Peter Walsh

Book Review: “The Lioness of Boston” — The Mystery Remains

September 17, 2023
Posted in , ,

Too often, “Lioness” reads like a digest of Boston tourist guides and historical surveys, at times even seeming to quote them directly.

Read More

Visual Arts Review: “Edvard Munch: Trembling Earth” — Overwhelming the Clichés

September 3, 2023
Posted in , ,

Edvard Munch was very far from a one-hit wonder. His career was a long narrative of restless creativity.

Read More

Book Review: “Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting” — Demanding the Miraculous

July 25, 2023
Posted in , , ,

It is the volume’s autobiographical component, the accounts of Pasolini’s wide wanderings in art and aesthetic revelations, with their dramatic, cinematic flashbacks, that give this collection much of its literary value.

Read More

Book Review: “Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer” — Sort of a Shaman

June 22, 2023
Posted in , , ,

Betye Saar’s assemblages and travel sketchbooks are rich in references and symbols; they are mysterious and introspective, more spiritual than political.

Read More

Visual Arts Review: “Chasing Rembrandt” — The Hunt Continues?

May 11, 2023
Posted in , ,

Chasing Rembrandt is a small show, probably quickly assembled to complement the TheaterWorks production. For curious viewers, though, it raises a number of provocative questions.

Read More

Visual Arts/Book Review: “Fellow Wanderer: Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Travel Albums” — Upper Class Gilded Age Tourism

April 14, 2023
Posted in , , ,

Faced with the dual dilemmas of the opacity of the albums themselves and the now painfully obvious narrative of colonialism, wealth, and white privilege, some of Fellow Wanderer’s authors dodge into more easily researched side issues.

Read More

Book Review: “John Constable: A Portrait” — The Slow Triumph of a Great British Landscape Painter

March 20, 2023
Posted in , , ,
John Constable, Flatford Mill,

James Hamilton’s biography of British landscape painter John Constable is a highly accomplished, beautifully composed, revealing, and richly entertaining work of scholarship.

Read More

Visual Arts Review: “Matt Pawleski/Matrix 191” — Flirting With the Functional

February 26, 2023
Posted in ,

Instead of adoring function from an aesthetic distance, Matt Paweski confronts it where it lives. These sculptures play with the self-insistence that function has always had in modern design.

Read More

Book Review: “The Artist in the Counterculture” — California Dreamin’

February 17, 2023
Posted in , , ,

If historian Thomas Crow’s goal is to explain how these rebels of the counterculture reshaped American art, he is at least partly successful.

Read More

Book Review: “Leon Battista Alberti: The Chameleon’s Eye” — Not Your Classic Renaissance Man

January 23, 2023
Posted in , , ,

This splendid biography of Leon Battista Alberti, beautifully produced, with a rich selection of well-placed and well-reproduced illustrations, vividly portrays one of the most complex and fascinating figures in a complex and fascinating time, one whose preoccupations are entirely relevant today.

Read More

Recent Posts