
Latest News »
- Tuesday, January 21, 2020 Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels forthcoming from FSG, May 2020 My third book, Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels will be published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, May 5, 2020. The book is a reflection on a period of life, when our children were born and began to grow, and my father died, and during which I seemed only to read five novels by Jane Austen. The cover was designed by Na ... more»
- Friday, September 6, 2019 Review of Manet and Modern Beauty in Apollo I reviewed Manet and Modern Beauty , which was at the Art Institute of Chicago this summer, for Apollo Magazine. The review is here: https://www.apollo-magazine.com/manet-modern-beauty-exhibition-review/ ... more»
Featured Essays »
- Gold, Golden, Gilded, GlitteringThis essay, on a long complex history of overlap in financial and artistic inventions, appeared in The Believer in the Nov / Dec 2012 issue. ... more»
- Looking at Poussin This essay, on the occasion of the Metropolitan Museum's Poussin Exhibition, "Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions," February 12-May 11, 2008, appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of The Threepenny Review . ... more»