Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Books of 2019

This morning, AA said to me by text, "Aren't you going to blog about your Books of 2019?" And so here I am doing it, while he's on an airplane heading back home so we can celebrate New Year's Eve just in time with a glass of prosecco. Normally I write this post soon after the annual 100 Notable Books from The New York Times comes out, but we were away at that time and . . . well, that thing called daily life just kept delaying things. Over the last few years, though, I've discovered that not all of the books on the list are among my favorites once I actually read them. Case in point: last year, Tana French's The Witch Elm and Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry were on their list, and I was eager to read them, but to be frank I didn't find either book to be "best" reads. In my opinion, French's book was too dense with excessive details for that type of book (mystery/thriller), so by the time you started getting into the actual mystery, the suspense wasn't there for me. Halliday's book, in turn, was creative as a writing experiment (two novellas that seem to have nothing to do with one another, then somehow become linked in a coda-story), so it wasn't as if I didn't like the book, but it just wasn't what I would consider to be a favorite. All that said, I had commented last year about looking forward to reading Michelle Obama's autobiography, and that was great--inspiring even! I guess I'm biased, but what made it such an enjoyable read was that it felt like she was talking to you the entire time, telling you not just about her life but the lessons she learned from her experiences.

The image you see above is undoubtedly my favorite novel that I read this year. Colson Whitehead's new book was published in 2019 and I bought and read it immediately. I loved The Underground Railroad, as painful as that book was to read, so while The Nickel Boys wasn't "magically realistic" as components of his previous book was, the pain and anguish, and the lessons we have to learn still about America's history of racism and abuse of power, were remarkably strong with completely different types of stories. Whitehead has this uncanny ability in these two books to create a narrative voice that allows you to feel the pain of his characters, but still keep yourself at a distance so you can process it objectively. I see him as an heir to Toni Morrison in some ways. I have no doubt that these two books will be models of a new American literature for generations to come, much the same way Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird has been. That was a book I also finally read earlier this year for the first time. I discovered the Icelandic author Sjón this year with his fairy-tale-with-a-twist The Blue Fox, and I thoroughly enjoyed, both as a mystery and a meta-novel, Anthony Horowitz's clever The Word Is Murder. I should add that a year ago when I did my last books post, I was worried that Persuasion wasn't going to end well, but I'm pleased to say that it was in fact probably my favorite Jane Austen novel of them all. I read somewhere that if you loved Pride and Prejudice as a young person, Persuasion is the book you read as a mature adult to find satisfaction in her writing. It is so true.

In the world of non-fiction, I enjoyed and learned a lot from Richard Holmes's group biography The Age of Wonder, on the history of science and Romanticism around the years 1800. I read the collection of essays Beyond the Face, providing new interpretations on portraiture in the history of art of the United States and beyond, and published a book review of it which you can read here as well as my blog post here where I add more about the artist Carrie Mae Weems. I also read Anthea Callen's new art history/anatomy book Looking at Men, and published an extended book review essay in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, which you can read here. Right now, my bedtime read is Robert K. Massie's biography of Catherine the Great, and my subway reading is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, which I read back in college (almost 30 years ago!), but decided to revisit all these years later.

It seemed like a good idea to actually share the full list of the 30 books I've read this year. This is the order in which I finished them, and I've included the publication year in brackets, and my star rankings (5-stars is highest!) to help anyone along if they decide they want to read these. Here's to 2020 and more books to read!


