In her 1988 essay “(Im)Personating Gertrude Stein,” Marjorie Perloff takes a sharp knife to Marty Martin’s Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein, the sort of one-character Hal Holbrooke–ish stage production popular in the 1970s and ’80s, and its presentation, as the publisher of the play had declared, of “true Stein style.” The crux of the matter is pretty simple: “On the one hand, there is the public persona, the legendary Gertrude of ‘A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose’ and the Picasso portrait. On the other, there are the non-representational, hermetic works such as Tender Buttons

Never underestimate what a “tragic” death can do for an artist’s reputation. Who knows whether the romance of Jackson Pollock as cowboy existentialist would be intact if he had survived that car crash, entered AA, and continued to drip paintings while the art world tuned into Warhol and Koons. Or imagine a seventyfive-year-old Sylvia Plath on her third marriage, exhausted after thirty years of leading poetry workshops, reciting “Daddy” on Fresh Air. Autumn Rhythm and “Ariel” would rank as masterworks even if their creators had enjoyed a fuller measure of years. But by dying precociously, neither had to face the

Daniel Radcliffe as Maps in December Boys, directed by Rod Hardy, 2007. THE STORY OF HOW AUSTRALIAN WRITER Michael Noonan’s 1963 novel December Boys became a feature film begins over four decades ago, in rather surprising fashion. Writer/producer Ronald Kinnoch, fresh off the success of the 1960 cult horror film Village of the Damned, optioned […]

It’s difficult to describe the complexity of Isa Genzken’s installation, titled Oil, created for the German pavilion at this summer’s Venice Biennale. The work is a jangle of mixed sculptures—and mixed messages—inside the long-freighted structure with its overdetermined history. Genzken even framed the pavilion itself in the work, placing an ersatz della Robbia on its facade and veiling the building with orange construction-site material. Inside, the artist’s sculptures—from an arrangement of suitcases with images of dogs slapped onto them to the uncanny “Young Astronauts” lying on the floor—commented on postwar Germany and the United States while formally engaging the very

In a mesmerizing film clip from 1975, the British anatomist John Zachary Young dissects a squid just smaller than his forearm. (The clip can be seen online at http://www.science.smith.edu/departments/NeuroSci/courses/bio330/squid.html.) Young wields a pair of shears with considerable brio as he cuts open the mantle cavity and uncovers the nerves that radiate, starlike, beneath the skin. Some forty years earlier, shortly before he first identified the squid giant axon, Young had mistaken these transparent tubular structures (as much as a millimeter in diameter) for blood vessels, but in fact they turned out to be nerve fibers, mammoth axons whose stimulation with