Alex and Athena take Manhattan

July 20, 2016

In WAG’s June “Celebrating the Globe” issue, I wrote about my passion – OK, some would say my obsession – with all things ancient Greek, particularly Alexander the Great, the Greco-Macedonian king whose conquest of the Persian Empire in 331 B.C. when he was in his mid-20s would lead to the dissemination of Greek culture in the East, underscoring a cultural cross-pollination and political tension that are still with us today.

Recently, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan explored these themes in its blockbuster exhibit “Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World,” which I also wrote about in our June issue and which featured a kind of greatest hits of the Hellenistic (post-classical Greek) world. ...

‘SHE’ and ‘the woman’s card’

May 2, 2016

With apologies to Dickens, this seems to be the best of times and the worst of times to be a woman.

At a moment when women dominate higher education and professional schools, they stand on the threshold of one of their own achieving for the first time the highest office in the United States and becoming the most powerful person on the face of the earth.

On the other hand, Hillary Clinton’s opponents seek either to demonize her and her sex, ridiculing her for playing “the woman’s card” (Donald Trump), or to throw chivalry into sharply false relief by confining women to the gilded cage of the pedestal (Ted Cruz) and the nostalgia of the kitchen (John Kasich).

And that’s the good news. Murder; rape; genital mutilation; sex slavery; child marriage; forced conscription into terrorists squads; a lack of access to education, employment, health care and reproductive rights; cyber death threats to and bullying of female sportswriters (a subtheme of my forthcoming novel, “The Penalty for Holding”) and, that old standby, unequal pay for more-than-equal work: The challenges and atrocities that women face are staggering.

All of which makes the incandescent “SHE: Deconstructing Female Identity” – at ArtsWestchester in White Plains, N.Y. through June 25 – a most timely exhibit indeed.

Organized by Kathleen Reckling, the brilliant gallery curator and an avowed feminist, “SHE” considers that identity and the woman’s card through what have traditionally been three power centers for women – their bodies/nature, the home/domesticity and fashion. ...

The figure in Persian and Indian art: Different perspectives from two new books

April 28, 2016

Two richly layered new books from Thames & Hudson capture the contrast between the human figure in Persian art and the figure in Indian art.

“Persian Painting: The Arts of the Book and Portraiture” by Adel T. Adamova and Manijeh Bayani (552 pages, $50) reproduces in paperback for the first time shimmering illuminated manuscripts, miniature paintings and decorated book bindings from the 11th through early 20th centuries. Illustrations from such works as Firdawsi’s “Shah-nameh” (“The Persian Book of Kings”) and Nizami’s “Khamsah” draw on The al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait.

“The Spirit of Indian Painting: Close Encounters with 101 Great Works, 1100-1900” by B.N. Goswamy (570 pages, $50) covers roughly the same period. How these books cover these periods, however, is vastly different. ...

American Pharoah rides again

April 20, 2016

With all the talk about this year’s crop of 3-year-olds for the Kentucky Derby – Will it be the presumptive favorite Nyquist or his gray rival, Mohaymen, or Exaggerator? – I’ve been feeling a little nostalgic for American Pharoah and his glory Triple Crown run last year.

Well, we Pharoah phanatics are about to get a phix: AP is the subject of a new book by Joe Drape that was excerpted in The New York Times.

“American Pharoah,” published by Hachette Books, will be available April 26. ...

Greek to me: Met opens “Pergamon,” unprecedented Hellenistic show

April 13, 2016

“So,” a publicist at The Metropolitan Museum of Art asked teasingly, “are there enough Alexanders for you?”

She knows me only too well. Lover of the ancient Greeks that I am, there can never be for me enough images of Alexander the Great – the Greco-Macedonian king whose conquest of the Persian Empire in 331 B.C. ushered in 300 years of Hellenism (Greek culture) in Asia, reversing the course of cultural influence from East-West to West-East, and underscoring a tension between East and West that is still with us.

And yet, there I was in the first gallery of “Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World” (April 18 through July 17), surrounded by Alexanders. ...

‘Sudden Death’ and the fiction racket

March 15, 2016

On a recent trip to Jacksonville, Fla. via Delta, I had a disquieting thought. The flight attendants were so friendly, so generous with their drinks and snacks that I felt guilty about the scene in my debut novel “Water Music” in which an officious flight attendant denies tennis star Evan Conor Fallon an extra package of nuts, precipitating an international incident known thereafter as “Nut-gate.”

Mulling the gracious treatment I have always received while flying, I wondered how fair and realistic I had been with Nut-gate. Mustn’t fiction reflect life?

Then while at the beach house my sisters had rented on Amelia Island, I read the introduction to Alvaro Enrigue’s intriguing new novel “Sudden Death” (Riverhead Books, $27, 261 pages) – about an imaginary 16th century tennis match between the Italian painter Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo – in which he writes something that buoyed me so much I felt as if I had made a new friend: ...

Gods among us: Male beauty and ‘Dieux du Stade’

February 17, 2016

What would Abigail Solomon-Godeau make of “Dieux du Stade,” the new book by photographer Fred Goudon, inspired by the “Dieux du Stade” calendars featuring members of the Stade Français Paris rugby club and athletes from other disciplines?

In her 1997 book “Male Trouble: A Crisis in Representation” (Thames and Hudson), the feminist art historian suggests that the nude male has been the primary sex symbol throughout art history, reaching an apotheosis in Neoclassical (turn-of-the-19th-century) Paris in the work of such artists as David, Ingres and especially Girodet, who often portrayed their subjects in the languid pose of women offered up for the male gaze. ...