It’s not the K.G.B., or the Cold War. It’s decidedly more Pushkin-esque, or Peter the Great, than that.
BY PETER SAVODNIK JANUARY 10, 2017
Henry Kissinger recently compared Vladimir Putin to “a character out of Dostoevsky,” which apparently delighted the Russian president. That’s not entirely surprising. No Russian writer encapsulates the many incongruous feelings and forces—cultural, spiritual, metaphysical—still coursing through the post-Soviet moment better than Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Humiliated by the 1990s, Russia’s strongman is determined to win Cold War 2.0. He may be succeeding.
Twenty years before Vladimir Putin began his ingenious campaign to influence the U.S. presidential election, his predecessor as Russia’s president stood on a dark street near the White House. In his underpants. Looking for a pizza.
Killer, kleptocrat, genius, spy: the many myths of Vladimir Putin
Russia’s role in Trump’s election has led to a boom in Putinology. But do all these theories say more about us than Putin?
by Keith Gessen
Wednesday 22 February 2017
Vladimir Putin, you may have noticed, is everywhere. He has soldiers in Ukraine and Syria, troublemakers in the Baltics and Finland, and a hand in elections from the Czech Republic to France to the United States. And he is in the media. Not a day goes by without a big new article on “Putin’s Revenge”, “The Secret Source of Putin’s Evil”, or “10 Reasons Why Vladimir Putin Is a Terrible Human Being”.
The cameras have gone – but the suffering endures. Daniel Trilling deconstructs the beliefs that still shape policy and public opinion
by Daniel Trilling
Tuesday 5 Jun 2018 06.00 BST
Myth 1: The crisis is over
The refugee crisis that dominated the news in 2015 and 2016 consisted primarily of a sharp rise in the number of people coming to Europe to claim asylum. Arrivals have now dropped, and governments have cracked down on the movement of undocumented migrants within the EU; many thousands are stuck in reception centres or camps in southern Europe, while others try to make new lives in the places they have settled.
But to see the crisis as an event that began in 2015 and ended the following year is a mistake, because it obscures the fact that the underlying causes have not changed. To see it in those terms only gives the impression of a hitherto unsullied Europe, visited by hordes of foreigners it has little to do with. This is misleading. The disaster of recent years has as much to do with immigration policies drawn up in European capitals as it does with events outside the continent, and the crisis also consists of overreaction and panic, fuelled by a series of misconceptions about who the migrants are, why they come, and what it means for Europe.
In the culmination of an award-winning 18-month project, the new arrivals, Kate Lyons traces an Afghan father and son’s harrowing journey to Britain – and the pressures that led them to flee all over again
by Kate Lyons
Friday 1 June 2018
On a drizzly afternoon in February, Philip Kelly made the short drive from his home near the centre of Derby to a street in Normanton, one of the poorer areas of the city. He stopped at one of the terraced houses owned by G4S, which has a government contract to provide housing to asylum seekers in the region. The upstairs flat was occupied by Said Ghullam Norzai, an asylum seeker from Afghanistan, and his 11-year-old son, Wali Khan.
The final installment in John Richardson’s mammoth biography reveals the artist’s fiendish control over his admirers.
John Banville/
In 1935, the photographer Dora Maar met Picasso and plunged into an affair with him that would very nearly destroy her emotionally, as he encouraged her latent masochism and betrayed her repeatedly with other lovers. Ten years later, after the war and the affair were over, she suffered a mental collapse for which she was treated by Jacques Lacan, that dubious psychoanalyst de ces jours, who, according to John Richardson, “rescued her by transforming her from a surrealist rebel into a devout Catholic conservative.” As Maar herself said, “After Picasso, there is only God.”
How Pablo Picasso’s Wives and Mistresses Inspired His Art
The Spanish artist had a reputation for breaking the hearts of numerous women whom he used as muses for his work.
