The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between Two World Wars, by Frances Spalding (Thames & Hudson): The great avant-garde war artist Paul Nash (1889–1946) noted in 1932 that “whether it is possible to ‘Go Modern’ and still ‘Be British’” is “a question vexing quite a few people to-day.” That question is given ample consideration in Frances Spalding’s The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between Two World Wars. As Spalding perceptively puts it in a sentence that could be a synecdoche for the whole work, “Whereas the Italian futurists had wanted to turn their backs on the past, to abandon it or destroy it, much English art between the wars was motivated by a wholly different attitude, by a desire to raid the past for ideas, subjects and methods that would challenge and enrich the present.” She makes that case forcefully in this gorgeous new book, which serves as a primer to the major figures of the British interwar period: Wyndham Lewis, Stanley Spencer, Eric Ravilious, the Nash brothers, and many other worthies besides. —BR
“The Last Picture Show,” at Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York (through April 27): Focusing on painters of wonder and mystery, Betty Cuningham has been a mainstay of the New York gallery scene since opening Cuningham Ward at 94 Prince Street, on the second floor above Fanelli Café, in 1972. After a decade in Soho, a decade in Chelsea, and a decade on the Lower East Side (with stops in between), Cuningham is closing her storefront gallery at the end of April and moving to online sales. “The Last Picture Show,” her final exhibition at 15 Rivington Street, features a selection of several of the gallery’s artists “past and present,” including William Bailey, Rackstraw Downes, Andrew Forge, and Graham Nickson. —JP
Impressionists on Paper: Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec, with contributions by Christopher Lloyd, Ann Dumas & more (Royal Academy of Arts Publishing): The First Impressionist Exhibition in 1874 was riddled with aesthetic apostasies. Few of these were more heretical than the hanging of drawings alongside paintings, a choice that reflected the artists’ obsession with the rapid and transitory, as well as their readiness to upset artistic hierarchies. The sacrilege found a devotee in Joris-Karl Huysmans, who wrote that the works on paper had a “spontaneity, a freshness, a spicy brilliance inaccessible to oil . . . a bloom and a velvety smoothness.” Much of this splendor can be found in Impressionists on Paper, a copious collection of the movement’s experiments in watercolor, pastel, pencil, and chalk. Dozens of vivid plates fill out Impressionists, and Christopher Lloyd provides a thorough introduction, attentive to both the artists’ innovations and their debts to the past. The volume serves as catalogue for the London Royal Academy’s ongoing show of the same name, on view through March 10. —LL
Berg, Korngold & Beethoven, by the National Symphony Orchestra, at Carnegie Hall, New York (February 12): Two weeks ago, I mentioned the seeming kinship between Bernard Herrmann’s score to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Mahler’s icy opening to his Symphony No. 4. Though Mahler was neglected in the concert hall for many decades following his death, his influence was still felt in the world of Hollywood film scores: take the music of Erich Korngold, the father of film composition, whom Mahler dubbed “a great genius” when Korngold was only a boy in Vienna. Thanks to Korngold, the languid eroticism of Mahler’s Adagietto and the narrative architecture of symphonies such as No. 2 (“Resurrection”) are embedded in our understanding of film music and of Hollywood as a whole. James Ehnes will solo in Korngold’s Violin Concerto in D major (1945) Monday at Carnegie Hall, a piece that quotes from four of Korngold’s scores for the silver screen. Gianandrea Noseda conducts the National Symphony Orchestra in a concert also featuring selections from Berg’s Lyric Suite and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, “Eroica.” —IS
Bruce Liu, Rachmaninoff & Dvořák, by the New York Philharmonic, at David Geffen Hall, New York (February 15–17): Audiences know and love the grand, sweeping eighteenth variation from Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini; “this one is for my agent,” Rachmaninoff once winked, knowing he had a hit on his hands. The twenty-fourth and final variation, however, is such a challenge that Rachmaninoff, usually a teetotaler, used to break his vow with a shot of crème de menthe before playing it. The Rhapsody will hopefully be in steady hands with Bruce Liu, the winner of the 2021 International Chopin Competition, who will make his New York Philharmonic debut in concerts this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at David Geffen Hall. Also on the program will be music by that other great New Yorker, Antonín Dvořák (his Symphony No. 7), and a piece by Louise Farrenc. Santtu-Matias Rouvali conducts. —IS
By the Editors:
“Examining the Controversy Surrounding Tucker Carlson’s Interview with Putin”
Roger Kimball, American Greatness
From the Archives:
“Capote’s children,” by Bruce Bawer (June 1985). On one of a handful of American novelists.
Dispatch:
“The last conservative?” by Robert Steven Mack. On a new Milton Friedman biography.