1. Vince Aletti, in his mini-review of “Constellation,” a Diane Arbus exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory, describes Arbus’s work as “tough, provocative, and brilliantly dark.” I agree. He also says that Arbus “isn’t easy to love.” This is also true. Aletti’s note reminded me of Susan Sontag’s great essay on Arbus – “Freak Show” [The New York Review of Books, November 15, 1973; included in her brilliant On Photography (1977) under the title “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly”]. It contains one of my favorite Sontag sentences: “Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.”
2. Hilton Als’ “Goings On” review of Gagosian Gallery’s “Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting” is illustrated with a reproduction of de Kooning’s “Suburb in Havana” (1958). It’s one of my favorite de Koonings. I first saw it in a piece by T. J. Clark called “Frank Auerbach’s London” (London Review of Books, September 10, 2015). Clark writes,
If I’d been able to glimpse a de Kooning landscape from ten years earlier – say, Suburb in Havana from 1958 – lurking under Autumn Morning, I might have been a little less at sea. But the problem would only have shifted ground. I would still have had to sort out why and how de Kooning’s elegant, lavatorial graffiti – his Cuban-blue depth, the lavish decisiveness of his foreground ‘V’ – were turned in the Auerbach into a kind of waterlogged storm-streaked slipperiness.
"Elegant lavatorial graffiti"? Ouch. Clark has thrown a barb. Is he right?
3. A shout-out to photographer Heami Lee for her delectable pizza shot in Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Cactus Wren.”
4. And let’s give a huzzah for Alena Skarina’s wonderful, eye-catching illustration for Elizabeth Kolbert’s disconcerting “Seeds of Doubt.”
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