Why is everyone talking about Impressionism lately?
Plus, new Chopin just dropped.
SORRYYYY I’ve been neglectful and busy over the past two weeks. But I am back. Since we last spoke, I have mainly been occupied with work that I must do to pay my bills and general housekeeping (aka, recovering from a 2.5-day work trip to California sandwiched by a 6:25 a.m. flight and a redeye home). But here’s what else I’ve done:
Watched the delightful Rita Hayworth film Cover Girl (1944).
Finished reading Sarah Manguso’s Liars (I liked it more by the time I finished reading it, but ultimately I feel pretty neutral about it) and Michael Clune’s poetically written addiction memoir White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin.
Seen American Ballet Theatre’s program which included select works including The Kingdom of the Shades from La Bayadère (lovely) and Twyla Tharp’s frenetic and mesmerizing In the Upper Room, which is set to a Philip Glass score. I went last night, and I was shocked to see just how starkly empty the fifth tier of seats was. I find this pretty concerning and overall disheartening—and I will likely be writing a guide to becoming a person who “goes to the ballet” in order to convince some of you to attend if you’re feeling intimidated. But also, I do think this is a sign that ABT has a lot of work to do on its ticket discounting strategies and perhaps its marketing as well. The company always shoots beautiful promos, but I do feel like this fall, I was served far more targeted advertising for NYCB’s season than ABT’s. It is also worth pointing out—a note of constructive criticism I will give, if anyone is listening—that ABT’s website does not make it easy at all to see which performances are eligible for $30 under 30 tickets.
And perhaps—stick with me here—a $30 under 30 discount isn’t really sufficient to get bigger audiences at the ballet. Perhaps ABT should take note from the Philharmonic and up its discounted age upper limit to 35…or take a cue from the Met Opera and host more parties like its Fridays Under 40 program because realistically, the galas are beautiful to look at on Instagram, but wildly inaccessible for most (I would accept an invitation though). There’s pretty clearly an outreach and access challenge here, and it’s worth experimenting to fix it. I’ll be curious to compare attendance at Crime and Punishment when I go on Wednesday.Went to N+1’s launch party for their latest issue.
Now, the news.
If you’ve been seeing a lot of Monet lately, that would be because Impressionism—the artistic movement founded by artists such as Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, and Camille Pissarro—made its debut 150 years ago in Paris. Consequently, there are currently Impressionism exhibits on view worldwide. In the Louisiana State University Museum of Art, you can learn more about American impressionism through a new exhibit that examines the stateside take on the movement with paintings dating from 1870–1940. At the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, you can see how Dutch collectors embraced the Impressionists. And in Washington D.C., through January 19 (hopefully not our last day as a democratic nation), you can see Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment at the National Gallery of Art.
But wait, you may think, is this really such a big deal? And what more is there to Impressionism besides water lilies and ballet dancers?
Yes! And a lot. I will point you to the review that Jason Farago, critic at large for the New York Times, published earlier this month, which puts into context the world in which the Impressionists emerged—and how the National Gallery’s exhibit, which is curated in partnership with Paris’s Musée d'Orsay, highlights that context by juxtaposing Impressionist works with artworks displayed in the spring of 1874 of Paris’s prestigious Salon. Impressionism emerged shortly after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870—where many artists of the movement fought and saw friends perish—and at the start of a new modern age; “in the new Paris that emerged from defeat and civil war,” Farago writes, “the soon-to-be-Impressionists sensed that old aesthetic rules—and the institutions that governed them—were losing their authority.”
It wasn’t just the style of those institutions that the Impressionists rejected; it was also their subject matter, as The Economist points out. Artists abandoned classical motifs, portraits, and historical imagery for “scenes of contemporary life”—a “democratic and capitalist undertaking.” So, too, did they react to the changing world around them; perhaps shell-shocked from war, they generally avoided the topic in their art. With the advent of photography, they eschewed more traditional styles for distinctly painterly brush strokes. And with advances in paint formulation, they could more easily work outside with portable tubes.
