Cartoon by William Haefeli. For more: http://nyr.kr/13Qlvbc

Bob Mankoff tested Yahoo C.E.O. Marissa Mayer’s policy of banning working from home by convening all of our cartoonists together in the office. It didn’t really work out: http://nyr.kr/YAQpNH

(Source: newyorker.com)

(Source: newyorker.com)

For the past ten years or so, propelled by an epiphany he once had at the loading dock of a Winn Dixie, the artist Brendan O’Connell has been painting Walmarts: people shopping, and products on shelves, and people removing products from shelves and paying for them. He was fascinated by the stores’ ubiquity and the commonality of the retail experience. At first, Walmart threw him out of its stores, but now they regard the work as revealing something essential and meaningful in the Walmart universe. He is, as one company executive said, capturing “the art in the Wonderbread; the art in the Jif.”

Read Susan Orlean’s piece on Brendan O’Connell, and click-through to see more of O’Connell’s art: http://nyr.kr/WNqX8i

“Most educated people can name half a dozen poets who are more famous for their messy lives and deaths than for their poems… The narratives endure because they align with the popular understanding of what it is to be an artist.”

Sarah Manguso writes about Sylvia Plath, who died fifty years ago today, and looks at the changing way we talk about mental illness: http://nyr.kr/1576DDa

Photograph: Contrasto/Redux.

(Source: newyorker.com)

Richard Brody on the increasing gap between Lena Dunham and the character she plays in “Girls”: “That gap doesn’t make Dunham’s characterization less personal, only less contemporary—a work of fiction in which she plays a character that draws on memories or imagines a road not taken, but which, either way, casts on herself a shadow of regret and self-doubt.”  Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/Xz9obw

Photograph: HBO.

“Light” plays out almost entirely at the Monet residence, but the man of the house is often offscreen. For every passage describing his battle, waged on canvas, with the “luminous cloud of changing light” in which we all live, there are two passages showing us how the day looks and feels to the people around him: his wife, Alice; Alice’s children from a previous marriage; her grandchildren; Monet’s children from a previous marriage; their servants and visitors—for these people, Giverny was not a component of their lifework but, instead, a place where they happened to be employed, or to live some years of their lives. By moving between these perspectives, Figes attempts to bring Giverny to life—real life…

Peter C. Baker on the real world of Claude Monet portrayed in Eva Figes’s novel, “Light”: http://nyr.kr/Wwa3b1

Painting by Claude Monet/National Gallery of Art

Read an essay excerpted from “Andy Warhol at Christies,” a catalog of 354 works by Andy Warhol that will be sold at auction at Christie’s New York on November 12th. Images courtesy The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

And Jonathan Lethem writes about his evolving view of the artist.

“Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs.”

Picasso checking Brigitte Bardot’s face with a light meter during the Cannes Film Festival, 1956. Photograph by Jerome Brierre/RDA/Getty.

Happy birthday, Pablo Picasso! Here, a slideshow of portraits of the artist, and some of his wise words of wisdom.