Recent stories of note:
“Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein”
Matt Dinan, The Hedgehog Review
When Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein was published twenty-five years ago, it was widely lambasted as, in the words of one critic, a “shockingly bad” memoir of “cruel violations” for revealing unsavory private details about the scholar Allan Bloom, upon whom the novel’s character Abe Ravelstein was based. But if you look a little closer, the correspondence is not so one-to-one. Matt Dinan writes in The Hedgehog Review that while “Ravelstein is Bloom blown up to epic, perhaps tragic, proportions,” Chick, the author and friend of Ravelstein who narrates the book, is Bellow “comically debased.” Encouraging readers “to think through the relationship of images to originals” was one of Ravelstein’s—and Bloom’s—great aims. Perhaps it is the goal, too, of Ravelstein.
“‘Marsden Hartley: Adventurer in the Arts’ Review: A Roving Life and Career”
Ann Landi, The Wall Street Journal
The American artist Marsden Hartley was many things, but if he had one defining quality, that was being “almost neurotically peripatetic,” as Ann Landi puts it in The Wall Street Journal. As an adult, Hartley never lived in the same room for more than ten months, and he assimilated a huge range of influences into his artwork throughout his life, though always with his own distinctive flavor. At the New Mexico Museum of Art, “Marsden Hartley: Adventurer in the Arts,” an exhibition displaying the artist’s variety, makes its final stop through June 20.
“‘A major win for our field’: conservators rejoice at development of new ‘spaghetti-like’ adhesive for treating paintings”
Benjamin Sutton, The Art Newspaper
After a while, canvases weaken and decay, and (if the painting is a lucky one) conservators are left to deal with the problem. Marc Chagall’s Paris Through the Window (1913) was the first painting to be treated with the revolutionary adhesive Beva 371—which reinforces a canvas by lining it from the back—and since then the product has extended the lifespan of many an important picture. But in recent years two key ingredients of Beva 371 have been discontinued, causing concern about conservators’ ability to save worn-down works. Thankfully, a group of researchers has developed a new, safer form of the substance. Not only conservators and scholars but also museumgoers everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief.
