“Indian Skies: The Howard Hodgkin Collection of Indian Court Painting,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (through June 9): Wrestling elephants, Brahma atop a goose, intoxicated mystics, leopard hunts—such are the themes of seventeenth-century Indian court painting. Elsewhere Krishna defeats a serpent king by dancing on his head, and in another scene feasting Brahmans withstand a swarm of flies. The eclectic subject matter was matched only by the art’s varied influences. Courtesy of the Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company, the subcontinent became a central stopover for cargo as far-flung as Nagasaki and Amsterdam, Macao and Cape Town. Traders carried artifacts from these corners of the globe to the Mughal Empire, where courtly painters quickly began blending the wider world’s styles with their own. Islamic tales are thus told by way of Renaissance motifs, for example, and the Himalayan landscapes look as if they could have been painted by the Japanese. This artistry is on brilliant display in the Met’s “Indian Skies,” a surprising and compact show now on view through the spring. —LL
Hindemith, Mahler & Beethoven, at Carnegie Hall, New York (March 7): Franz Liszt put the finishing touches on his complete Beethoven symphony transcriptions for piano in April 1865 at a convent church outside of Rome, taking holy orders just days later. “I will be satisfied if I stand on the level of the intelligent engraver,” Liszt wrote in his preface to the cycle, “or the conscientious translator, who grabs the spirit of a work and thus contributes to our insight into the great masters and to our sense of the beautiful.” This painstaking and noble effort might be Liszt’s great unsung contribution to music, for it allowed many in the age before the gramophone to witness the grandeur of Beethoven from the comfort (and economy) of their parlor chairs. Igor Levit presents Liszt’s transcription of Symphony No. 3, the “Eroica,” this Thursday at Carnegie Hall, together with Hindemith’s Suite “1922” and a transcription of the Adagio from Mahler’s Symphony No. 10. —IS
Piano Evenings with David Dubal, at Grace and St. Paul’s Church, New York (beginning March 5): For over fifty years, the pianist David Dubal has been a mainstay of classical radio in New York and across the country through his shows on WNCN, WQXR, and WWFM. His erudite books, such as The Art of the Piano and Reflections from the Keyboard, draw from an unmatched well of knowledge on the history of the piano canon and are essential deskside (and armchair) reading. Tomorrow begins the spring 2024 semester of “Piano Evenings with David Dubal,” a performance and lecture series featuring Dubal and friends at Grace and St. Paul’s Church on the Upper West Side. Listeners of Dubal, and readers of his writing in The New Criterion, will know to expect encounters with old familiars such as Sergei Rachmaninoff and Vladimir Horowitz as well as unjustly neglected greats such as Nikolai Medtner. Subscriptions are available for in-person and virtual attendees. —IS
Book Talk: Beaux-Arts Architecture in New York City, at the Arsenal in Central Park, New York (March 7): Just as Augustus found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble, New York’s robber barons found a city of brownstones and left it a city gilded in gold. From 1870 to 1930, between the end of the Civil War and the start of the Great Depression, this Gilded Age defined the city in ways that continue to enrich its existence today. This Thursday, at the Arsenal in Central Park, the American Friends of the Georgian Group will host Phillip James Dodd as he talks about his recent book An American Renaissance: Beaux-Arts Architecture in New York City. With highlights that run from Grand Central Terminal (designed by Reed & Stem with Warren & Wetmore, 1913) through lesser-known marvels such as the Gould Memorial Library (Stanford White, 1899–1901) and the Cunard Building (Benjamin Wistar Morris, 1921), Dodd’s lavish survey reminds us of the splendors of the pre-skyscraper city. —JP
“Giotto and Physicists: The Dynamics of Images around 1300,” with Frank Fehrenbach, at the Institute of Fine Arts (March 12): “Science” has had a bad run these past few years, being used to justify all sorts of entirely unscientific depredations. That trend will no doubt continue. But babies and bathwater and all that—there’s still much to be said for a curiosity about the world, which is what science at its heart is. On March 12 at the IFA, Frank Fehrenbach, a professor of art history at Hamburg University, will take a scientific view of Giotto, showing how the early Italian master’s work is “characterized by the unprecedented visualization of physical forces: weight, pulling, pushing and throwing.” —BR
Podcasts:
“Is there life after woke?” featuring Dominic Green. On culture in the post-woke West from a recent evening with the Friends of The New Criterion.
By the Editors:
“Georgia on His Mind”
A review of Hard by a Great Forest by Leo Vardiashvili.
Isaac Sligh, Literary Review
From the Archives:
“Sex, the Sixties & Camille Paglia,” by Donald Lyons (October 1992). On Paglia’s collection & the idolization of the 1960s.