New Criterion

Few events have been awaited with more trepidation in the world of culture--we were going to say "the art world" but it embraces much more than that--than the appointment of the next director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Philippe de Montebello,...

Increasingly, contemporary travel writing divides into the kind which provides information about sights and experiences observed along the way and the so-called "journey of self-discovery." The latter tends to comprise self-indulgent musings on the impact...

Persian: that's the word I'll always associate with Shusha Guppy. Uttered with a luxurious protraction of the first syllable--Purrrzhen, as if a ... well, Persian cat were being stroked--it conjured up all those Oriental refinements rudely swept aside...

Giorgio Morandi can be described, with equal accuracy, as one of the most admired and celebrated of twentieth-century Italian painters or as one of the most misunderstood and underestimated. Responses to his magically quiet, introspective paintings,...

It may seem odd, at first, that the unbending, hard-line "pro-choice" attitude to abortion adopted by so many feminists of a generation now deprived by nature of their reproductive rights came to its present position of political importance just when...

"Wyndham Lewis Portraits" National Portrait Gallery, London. July 3-October 19, 2008 Wyndham Lewis is best known as a modernist and as the leader of the Vorticists, but the Vorticists' swirling style of vigorous erratic curves is not best suited to the...