Recent stories of note:
“Massive Ancient Roman Villa Unearthed in France Opens to the Public”
Tessa Solomon, ARTnews
The Romanian government has secured a long-term hold on a contested painting by El Greco, currently at Christie’s in New York. The painting, Saint Sebastian (ca. 1610–14), which has an estimated worth of $7–9 million, was pulled from a New York Old Masters Sale in February when the Romanian government claimed that the painting was “unequivocally the property of the Romanian state.” Court filings reveal that the painting was put up for sale by Monaco-based Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, who purchased the work from the embattled Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier through Accent Delight, the British Virgin Islands company Rybolovlev has used for offshore art dealings. In a now-deleted catalogue entry, Christie’s claimed that the painting’s ownership was transferred legally to King Michael I of Romania in 1947, after he fled from communists, and that its ownership was legally transferred when it wound up at the Wildenstein & Co. gallery in New York in 1976. The Romanian government claims that no such documentation exists for the 1947 transfer and that King Michael I had illegally removed the painting from its national collection.
“‘A dear little genius:’ Mark Twain and the making of an American literary tradition”
James Marcus, The Times Literary Supplement
Novelist, humorist, essayist, nineteenth-century, stand-up comic, and infrequently successful businessman—these are facets of the author known at birth as Samuel Clemens that Ron Chernow explores in his gargantuan new biography, Mark Twain. Twain grew up by the Mississippi River in Hannibal, Missouri in a childhood that inspired his memoir Life on the Mississippi (1883) and his greatest novels, The Adventures Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Prior to these literary peaks, Twain worked as a riverboat pilot, a prospector, and a newspaper man, and pioneered a distinctly American form of dry situational comedy, in part with his short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frogs of Calaveras Comedy” (1865). He dabbled in travel writing with his Innocents Abroad (1869) a radically scathing account of traveling through Europe—the first American writer to satirize the vaunted “Old World” relics. Twain also made various gimmicky business investments—namely the Paige typesetter—that turned out poorly, but he at last succeeded when his publishing house secured President Ulysses S. Grant’s two-volume memoir. James Marcus compliments Chernow’s coverage of Twain’s business misadventures but faults the book for dwelling too much on his less eventful later years.
“Erik Satie was an inadvertent innovator”
Philip Clark, The Spectator
The music critic Ian Penman seems uniquely suited to the subject of his biography, Erik Satie: Three Piece Suite, argues Philip Clark. Penman, who came of age as a writer in the late 1970s with the experimental British magazine The Wire and who has covered everything from jazz to electronic music to German film, approaches his subject playfully. The straight forward tack that prior Satie biographies have taken, Penman claims, have missed the essential strangeness of Satie’s life and compositional forms. Just as Satie’s work tended to be divided into three parts, exploring musical ideas from distinct vantage points, Penman’s book explores the composer’s life in three rounds: as biographical sketch, as an A to Z of his important landmarks, and through the perspectives of his personal diaries, burrowing deep into his psyche. Penman explores Satie’s rejection of Wagnerian “bombast” and of Debussy’s more form-bound modernism. Satie looked forward, according to the author, which included experimenting with pear-shaped form in “Trois morceaux en forme de poire” (1903) and giving rise to twentieth century music, including the randomness of the composer John Cage. Exploring Satie’s inner life, Penman shows how his doomed and all-consuming love for the painter Suzanne Valadon drove his compositional output, namely “Vexations” (ca. 1893–94).