  • Persuasion by Jane Austen [1818] (*****)
  • To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee [1960] (*****)
  • The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes [2008] (*****)
  • Beyond the Face: New Perspectives on Portraiture by Wendy Wick Reaves, ed. [2018] (****)
  • Arctic Chill by Arnaldur Indridason, trans. B. Scudder & V. Cribb [2005] (****)
  • The Blue Fox by Sjón, trans. V. Cribb [2004] (*****)
  • Rogues’ Gallery: The Rise (and Occasional Fall) of Art Dealers, the Hidden Players in the History of Art by Philip Hook [2017] (***)
  • The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: Stories by Hilary Mantel [2014] (***)
  • The Body in Three Dimensions by Tom Flynn [1998] (***)
  • Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante, trans. Ann Goldstein [1999] (****)
  • Looking at Men: Art, Anatomy and the Modern Male Body [2018] (***)
  • Becoming by Michelle Obama [2018] (*****)
  • The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware [2018] (***)
  • The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Metaphor of Modernity by Linda Nochlin [1994] (****)
  • Serpents in Eden: Countryside Crimes by Martin Edwards, ed. [2016] (****)
  • Model and Supermodel: The Artist's Model in British Art and Culture by J. Desmarais, M. Postle & W. Vaughan, eds. [2006] (****)
  • Bloomsbury at Home by Pamela Todd [1999] (****)
  • Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday [2018] (****)
  • Duncan Grant and the Bloomsbury Group by Douglas Blair Turnbaugh [1987] (***)
  • The Child’s Child by Barbara Vine [2012] (***)
  • The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead [2019] (*****)
  • The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst [2017] (****)
  • Harm Done by Ruth Rendell [1999] (****)
  • Bacchante and Infant Faun: Tradition, Controversy, and Legacy by Thayer Tolles [2019] (****)
  • 30 Favorites Celebrating 30 Years by Stacia Lewandowski & Zaplin Lampert Gallery [2017] (***)
  • The Stonewall Reader by Jason Baumann, ed. [2019] (***)
  • Teaching in the Art Museum: Interpretation as Experience by Rika Burnham & Elliott Kai-Kee [2011] (****)
  • Losing Helen: An Essay by Carol Becker [2016] (*****)
  • The Witch Elm by Tana French [2018] (***)
  • The Word Is Murder by Anthony Horowitz [2018] (*****) 

Monday, December 2, 2019

First Snowfall & Snowstorm: 2019-2020 Fall/Winter

Has it really been almost nine months since I last blogged? One would like to imagine that this period of gestation might have led to the birth of something magnificent and wonderful that I could announce here.

Alas, no. It's just snow.

Perhaps it was the annual recurrence of this phenomenon of nature in the Northeast (i.e. here and here) that has drawn me back to the blog. Perhaps it is the anticipation and expectation of the cold season that has inspired me to return, huddled in front of my laptop, listening to the loud rush of gusty air from the heating unit not too far away. I don't want to make any claims or set hopes high: let's take all this one day at a time...

Today was our first snowfall and, I think it's safe to say, our first snowstorm, here in the NYC area, as we received a few inches for sure. I took the picture you see here at 3:03 PM on the campus of Columbia University. I was on a coffee break, and I was surprised to see that the snow was sticking. The campus plows had already come through at least once.

Technically, though, I imagine I should claim the first snowfall for AA and me actually was last Thursday--yes, on Thanksgiving!--not here in the NYC area but in Chicago. We were getting ready to head out to our "Friendsgiving" dinner when AA noticed snow flurries out our window on the 28th floor. By the time we went downstairs, however, the snow flurries had already dissipated into dewy drops, making me realize that what we saw above never actually made it to the ground. Indeed, on the ground, no one even knew that it had been snowing. It was an interesting existential moment: the realization that two different people in the same location (albeit, at different vertical planes) could experience nature in two very different ways...

Have you missed this?  More anon from bklynbiblio...I hope...

Sunday, April 14, 2019

British Portraits at Columbia Catalogue

Just over a month ago, I blogged about the new exhibition about four British portraits that we have on view at Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library. The paintings are from Columbia's permanent collection. I'm pleased to share the news that the pamphlet-type catalogue we've published is now available for free to download from Columbia's Academic Commons network (click here). I'm incredibly pleased with this came out, which is a testament to the incredible design skills of Katherine Prater, one of my co-workers. The essays are extended versions of the didactic panels Mateusz and I wrote.

Ten days ago, on April 4th, we hosted an invitation-only Evening at Avery to celebrate the exhibition and bring more paintings out to show. Dr. Meredith Gamer was our keynote speaker, and my co-curator MM and I also gave brief talks that were well-received. My thanks to Paul Jeromack for sending me pictures he took from the evening, which I am posting here.




The Social Media Phenomenon (aka Naked Men)