EUDIE PAK MAY 28, 2020 ORIGINAL: JUN 21, 2019
Sex, love and art were interconnected in the world of Pablo Picasso, and while some of his supporters would argue he had a demonstrably tender side towards women, it would be difficult to deny that the serial philanderer, by and large, used his wives and mistresses as a means to a self-serving end — that end being his artistic identity.
"There are only two kinds of women, goddesses and doormats," Picasso once said.
Isabel Almazán and Beatriz Ganuza, pictured on Thursday in front of Picasso's 'Guernica' in Madrid's Reina Sofía museum.VÍCTOR SAINZ
The flight attendants who accompanied Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ back from exile
Forty years ago today, Iberia cabin crew Isabel Almazán and Beatriz Ganuza were working on the plane that returned the painting from New York to Madrid. They recount their memories of the experience to EL PAÍS
Antonio Jiménez Barca
Madrid, 10 de septiembre de 2021
Flight attendant Isabel Almazán was 38 years old on that day, and she insists that she noticed that there was some kind of fuss when she boarded the plane in New York. But perhaps it’s an invented memory, created once all the events of that day became known. The plane, a Boeing 747 belonging to the then-Spanish flag carrier Iberia, took off from New York’s JFK airport with a slight delay, at 8.20pm. In many respects, it was a normal flight – just another for the IB-952 route. But at around 8am Madrid time, when the plane was already on the tarmac and headed to its gate, Captain Juan López Durán broke the news.
Pablo Picasso, from suspicious foreigner to French national treasure
A book and exhibition on the Spanish-born artist show how he was placed under police surveillance before finally being adopted by the country that once refused him citizenship
MARC BASSETS PARIS, NOVEMBER 8, 2021 English version by Rob Train
It could be considered a flagrant case of cultural appropriation before the expression entered common use: the story of how the Spanish artist Pablo Ruiz Picasso ended up being one of France’s greatest artistic glories.
In reality, it was all rather more complicated than that. For decades, from the first time the Málaga-born genius visited Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, the French authorities were suspicious of him. He was placed under police surveillance, a file was opened on his activities and he never renounced his Spanish citizenship. The only occasion he sought French nationality was in 1940, on the eve of the Nazi occupation. However, his application was denied. After World War II, France worked hard to be reconciled with the creator of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Guernica, but by then Picasso had lost interest in acquiring French citizenship.
The grand Allied invasion of Normandy had myriad ways to go wrong, writes historian Beevor (The Mystery of Olga Chekhova, 2004, etc.) in this skilled account. Miraculously, it did not.
“Everyone in Britain knew that D-Day was imminent,” the author writes, “and so did the Germans.” What kept the Germans from knowing the exact details of the attack is the stuff of legend—and a massive program of disinformation and double-agenting, which Beevor deftly relates. The larger outlines of the story are well-known; historians and journalists from John Keegan to Cornelius Ryan have had their say about the matter. To this Beevor adds sharp observations derived from the archives, among them the unsettling fact that just before the invasion almost every American unit involved was rated “unsatisfactory,” most having never experienced combat before. Fortunately, the Germans across the English Channel were divided in how to respond. As the author notes, Erwin Rommel wanted to concentrate his troops near the landing sites, while his superior officers wanted to assemble a mighty counterattack in the woods north of Paris. Elements of both strategies were hastily assembled as needed, and in either event they cost the Allies plenty. One of the strongest elements of the book is Beevor’s inclusion of sometimes overlooked and discounted actors, including French Resistance forces and veterans of the Polish army who had made their way west, and who told their French counterparts, “You will be liberated…but we will be occupied for years and years.” As the author writes, the Germans had an international army, too, including Cossack forces that were mowed down as they rode into battle. His account of atrocities on both sides, of errors committed and of surpassing bravery makes for excellent—though often blood-soaked—reading.
You know I’d like to be doing a post called Holiday Books 2020 but that’s not happening for me this year, hence I’ve gone with a gloomier theme for the title. I’d like to think there’s a book for everyone in this list, but that’s perhaps not wholly true since there is a male-bias and certainly no, dare I say it, chicklit. I keep telling Siggy to start a blog so she can wax lyrical about the latest Emily Barr, Pudding Club or Shopaholic book, but she’s not biting.
