This week: John Richardson’s homes, Meg Hitchcock’s collages, Brooklyn’s female choreographers & more from the world of culture.

The interior of John Richardson’s loft on Fifth Avenue, from John Richardson: At Home. Photo: Rizzoli.

Nonfiction:


John Richardson: At Home, by John Richardson (Rizzoli): John Richardson, who died in March of this year aged ninety-five, is probably best known for his multivolume Picasso biography (Hilton Kramer reviewed the first in 1991), the fourth and last of which was unfinished at the time of his death. But he was also a dedicated aesthete with a markedly architectural eye. A new book from Rizzoli, published mere weeks after Richardson’s death, intersperses text from Richardson with brilliant photographs of the various places he called home through the years. From his “set” at Albany in London, its walls containing not only Pugin wallpaper but a Reynolds portrait, to his loft on lower Fifth Avenue in New York, where he moved so as to be farther from the society haunt Mortimer’s, which distracted him from his writing, Richardson was in the habit of living in well-appointed and overstuffed rooms. At home with both chintz and Cubism, his expansiveness comes through vividly in the essays and photographs of this treasure-filled book. —BR

Art:

Meg Hitchcock, The Secret of the Golden Flower, 2018, Letters cut from Aunt Helen’s Bible and thorns on paper,  Margaret Thatcher Projects.

“Meg Hitchcock—Cathedral,” at Margaret Thatcher Projects (through May 18): Born into an evangelical Christian family, Meg Hitchcock looks to the intersection of words and faith in intimate collage. Now at Chelsea’s Margaret Thatcher Projects through May 18, her latest exhibition, “Cathedral,” finds unexpected resonance in the headlines by looking to the “psychological architecture of religion” with works on paper that recast sacred texts in meditative patterns. Beyond just remixing letters and words, Hitchcock here expands her obsessive practice by introducing paper color, layering, and burn holes to the resulting forms. —JP

Dance:


“Counterpointe7: New Work by Women Choreographers and their Collaborating Artists,” at The Actors Fund Arts Center (April 26 through 28): “Ballet is woman,” George Balanchine famously said. For seven seasons Norte Maar, the Brooklyn-based nonprofit dedicated to collaboration in the arts, has put this statement en pointe by elevating female dancers, choreographers, and stage designers. In collaboration with Brooklyn Ballet, “Counterpointe7: New Work by Women Choreographers and their Collaborating Artists” returns this weekend for three performances at The Actors Fund Arts Center in downtown Brooklyn. This year’s pairings of choreographer/artist include Courtney Cochran and Jamie Powell, Norte Maar co-founder Julia K. Gleich and Meg Lipke, Mari Meade and Roxanne Jackson, Melanie Ramos and Amy Lincoln, Janice Rosario and Joy Curtis, and Michelle Thompson Ulerch and Justine Hill. —JP

Other:

Schnauzer, reading and publication party at Suite (April 28): Join our poetry editor, David Yezzi, in celebrating the publication of his third play, now available from Exot Books. The one-act Schnauzer is a “bold play-in-verse about our feral need for love untethered,” one reviewer writes. Admission is free and drinks are cheap, so find your way up to 109th and Amsterdam for the live reading and book signing at 3 p.m. on Sunday. —HN
 

Louis Simpson. Photo: Bloodaxe Books.

From the archive: “Trouble,” by Louis Simpson. (June 1987). A poem.

From the current issue: “Fathers & sons,” by Richard Tillinghast. A review of Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce by Colm Tóibín.

Broadcast: “James Panero on Jeffrey Hart,” by James Panero. On the great literary scholar, editor, and mentor.

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