24 hours ago, I was in Chelsea to see two exhibitions: Jeff Miller's show "Through the Looking-Glass: Alter Egos & Others" at the Atlantic Gallery; and "The Young and Evil" curated by Jarrett Earnest at David Zwirner. Soon afterward, I posted on my Instagram account pictures showing installation views and object shots from both shows. Whenever I post on Instagram, the norm for me is about 50-60 likes. Occasionally, it goes up to the 80+, and I've had about 4 posts that were liked by over 100 people. Let's face it: despite some personal "fans" (you are reading this right now!), I'm not a social media phenomenon, nor have I ever aspired to be. So you can probably imagine my complete shock and surprise how--only 24 hours later--I now have over 1,300 likes on my Instagram post about the exhibition at David Zwirner. I am literally stunned by this and--dare I say--even a little disturbed by it. I said to AA at least twice today "post a picture of a painting of a naked man..." Clearly that has something to do with it. But there has to be something else going on. I wonder if it is some sort of algorithm, pushing the image higher in the search for people or coming up randomly on people's Instagram posts because friends-of-friends-of-friends are liking it, and it's growing exponentially as a result. I don't think my hashtags (e.g. #queerart #stonewall50 etc.) are that special, but maybe I'm wrong. It has occurred to me that perhaps the gallery is somehow actively pushing the feed, but I don't see how they could do that. In any case, it's all completely bizarre how over 1,300 people I have never met, who live everywhere in the world, are liking these pictures. A few have commented and asked questions, so I've helped identify the works and responded to them. Some have started following me now, which is how this is supposed to work I imagine, and I in turn have chosen to follow a few back.

What is fantastic about the exhibition (which has now closed--yesterday was the last day) is that it presents a number of pictures never published before and rarely, if ever, seen by the public, all depicting works of art by a group of gay male artists (and women close to them) who were all active in the 1930s and 1940s in New York City.  The artists on view include Paul Cadmus, Jared French, George Platt Lynes, George Tooker, and so on. The style of art is largely figurative, somewhat surrealist, frequently provocative (and unapologetically so), and using older painting techniques out of favor at the time (e.g. tempera paint). Ultimately, it presents an alternative canon of American art, and it challenges the modernist tendencies that lean towards abstraction and social realism--art movements almost completely dominated by heterosexual men, culminating in the mid-century, uber-macho-modernity of Abstract Expressionism (i.e. Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, etc.). One of the artists who has been underappreciated and clearly comes to the foreground in the show is the Russian-born artist Pavel Tchelitchew (1898-1957). The image you see above is by him: The Lion Boy, 1936-37, gouache on paper mounted onto canvas. The stark hyperrealism of the muscular, blonde youth whose mane-like hair bursts from his body even more strongly than that from his head is without a doubt incredibly startling to see. The fact that it is uncomfortable for some to even see it now, or the fact that so many others are enamored of it because of its eroticism, reinforces how unusual such images are in our society. Would anyone have reacted the same way if it was a painting of a nude woman with blonde hair? I doubt it. Even if it were a spectacular painting, I can't imagine that it would have generated over 1,300 likes just 24 hours after I had posted the picture.

Going back to Jeff Miller's show, if you're in the NYC area, you should go see his show too before it closes next week. Like the other exhibition profiling gay male artists, Miller exhibits his own interpretation of the idealized male body. His drawings have a fascinating energy to them, and his hyperrealistic sculptures play with ideas of ego and superego in their doubling effect. So far, though, the post of his pictures on Instagram has only generated about 40 likes in 24 hours. The thing is, that is actually a great number! But when compared to the other post, it just demonstrates that there is something more going on that has to explain how the other post has literally shot through the social media roof.

Saturday, March 16, 2019

Review: Beyond the Face (and Carrie Mae Weems)

Earlier this month, ARLIS/NA Reviews published my short review on the new book Beyond the Face: New Perspectives on Portraiture, which was published in 2018 by the Smithsonian Institution, National Portrait Gallery, as part of its 50th anniversary celebration. Edited by curator emerita Wendy Wick Reaves, the book includes her introduction and sixteen essays by junior and established scholars on aspects of American portraiture. You can read my review here. The book truly does offer new insights into thinking about American portraiture, historical and modern/contemporary, with a particular emphasis on non-white artists and representations thereof. The essays on photography were among the most interesting, and I mentioned in the review that one scholar's take on a photograph by Carrie Mae Weems was brilliant. I thought I would engage with that a little more here.

