Month: November 2015

 Fashion Agony I realize that fashion in the presentation of fashion is an ever-changing thing, but it seemed to me in the old days that clothes were intended to engender happiness. Models smiled. No longer, it seems. The tack now seems to be drama: these aren’t women such as one encounters in life, but supercharged,…

An artist’s compositions tend to employ characteristic devices. For example, these two Bruegels use the foreground oblique (the triangular shape beginning at one corner), block it with a tree at the edge of the canvas, and then zigzag into the distance.                       Corot uses a…

I think of the ’50s and ’60s as a visually as well as socially discordant period—the Gray Flannel Suit on the one hand, and hippie tie-dye on the other. But some things made sense. Perhaps it was only that television was still in its comparative infancy, but the Kennedy-Nixon debates, for example, were presented as…

The other day I looked down at my coffee table, which is typically a jumble of odds and ends in the process of being read, and there was Swann’s Way sitting on the current issue of the New Yorker. Proust and Jeb Bush–the odd couple, surely.