John Ashbery’s ​​Something Close to Music: Late Art Writings, Poems, and Playlists

By Candice Chu

OCT 2022 | Art Books

This book allows one to read with as much freedom as one listens to a playlist, in sequence or on shuffle. Read it as a playlist, or as any artwork that is drawn from the stuff of life, discover the biography revealed at its edges and interpret it as a portrait, a diary, or a letter from John Ashbery.

Helga Paris’s Women at Work

By Billy Anania

JUL-AUG 2022 | Art Books

For Paris, politics was secondary to her love for everyday people. Much like her sitters, Paris earned her daily bread and socialized at East Berlin beer halls, recognizing herself in the anonymous masses that became her muse.

Whistler to Cassatt: American Painters in Paris

By Joe Fyfe

JUL-AUG 2022 | ArtSeen

Whistler to Cassatt illustrates the story of the changes in American art that took place after the Civil War. Many artists turned away from the methodology of the Hudson River School, and it became the norm for literally hundreds of them to train in Paris, with its superior art academies and the Louvre’s masterworks available to study and copy; the entrance to the exhibition includes a wonderfully evocative photo mural of the Eiffel Tower under construction.

9. November and December, 1955, Paris

By Raphael Rubinstein

JUNE 2022 | The Miraculous

A German composer, who was deported from the United States seven years earlier for being, as one right-wing politician put it, “the Karl Marx of music,” is hired by a French director to score a documentary film about the Holocaust. From Paris, he writes home to his wife in East Berlin: “The film is grandiose, horrible, showing monstrous crimes...regrettably, the film people here are putting me under pressure to finish the whole thing in ten days even though the film is barely finished.