Miracula: Weird and Wonderful Stories of Ancient Greece and Rome, by Paul Chrystal (Reaktion): The efforts of a Robert Ripley or the Weekly World News are more recent examples, but the tradition of paradoxography—writings about the unusual, the miraculous, and the absurd—runs back to Hellenistic Greece and beyond, including Aristotle, Callimachus, Cicero, and Pliny alongside lesser-known practitioners. In this connection the historian Paul Chrystal’s new Miracula is both a continuation and a commentary, presenting oddities, trivia, and twice-told tales from the ancient world and contextualizing them for the reader. Here are marvels from pygmies to the Polyphagus (Nero’s personal cannibal), the war-cats of Cambyses to the longest word in ancient Greece. —RE
“Francis Picabia: Eternal Beginning,” at Hauser & Wirth, New York (through August 1): Francis Picabia represented the restless spirit of French modernism. At various times a Cubist, Fauvist, Dadaist, and Realist, his paintings were syncretisms, drawing on a host of influences. Following a wartime suite of sexualized nudes, in his final years between 1945 and 1952 he returned to abstraction. A selection of his late works is now the subject of an exhibition in the skylight gallery at Chelsea’s Hauser & Wirth, organized in collaboration with the Comité Picabia and cocurated by its president, Beverley Calté, along with the art historian Arnauld Pierre. With enigmatic forms that recall archaic imagery, these accomplished final paintings find their own way between veristic surrealism and biomorphic expressionism. —JP
“Berthe Weill, Art Dealer of the Parisian Avant-garde,” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (through September 7): In Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, the art dealer Berthe Weill receives only tepid praise: since “she bought everybody’s pictures, pictures brought by any one,” it was no wonder certain masterpieces first passed through the doors of her Montmartre shop of “pictures, books and bric-a-brac.” Long forgotten, Weill deserves much more credit, as can be seen in this fantastic exhibition of over one hundred works at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (fresh off a stint at NYU’s Grey Museum). Clearly, she had an eye for the beautiful and the uncanny, with particular strengths in Fauvism and Cubism. Pleasures abound, from early, off-the-beaten-path Picasso to excellent Matisse and Modigliani, for whom Weill organized his only solo exhibition during his lifetime. If you can’t make the trip, a catalogue is available. —IS
Museum Mile Festival (June 10): There are many good reasons to visit the varied institutions that make up New York’s “Museum Mile,” which runs on Fifth Avenue between Eighty-second and 110th Streets, but tomorrow will add another: free admission and extended opening hours, as part of the annual Museum Mile Festival, which will also see the stretch closed to vehicular traffic and hosting various food vendors. Come for the empanadas, stay for Sargent at the Met. —BR
Dispatch:
“A woman of many colors,” by David Platzer. On “Gabriele Münter: Painting to the Point,” at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris.
By the Editors:
“A Soulless Biography of William F. Buckley Jr.”
James Panero, The Wall Street Journal
From the Archives:
“Nora Sayre: a progressive ‘Journey,’” by Hilton Kramer (February 1996). On progressivism in America.