Why I didn’t write a post about Peace straight after reading it is a mystery to me and now I’m left wondering if I can really do it justice. Despite not enjoying The Fifth Head of Cerberus all that much, I consider myself an enthusiastic fan of the late great Gene Wolfe after enjoying the awesome tetralogy The Book of The New Sun – which Publishers Weekly described as “a masterpiece of science fantasy comparable in importance to the major works of Tolkien and Lewis”.
This year I read around 40 books – it might have been more if some of them hadn’t been so long! And of course I didn’t get an opportunity to do any reading on holiday, because I had no real holiday this year. Poor me. Anyway, here’s a list of the Top 4 books I’ve read this year with links to longer reviews in some cases (I would’ve done a Top 5 if I’d read fifty – blame Stephen / Owen King and Margaret Atwood):
Claude Picasso, New York, November 29, 1967, photographed by Richard Avedon
IN CONVERSATION
CLAUDE PICASSO ANDJOHN RICHARDSON
Picasso biographer and family friend Sir John Richardson sits down with Claude Picasso for a wide-ranging conversation. The two discuss Claude’s photography, his enjoyment of vintage car racing, his encounters with Willem de Kooning, and the future of scholarship related to his father, Pablo Picasso.
CLAUDE PICASSO Well, tomorrow is my birthday and I thought I’d spend it with [my mother] Françoise [Gilot]. It’s amusing because we’re exactly twenty-five years apart, so it’s easy to remember: When I turned twenty-five, she turned fifty. When she turned seventy-five, I was fifty. This week she said, “And what are you going to be? Oh, seventy-two? So it means I’ll be a hundred” [laughter]. I said, “Not yet.”
“What makes you smile?” our photographer asks Françoise Gilot. Her serious expression suddenly shifts into a delighted grin. Everyone laughs. We are in the Colas Engel Art Gallery in North Park, where Gilot’s paintings are on exhibit in advance of Symphony at Salk, the annual concert and benefit for the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences. The internationally-known artist and author has served as Honorary Chair since the event’s inception in 1994, and her strong, dynamic works have been featured as the event’s signature posters. “I paint for me,” says Gilot who began studying art as a child. “It’s a natural thing. It’s a way of expressing both my ideas and also my passions.”
Inspired by her mother, who was a watercolourist, Françoise Gilot decided to become an artist herself at the age of five. She was tutored first by her mother and then by her mother’s art teacher. In 1938 Gilot attained a Bachelor of Arts (Philosophy) at the University of Paris, and then completed another degree in English literature at Cambridge University in 1939. In order to please her father Gilot enrolled to study law from 1940−42, during the Nazi Occupation of Paris, but eventually decided to pursue a full-time career as an artist, spending her time sketching in Paris subways and cafes. Her art heroes at this time were the masters of the Italian Quattrocento, as well as Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh. In 1941 at the Salon des Tuileries she met a young Hungarian painter Endre Rozsda, who was an enthusiast of Surrealism and the work of Pablo Picasso, who allowed her to work in his studio. Gilot now developed an interest in the work of Henri Matisse and Georges Braque. In Paris from 1943–45 she studied at the Académie Julian, the Académie Ranson and the École des Beaux-Arts.
In 1943 Gilot held her first exhibition in Paris, showing work alongside another artist friend, Geneviève Aliquot. In this same year, at age twenty-one, she met Pablo Picasso. The two were romantically linked as partners for the next decade, and had two children together, Claude and Paloma. Following the war, the couple lived primarily in the south of France. Gilot continued to work as an independent artist during and after her relationship with Picasso. In 1949 she entered into a contractual arrangement with the Galerie Louise Leiris, becoming the first woman artist to exhibit with this prestigious gallery in 1952. Gilot separated from Picasso in September 1953, leaving the home she shared with him in Vallauris and returning to Paris with their children. In May 2016 Françoise Gilot recalled:
When the French painter and writer Françoise Gilot was 21, she met an older artist at a Paris restaurant. He invited her to visit his studio, and they quickly fell in love.
