On the Romantics, by Margaret Drabble (Thames & Hudson): This satchel-sized, forest-green volume is ripe to be taken to go and thumbed through in the setting its subjects favored: nature, full of what Wordsworth called “that beauty, which . . . Hath terror in it.” Wordsworth, his sister Dorothy, and their friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge take up much of Margaret Drabble’s attention in On the Romantics, an affectionate survey of the titular nineteenth-century literary movement in Britain, but she also spends time with the Brontë sisters, Walter Scott, and others. Charming color reproductions of paintings and the authors’ scribblings accompany the reader along the way. —SM
“Caravaggio 2025,” at the Palazzo Barberini, Rome (through July 6): If the “blockbuster” exhibition is perhaps a regrettable feature of modern museum life, it doesn’t stand to reason that all major shows should be ignored. Frustrating the crowds of cell phone picture-takers may be, but there is still something compelling in seeing a deep assemblage of works from a master. Take “Caravaggio 2025,” on for a few more weeks at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. Brave the scrum and be rewarded with a remarkable collection of paintings from across the globe never before seen together. All Caravaggio’s talents are here, and here in multitude: the unmatched handling of light and shade, the clean brushwork, the drama. See it if you can, and look for Karen Wilkin’s full review in the September issue of The New Criterion. —BR
“Paul Resika: 1945 & 2025” at Bookstein Projects (through July 25): Over a career spanning eight decades, the painter Paul Resika has found stylistic renewal through creative recurrence. At times this has meant looking to the masters, both old and modern. Hans Hofmann, Tintoretto, and Fra Angelico have all been his teachers. Now aged ninety-seven and still painting daily, Resika has become his own master, looking back to older work with fresh eyes. A new exhibition at Bookstein Projects draws together Resika’s abstract work from 1945 and 2025 in a recursive display connecting eighty years. —JP
Telemann’s Pimpinone & Ino, presented by the Boston Early Music Festival, at Caramoor, Katonah, New York (June 29): Though hard for us to imagine today, weighty Baroque opera seria often had comic operas called intermezzi interspersed between their acts. Dramatic whiplash (and a lengthy sit) this must have been, but turn-of-the-eighteenth-century audiences seemed squeamish in the face of untrammeled woe, as the habit of attaching happy endings to Shakespeare’s tragedies in Restoration Drama shows us. This Sunday at Caramoor, the Boston Early Music Festival will perform Telemann’s once-popular intermezzo Pimpinone, a tale of a chambermaid who schemes to seduce and marry her wealthy employer. In good Baroque fashion, Telemann’s solo cantata Ino, based on a fraught tale from Ovid, will provide an intervening contrast. The soprano Amanda Forsythe is Ino, and the bass-baritone Christian Immler and the soprano Danielle Reutter-Harrah sing in Pimpinone. —IS
“Cooper vs. Cooper: Lettering in Twentieth-Century America,” featuring Paul Shaw, presented by Poster House (July 1): New Yorkers might be forgiven for not wanting to think about the subway system in the middle of summer. But weary straphangers can find encouragement in a pair of ongoing presentations of The Subway Sun, the triumph of graphic design that enlivened NYC train cars in the mid-twentieth century, at the New York Transit Museum and Poster House. Next Tuesday, July 1, in conjunction with the latter, the designer and historian Paul Shaw will compare the typographic achievements of the Sun’s creator, Fred G. Cooper, with those of his contemporary Oswald Cooper, for whom he was often mistaken. Registration for this virtual event is free. —RE
Dispatch:
“Leonard A. Lauder: a personal reminiscence,” by Eric Gibson. On the late philanthropist’s collection.
By the Editors:
“On Iran, trust Trump’s instincts”
Roger Kimball, The Spectator
From the Archives:
“A Balanchine creation,” by Moira Hodgson (October 1990). On Holding On to the Air, by Suzanne Farrell, with Toni Bentley.
