Dawn party
The Whitney Museum is digging back to the dawn of American Modernism
Modernism
Sunday
Tuesday
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land at 100
A century after its first publication, the poem still defies easy categorization
Monday
From modernism to totalitarianism
Postmodern man is characterized by an obsession with technique and technology
Thursday
Playing the long game
Paul Cezanne is lighting fires with a new retrospective in Chicago
Wednesday
Virginia Woolf’s very own Bloomsday
Celebrations of her novel Mrs. Dalloway should be more raucous than they are
Monday
One hundred years of Ulysses
James Joyce’s Ulysses caused a sensation on its publication a century ago
Thursday
Prints of Wales and elsewhere
Amid the turbulence of modernism, British artists made art for themselves
Saturday
Keep the modernists away from the Notre-Dame restoration
Reconstructions should aim to recreate and not transform the earlier style
Thursday
Modernist architecture isn’t barbarous – but the blinkered rejection of it is
When I was younger, one of my favourite books was James Stevens Curl’s The Victorian Celebration of Death. His latest is much less cheerful. Like one of those innocents who re-enact the Civil War in embarrassing costume on Bank Holidays, Curl has been time-travelling backwards into a pre-modern world. He returns from the past with a crude message that has been familiar since Reginald (Menin Gate) Blomfield told us in the 1930s that modern architecture is a godless conspiracy of foreigners, Jews and Bolsheviks to eradicate an established culture of building, patiently evolved over three millennia. This is less than a half-truth. Yes, modernist principles, misunderstood by unimaginative planners, often
