Art

This summer, a niche story from the art world caught fire: an Old Master painting, stolen by the Nazis from a Dutch-Jewish art dealer, surfaced in Mar del Plata, Argentina. Remarkably, journalists from a Dutch newspaper spotted it on the wall of a house in a promotional photo that was part of a “for sale” real-estate listing. It turned out that one of the sellers of the house was the daughter of a Nazi official who worked for Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, a notorious art plunderer. When the stolen painting was recognized, the daughter allegedly removed it from the wall, replacing it with another artwork – a tapestry. Argentine authorities then arrested her and her husband and charged them with concealing a crime.

We meet at Adam McEwen’s apartment on the Upper East Side, a few hours before he makes a lightning trip back to London, where he was once a journalist working for the Daily Telegraph. After studying art, McEwen worked for a while writing obituaries, and his eureka moment came in 2000 with the decision to turn his day job into art. He began to write fake obituaries for living subjects, adopting the detached prose and visual design of a broadsheet newspaper. Each text was presented as a black-and-white C-print, and subjects included Jeff Koons, Marilyn Chambers, Macaulay Culkin and Nicole Kidman. McEwen’s fictitious obituaries are small masterpieces of the uncanny. In the instant of reading one, the hypothesized death seems real.

How can an artist express social and political dissent in a polarized, volatile time? Look no further than the sobering and rousing Ben Shahn: On Nonconformity. Throughout his decades-long career, Shahn (1898-1969) crafted paintings, murals, posters, drawings, photographs and prints chronicling the news of the world, with a focus on the suffering of society’s most wounded. This is the first major retrospective of his work to appear in the US since 1976. The country has changed, and yet Shahn’s work remains as timely as ever.  His social-realistic approach fell out of fashion as critics came to prefer abstract and pop art. But Shahn remained true to his own aesthetic, as the show’s 175 works demonstrate.

Johannes Vermeer (1632-75) is doubtless a blockbuster artist, but the Frick’s exhibition, Vermeer’s Love Letters, is the size of a postage stamp – or, maybe more fittingly, a wax seal. The Frick has three Vermeers of its own, but only one made the cut: “Mistress and Maid” (c. 1664-67). From the 37 known works by the artist, the museum has only borrowed two to bolster the show: “Woman Writing a Letter with her Maid” (c. 1670-72) and “The Love Letter” (c. 1669-70). Each depicts a woman, her maid and at least one letter somewhere in the mix. Though we don’t know exactly what’s written in those papers, it’s fair to say that these discreet works have an air of romance. The show’s effect is something of a riddle. Why has the Frick picked these three?

I am expecting Sarah Hoover to be brash. The New York art-scene stalwart and influencer has written a warts-and-all misery memoir about motherhood and self discovery called The Motherload, which is presently cruising atop US bestseller lists. The book, unanimously agreed to be “unflinchingly honest” about all the bad things that can happen on a woman’s journey to and through new motherhood, opens with a stream-of-consciousness account of a party Hoover threw at the Chateau Marmont in 2017 for her first baby’s ten-month birthday. “I’d be in LA for a couple of weeks, staying at the hotel, and a diet of room service and edibles was my general game plan.

Almost three decades after the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, it is possible, if not always easy, to see the funny side of the Troubles. Derry Girls, Lisa McGee’s coming-of-age television series, and Milkman, Anna Burns’s surreal novel, wring laughs as well as tears out of mayhem. There are few laughs in Steve McQueen’s Hunger, which did “for modern film” according to one critic, “what Caravaggio did for Renaissance painting.” For those who prefer horror unmediated by fiction, Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing is the best example of longform journalism since Capote’s In Cold Blood. But along with their setting, these dazzling creations have something else in common: to get made, they all needed the backing of a producer or publisher from the UK or US.

John Myatt held his breath as the bidding began in the Christie’s auction room. His drawings were selling, one by one. He had dreamed of having his work on the block since the beginning of his career. He felt a tingle of adrenaline as the paddles went up... and victory as he strolled through the city streets with a wad of money in his back pocket afterward. But the feeling didn’t last long. Eventually, Myatt started to feel empty and disappointed. The psychic void grew as the prices that his agent, John Drewe, sought for his work went up and up.