Nikki A. Greene's essay, "Habla LAMADRE: Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, Carrie Mae Weems, and Black Feminist Performance," focused on these two women artists, but more importantly engaged with the way that women of color have been excluded historically as makers of art from the great museum collections and exhibition programs. Weems's 2014 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum was unprecedented, as she was the first African-American woman to have a show there. I remember the exhibition well; it was incredibly moving and powerful. Weems's photographs from her Museums series position the artist as a Ruckenfigur, displaying her body shrouded in black to the viewer as she stands outside the great cultural institutions and museums worldwide as an outsider. In her essay, Greene writes of the image you see here, Guggenheim Bilbao, 2006, as follows:
Weems journeyed to northern Spain ... to encounter the seduction of the sweeping, undulating, titanium walls of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, designed by Frank Gehry and completed in 1997. In the photograph Guggenheim Bilbao, Weems stands as a dark silhouette in her black, long-sleeved dress with her back to the viewer .... Weems stretches her arms outward to rest her hands on a white railing that heightens the chasm between her and the museum as water gently ripples below her. The framing of this photograph plays on the building's ship-like forms, with stern-like triangular peaks making Weems appear as if she is viewing the museum across a body of water from her own ship. Weems's serenity in the face of the immensity of the museum's presence grounds the viewer, encouraging a pause as the two ships purportedly confront each other. This moment of recognition of each other's position in space acknowledges their unreachability. (pp. 294-95)
What Greene also intimates with this ship-like allusion is the history of the transatlantic slave trade and the ongoing legacy of slavery as a hindrance to people of color, in this instance in an art world dominated by white privilege and the 1%. Greene's reading of this image is wonderfully intuitive.

The next book I'm scheduled to review for a publication is this: Looking at Men: Art, Anatomy and the Modern Male Body by Anthea Callen (2018). The book focuses on the nineteenth century. It should prove an interesting read, incorporating issues of science and medicine along with artistic practice, framed by the development of heterosexual, homosocial, and homosexual identities over the course of the century. Or so I hope!

Saturday, March 2, 2019

British Portraits at Columbia Exhibition

On February 11th, we officially opened a new exhibition at work that I curated with PhD art-history student Mateusz Mayer. The show is entitled Hoppner, Beechey, Fisher, Lavery: Researching Columbia's Portraits, and is on view in Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Wallach Study Center for Art & Architecture, until May 10th. It is open to the public Mon-Fri, 9am-5pm. This focused exhibition showcases four rarely-seen historical British portraits from the permanent collection, and transforms them into objects of study rather than present them as traditional museum-style masterpieces by these artists. The portraits were painted between the years 1800 and 1927, and the show highlights new discoveries that we have made about them, ranging from biography to provenance to political propaganda. As examples of British portraits, the show also seeks to query the idea of "British-ness," both in its historical context and in the age of Brexit.

One of the paintings on view is the work you see here, a portrait of King George III by Sir William Beechey and his studio. The portrait depicts the king wearing a field marshal's uniform, his bicorn hat and Star of the Order of the Garter prominent ornaments to his outfit. The painting is an artist's copy of his life-sized portrait of the king that he exhibited at the 1800 Royal Academy exhibition, now in the Royal Collection. The painting became so popular (arguably a form of political propaganda) that Beechey's studio produced numerous replicas and copies, some with various backgrounds and in half-size and portrait-bust versions. In the background of this portrait is Windsor Castle, the king's primary residence, where Beechey likely painted the original version. This painting was a gift to Columbia in 1943 by Mrs. Mary Hill Hill. Her doubled surname is not an accident: her father and husband, both of whom were railroad magnates, had the same last names, but there were no family relations between them. Although originally from Minnesota, Mrs. Hill Hill lived at the time of the donation in Tarrytown, NY, and auction catalogs after her death show that she was an avid collector of 18th-century British portraits and George III silver.

A free accompanying exhibition catalog will be made available very soon, so I'll post a link to the PDF version when it's ready.

First Snowstorm: 2019 Winter

This snow season has been a bit strange. We had an early first snowfall back in November, and while we've had a couple of light flurries since then, it's taken until during this past night and this morning for us to have what I would qualify as being some semblance of a snowstorm. This is a photo I took outside our loft window about 7:40am this morning (and, yes, it is coincidentally the same view that I posted last time!). By that time Newark Airport was reporting over 4 inches of snow. It's all supposed to stop in a little while, but then snow again tomorrow and all Sunday night, so Monday morning commuting should be a bit miserable. It's always lovely to see the snow come down and blanket everything in shimmering whiteness; the dirty snow and mucky slush is the let-down afterward. Overall, though, this has been a light snow season as compared to other years.

Saturday, January 12, 2019

Projects of 2018

Here is my last "highlights" list from 2018...a little late, perhaps, but not by much... (Here is the 2017 list.) I've discovered it's beneficial for me to record these events because it helps me take stock of the activities I've been involved with and what I've accomplished. I have a tendency to forget things and move on, and reflecting on these things annually makes me realize that I am doing quite a lot professionally and that I need to stop being so self-critical about what it is that I am not doing.

