Clive James has a high-maintenance girlfriend: the reader. To educate this girlfriend, to correct her wayward mind and haphazard schooling, he has written more than 100 loosely related essays on artists, intellectuals and tyrants, mostly of the 20th century—a crash course in modern history and culture. His selection is idiosyncratic, and his structure organic, like Read More
The Women of Giacometti, an array of paintings and sculpture by the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) on display at Pace Wildenstein, prompts a kind of yearning that has become familiar at the 57th Street branch of the gallery. Past shows bringing together Bonnard and Rothko, de Kooning and Dubuffet, Mondrian and Ad Reinhardt, and Read More
I’m not sure how I feel at present about all the plays this fall wrestling with the tragedy of Sept. 11. One is Recent Tragic Events , a soap opera with a twist; another, Portraits , is a solemn affair; and the one I just caught, the well-received Omnium Gatherum by Theresa Rebeck and Alexandra Read More
In the summer of 1949, a 22-year-old graduate student from the University of Chicago arrived in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Sorbonne. His name was Herbert Lust, a self-described “farm boy from Indiana” who had been orphaned at the age of nine. “I was at that time among the top scholars Read More
