À la Recherche de Jeanne Duval

À la Recherche de Jeanne Duval

Who Was the Mysterious Mistress Immortalized by Two 19th-century Geniuses, Charles Baudelaire and Édouard Manet The widespread protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in May, abetted by the swelling powers of the Black Lives Matter movement, got some of us with...
Ripe for Rediscovery: Berthe Morisot

Ripe for Rediscovery: Berthe Morisot

Having It All in the 19th Century Berthe Morisot’s subjects now seem among the tamest and most ingratiating imaginable: sun-drenched land- and seascapes, women and children casually posed in the garden or cozy domestic interiors, stylish Parisian beauties at their...
The Limits of Protest Art

The Limits of Protest Art

What can it really do? While driving home from Albuquerque on Thursday, terrified and disgusted by the news on the radio, I popped in a CD from an audiobook that had been languishing in my back seat for weeks. Picasso’s War, by Oliver Wyman, tells the story of the...
First Love and Irresistible Impulses

First Love and Irresistible Impulses

First Love and Irresistible Impulses Or the man who licked the Vermeer My first boyfriend, in college, always smelled of Ivory soap. It was a clean, innocent scent, like baby powder or shampoo, and therefore perhaps appropriate for young love. For years after we broke...