The picture you see here commemorates one of the more memorable events. In early October, I joined my fellow Solomaniac friend & colleague Carolyn Conroy and numerous descendants of the Solomon/Salaman family for the rededication of the Salaman family graves and a visit to the recently rededicated grave of Simeon Solomon, all at Willesden Jewish Cemetery in London. It was a special and humbling moment to be there.

In addition to all our travels (professional and vacation), here is the 2018 list of projects...

Saturday, January 5, 2019

600 Posts!

When I wrote my annual New Year's post, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that was my 599th blog post. When I went back to see when #500 was, I was even more surprised to realize it had taken place on New Year's Day in 2015...AND that #400 had coincided with 2013 New Year's. It seems oddly serendipitous, then, that my 600th post is happening now, and still rather amazing that I've had this blog going for 10 years now. I've decided to leave the design of the blog as-is for now, but it's always fun to look at statistics and see how the site has been reached and what are the most popular posts.

The blog statistics show that I've now had 185,536 page views since August 2008, with visitors mostly coming from U.S. Internet addresses, followed by Russia (!), France, United Kingdom, and Germany, with Italy just barely behind Germany. Readers are mostly coming from Internet Explorer browsers still, although that has dropped down a few percents since 2015 to 36%, while Firefox (30%) and Chrome (22%) use has gone up respectively by 4% and 3% since 500 posts. Not surprisingly, Google searching accounts for about 2/3 of all the statistics in terms of being directed to specific posts. When I look at the most popular blog posts since August 2008, I have to laugh that #1 has remained the most frequently visited/read post (you wouldn't believe how much spam commentary I get on that one!). What was #4 on the 500th mark has bumped up to #2, and remarkably my #s 3, 4, and 5 are all new posts since 2015. Who knew that my Inauguration Day 2017 rant would generate such a high number of reads!? Here's the current ranking:
#1: Male Enhancement [Jul. 5, 2010; 2675 views]
#2: Post-Queer Art History [Oct. 13, 2009; 1699 views]
#3: President Tyrant [Jan. 21, 2017; 1590 views]
#4: Poem #2 [Jan. 30, 2017; 1451 views]
#5: Poem #1 [Nov. 29, 2016; 1350 views]

It is interesting that my recording of two poems, relating them to certain events at the time, come up as being so popular. I suspect it has to do with the fact that someone is searching for the actual poems or poetry by the authors (in this case respectively Emma Lazarus and Florine Stettheimer), but I appreciate their discovery here and makes me wonder if there is a renewed interest in reading poetry? Last year, I read Richard Blanco's memoirs For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet's Journey, which was so fantastic in terms of his life experience as a gay Latino in America, but also his zeal and drive for poetry and writing, and reading his poem at Pres. Obama's inauguration. Perhaps we all need more poetry in our lives...

Thank you to the readers who contact me with encouragement to continue blogging along!

Tuesday, January 1, 2019

Happy 2019!


Earlier today I was speaking to Uncle Eddy and I said to him, "Can you imagine it's 2019?!"--to which he replied, "NO!" The way time flies by, it won't be long before we hit 2028, the centenary of his birth! We spent a lovely Christmas and the week afterward with AA's family in Kansas City, MO. Aside from family visits, I indulged in my first-ever KC barbecue dinner (delicious, but heavy on meat), and we visited the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, and the National World War I Memorial and Museum over the course of the week. We flew home on Sunday, then headed into the City the next day for a New Year's Eve dinner with AR, GM, and GG. It was pouring in NYC, so everyone gathered for the Times Square ball-drop got drenched, including Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper (above), whom we watched while staying toasty warm and dry just a few blocks away watching and supporting our fellow gays on TV. (Other than watching Anderson Cooper get drunk on shots, it wasn't as eventful as we would have hoped though. Or am I being nostalgic for Dick Clark?)

Today for New Year's Day we had a quiet day at home. We ate for dinner butternut squash soup, cod with lemon and pomegranate, and steamed broccoli. Then we watched the gay-themed movie The Cakemaker (2017, image right), in which a German baker goes to Jerusalem to find the family of his recently deceased lover, with some awkward consequences. It wasn't a bad movie...the acting and directing was good, there were some existential questions about sexuality worth pondering, and there were a few important moments about Jewish/Gentile cultural differences, but it was a bit slow. I am craving black forest cake now (you have to watch to get the message).

Happy 2019!