4+ day, 10+ hour ago   (931+ words) Literary translation is a personal and ever-evolving pursuit. No project will be conceived of or approached the same exact way as another. Literary translators are tasked with balancing a faithful translation with demands of art, honoring, and grounding the work…...

4+ day, 9+ hour ago   (757+ words) The Brooklyn Rail The exhibition Never The Less at Guild Hall in East Hampton, New York, presents 185 small paintings (measuring 10 by 8 inches or vice versa) and ten large paintings of varying sizes by Ross Bleckner. This contrast in scale highlights…...

4+ day, 16+ hour ago   (783+ words) Sarah Minor’s Carousel: An Essay on Seeing The Brooklyn Rail Sarah Minor's Carousel: An Essay on Seeing opens with a professor teaching art history into the rectangular frame of Zoom, with many of her students’ cameras off or angled not…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (1797+ words) Portrait of Emily Rauh Pulitzer, pencil on paper by Phong H. Bui. Emily Rauh Pulitzer: It’s the library of collectors—not of an institution—because there are great strengths and weaknesses. It goes back to books that Joe—Joseph Pulitzer Jr....

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (839+ words) Youssef Rakha’s Postmuslim: A Testimony The Brooklyn Rail Youssef Rakha opens his remarkable new collection of essays, Postmuslim: A Testimony, with a piece on boxing, a sport he picked up in 2021 when he was forty-six years old. It was a…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (708+ words) Historicism’s Modernity: Modernism is History The Brooklyn Rail Among the shibboleths of the orthodox narrative touted by MoMA and American art history textbooks for much of the twentieth century, none has proved more stubborn than this: that modernism and historicism…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (989+ words) Portrait of Malcolm Peacock, pencil on paper by Phong H. Bui. Malcolm Peacock: I think that what I’ve become interested in—and in fact what I was already interested in prior to making Five—is the situation the work is traveling…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (265+ words) Ralph J. Gleason: ‘Cause you’re an explorer, this is obvious, right?John Coltrane: …! don’t know, man. I’d like to … at the moment, I don’t really know- May, 1961 interview Well, I think I’m gonna let the nature of the songs determine just…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (179+ words) Willem de Kooning, Untitled (Reclining Figure), ca. 1945. Oil and charcoal on Masonite, 15 × 19 ⅞ inches. © 2026 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy the Collection of Gene and Sueyun Locks. After immigrating as a stowaway from the Netherlands…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (833+ words) The Brooklyn Rail In school, I was interested in tabula rasa. I had this rather naïve notion that there was a kind of political and ethical purity in the avant-garde, which was pretty much outlawed in the Soviet Union, and…...