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
Visual Arts Review: “Creative Alloys” — The Boston Metals Scene
This exhibition provides a very thoughtful lesson in appreciating the poetry of practical objects.
Visual Arts Review: The Dazzling Vodou Flags of Myrlande Constant
It is stunning to see these flags of beads and sequins on cloth, and the adjectives keep on coming — hypnotic, baroque, beguiling, hallucinatory.
Visual Arts Review: Is There a Boston Art?
Arnold Trachtman, Isabelle Higgins, and Barbara Ishikura are all “Boston Modern” artists who never stray far from communicating all-too-human joys and worries.
Visual Arts Commentary: The New Geometry of Boston’s Skyline
Two campus structures and one downtown office building speak a new visual language.
Visual Arts Review: Marks from Elsewhere — Cy Twombly and Léonie Guyer
It’s no wonder poets have been drawn to write about Guyer and Twombly’s work. We are carried away by an art that is always immediate, hic et nunc, but elsewhere too.
Visual Arts Review: “Matt Pawleski/Matrix 191” — Flirting With the Functional
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’
If historian Thomas Crow’s goal is to explain how these rebels of the counterculture reshaped American art, he is at least partly successful.
Book Review: “Leon Battista Alberti: The Chameleon’s Eye” — Not Your Classic Renaissance Man
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.
Visual Arts Review: The Trouble with “Symbionts” — and an Unlikely Antidote
Many of the entries in Symbionts do not question scientific worldviews as much as attempt to validate art in a world ruled unquestionably by science.