Peter Walsh

Visual Arts Review: “Fashioned by Sargent” — Round Two

December 8, 2023
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Was John Singer Sargent just a talented flatterer of his wealthy patrons or was there more to him?

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

September 17, 2023
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Too often, “Lioness” reads like a digest of Boston tourist guides and historical surveys, at times even seeming to quote them directly.

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

September 3, 2023
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Edvard Munch was very far from a one-hit wonder. His career was a long narrative of restless creativity.

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

July 25, 2023
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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.

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

June 22, 2023
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Betye Saar’s assemblages and travel sketchbooks are rich in references and symbols; they are mysterious and introspective, more spiritual than political.

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

May 11, 2023
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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.

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

April 14, 2023
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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.

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

March 20, 2023
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James Hamilton’s biography of British landscape painter John Constable is a highly accomplished, beautifully composed, revealing, and richly entertaining work of scholarship.

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

February 26, 2023
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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.

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

February 17, 2023
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If historian Thomas Crow’s goal is to explain how these rebels of the counterculture reshaped American art, he is at least partly successful.

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