Paris, the “capital of the nineteenth century,” as Walter Benjamin called it, was meant to be painted. Its streetscapes, with their exquisite filigree and ornamental splendor, seem to be art itself, an ethereal creation that’s as wondrous and enduring as nature. The city’s lines and details seem to have been conceived as the very brushstrokes in which they’re captured. The great paintings of Paris keep its industrial vigor on the margins, whereas New York, the capital of the twentieth century, wears its working energy on the outside…

Yet, even if the walls of the Met’s Bellows exhibit weren’t festooned with quotations from the artist attesting to his ambition to fill his canvasses with the raw energies of life and finding them exemplified on the streets of New York, the paintings themselves provide ample proof that the city offered him a unique subject—one with which he wrangled mightily…

Continue reading Richard Brody on George Bellows’s paintings of New York, on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through February 18th: http://nyr.kr/WKIGOn

“Painters and poets… looked at people and saw angels; he looked at the heavens, and didn’t.”  

In this week’s issue, Adam Gopnik writes about the life and work of Galileo Galilei: http://nyr.kr/11pkFjC

“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

A New Yorker reading list on Congo —its conflicts, but also its people, culture, and environment: http://nyr.kr/TmoxKf

The cover of this week’s issue, by artist Barry Blitt, pays homage to the Norman Rockwell painting “The Tattoo Artist.” We asked Blitt how he came up with the idea: See his response.

A Saturday morning cartoon by Jack Ziegler. For more from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/Ok5K0y

Louise Lawler is a photographer known for her portraits of other artists’ work, in which she gives special attention to all the connecting tissue that holds and frames it: walls, floors, hallways, storage units, workers’ hands. As its title suggests, her latest book, “Louise Lawler and/or Gerhard Richter,” published by Schirmer/Mosel, is devoted to photographs taken over the past twenty years of art by Gerhard Richter—including photographs of Lawler’s own photographs of Gerhard Richter pieces (who himself uses photographs and other forms of media in his paintings). The result is a playful exchange among artwork and artist, photograph and painting, and all the trappings that surround them. Click-through for a selection of Lawler’s work: http://nyr.kr/LZ5V3t

(Photographs courtesy of Louise Lawler/Metro Pictures, New York.)

(Source: newyorker.com)

“My family and I, we posed for this painting when we went on vacation to Hawaii”. Click-through for the story behind this week’s cover, “Capturing Memories,” and for more from artist Mark Ulriksen: http://nyr.kr/Nrem7h

This week’s cover, “June Brides,” is the artist Gayle Kabaker’s first time in The New Yorker. The magazine’s art editor, Françoise Mouly, found the image through her Blown Covers blog. Every week, Mouly hosts a cover contest on the blog, open to all, with themes that closely mirror those she suggests to her regular contributors, from Father’s Day to books to the theme that reeled this image in: weddings.

Click-through for a slide show of other wedding images submitted to the Blown Covers blog, with Françoise’s comments: http://nyr.kr/OSX5mh