This does ultimately make me wonder what the emerging art style of our time may be, or if we will ever again have such a distinctive movement grip the art world (even if gradually). Now is a tenuous and volatile time. I wonder, when we look back, what might emerge as the most representative form of this era. I think about what
recently wrote in , that: “Culture isn’t stagnating; it’s evolving in ways that we’re struggling to recognize and appreciate. The challenge lies not in reviving what’s dead, but in developing the language to understand what already exists.”Holy Grail—found? Close but not quite. Researchers from the University of St. Andrews unearthed a secret tomb at Al-Khazneh, the World Heritage Site in Petra, Jordan, which is believed to date back to the first century AD. The historic location is also the fictionalized resting place of the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)—which is why researchers were particularly struck when they found that one of twelve unearthed skeletons was found clutching a chalice that looks strikingly like the Grail in that very film. “All of us just froze,” says self-proclaimed adventurer Josh Gates in a press release from the university. Ultimately, however, the chalice was determined to be the top of a broken jug. Still pretty cool.
Also in archeological news: The discovery of Tugunbulak, a complex ancient city in the high-altitude region of Uzbekistan, has changed the way that historians understand the Silk Road, the network of Eurasian trade routes active from the second century BCE to the mid-15th century. While previously researchers believed that travelers only crossed lowlands, this latest discovery, made by archaeologist Michael Frachetti, shows that caravans traversed mountains, too, and that the Silk Road was far more complex than initially believed.
First new Mozart, and now Chopin? Thanks to Morgan Library & Museum curator Robinson McClellan we now have a new piece of music by Romantic composer Frédéric Chopin, who died in 1849 at age 39. It is a short waltz that pianist Lang Lang says “evokes the harsh winters of the Polish countryside,” with its jarring opening. You can listen to him play it here.
I think this has happened before. The far-right group Alternative for Germany (AfD) is pushing against the celebration of the Bauhaus art school’s centennial in the city of Dessau. The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 in the city of Weimar by architect Walter Gropius and taught students a mix of both design education and fine arts, and how to design for mass production. This is where we got Marcel Breuer’s iconic Cesca chair and Wassily chair designs. The Bauhaus ultimately shuttered in 1933, with the rise of the Nazi party and the school’s fraught financial situation making it unable to sustain its future.
Earlier this month the AfD submit a motion—that was ultimately rejected—to end the “one-sided glorification of the Bauhaus legacy,” which has drawn concern from Barbara Steiner, the director of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, who told The Times, “It’s highly worrying to see the cultural field becoming a battleground again.”
While the AfD claims its rejection of Bauhaus stems from the belief that it “displaced local architectural traditions,” the reality is that this group is one of many right-wing organizations that has rejected modern design, Thomas Escritt points out in Reuters: “Donald Trump's U.S. administration sought to prescribe neoclassical architecture for all new federal buildings, while Hungary's nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban has rebuilt much of the centre of Budapest in a supposed restoration of its pre-war facade.”
Apparently former New York City Ballet dancer Mary Helen Bowers, founder of the ballet-inspired workout Ballet Beautiful, is married to one of the architects of Project 2025. Oh! Well luckily I never signed up for that because there is no shortage of actual ballet classes in NYC you can take with highly skilled instructors and live accompaniment. In any case, Harper’s Bazaar has a thoughtful feature on the matter and the question of supporting a person whose spouse holds politics you vehemently reject. Bowers declined to be interviewed multiple times for the piece, but instead offered a statement: “Women seeking to cancel a woman for her husband’s politics is not only mean-spirited, unfeminine, and unmotherly—it’s also out of fashion.” Give me a break girlina………
Two quick updates on things we’ve discussed before:
Dallas Black Dance Theatre, the company that fired 10 of its dancers, most likely for unionizing, has had its funding frozen by the city as it deliberates whether it will continue to receive public financial support.
Regarding that Atlantic story about students no longer reading: I do fear I got caught up in the blitz of this piece like many others, and while some components of the reporting remain compelling—I do still think that reading comprehension and ability is a growing public challenge, though not a new one, or even one specific to teenagers—I’ve realized it did not give a full picture of the current situation. I really appreciated reading this piece by
, who was interviewed for that story, and found much of what she had to say not included. On her own Substack, she addresses how she creates “space for the joy and curiosity of reading” in her students, and why many of the red flags the Atlantic raises are not actually real causes for concern—or challenges that teachers haven’t successfully weathered before. ▲