She defied her bourgeois family by moving in with him, and they remained together for 10 years. They raised two children, and she slowed her own career to be his muse, manager and support system. But this became untenable, and she left him, becoming a highly successful painter in her own right. As for the older artist — well, he was Pablo Picasso.
Siri Hustvedt: ‘I loved Ann Petry’s biography, Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad.’
The
Books
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Siri Hustvedt: ‘I responded viscerally to De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex’
The US author on becoming a feminist, growing into Gertrude Stein, and the comfort of folk tales
Siri Hustvedt Friday 26 November 2021
My earliest reading memory At six I became fascinated with the Lonely Doll books by Dare Wright that I found in the public library of my small town, Northfield, Minnesota. They used photographs, not drawings, as illustrations; they gave me an uncanny feeling of secrets lurking behind the words and images. It is a feeling I have never forgotten.
My favourite book growing up I loved Ann Petry’s biography, Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad. I found it in my school library in 1965, 10 years after it was first published. I was 10 years old and intensely aware of the civil rights movement, despite the fact that I lived in an all-white town and had seen black people only on forays to Minneapolis every Christmas. I was passionately attached to the story of this extraordinary, heroic woman.
The book that changed me as a teenager When I was 14 or 15 I read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Despite my lack of philosophical sophistication, I responded viscerally to the book. Rereading it later, I wonder exactly what I understood at the time. It is not an easy book. I suspect that, despite my struggles with the text, I gleaned its essential message – that women were treated as outsiders to history as the eternal feminine, had always been other to man, and that these injustices ran deep. I became a feminist.
The writer who changed my mind I was in my early 30s when I first read the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose book Phenomenology of Perception reordered my thinking about the mind/body problem. His work changed my “mind” by bringing it into my body. He skewers the mind-body substance dualism in the philosophy of Descartes and his heirs. The philosopher’s interest in the science of the moment and its flawed assumptions, as well as his use of neurological case studies to illustrate his thought, have remained highly influential for my own thinking.
The book that made me want to be a writer David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I was 13. It was the summer of 1968, and I was in Reykjavik, Iceland, where my father was studying the Icelandic sagas. Political upheaval was dimly present in my consciousness, but I lived on and in novels. The sun never set, and my disturbed circadian rhythms kept me awake. I read and read, one novel after another, but it was that book that set my nerves on fire. One night, moved to tears by a particular passage, which I no longer remember, I walked to the window and made a vow – if this is what books could do, then this is what I wanted to do. I began writing. Years later, I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Dickens. Although I sometimes tired of me and my insights while working on the thesis, I never lost a feeling of awe for the inimitable CD.
The book or author I came back to I didn’t “get” Gertrude Stein as a teenager. I had to grow into an adult to feel the music, humour and rigour of her work.
The book I reread I have read Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights five times now. I read it first at 13 during the same Icelandic summer, and it scared me witless. The older I get, the more profound and radical the book has become. I have come to view it as an insurrectionist text that razes our assumptions about borders between this and that, I and you, life and death and grinds them into dust.
The book I could never read again I am ashamed about Gone With the Wind. I read it that same fateful Icelandic summer. I checked it out of Reykjavik public library, didn’t understand that the author was writing about the Ku Klux Klan, and I had to ask my mother what the word “rape” meant. This horrible, cheesy book advanced the disgusting “lost cause” narrative still dear to the American south and parts of the north.
The book I discovered later in life I did not read Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace until I was well into my 40s. I now think this was exactly the right moment for me because I was able to place the text in a broader context. At the same time, the lightning precision of Weil’s extraordinary mind would no doubt have bowled me over as a young person too.
The book I am currently reading A wonderful recently published book, In Defence of the Human Being by Thomas Fuchs. Fuchs is a professor of philosophy and psychiatry at Heidelberg University and is a lucid, brilliant defender of a new form of humanism.
My comfort read Fairy and folk tales – any kind from any country.
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