On the face of it, there’s not much that’s Jewish about Highpoint II. The pre-World War II apartment complex, located in the Highgate suburb of London, is a sequel of sorts to architect Berthold Lubetkin’s groundbreaking Highpoint I from 1935. The first building was the apogee of modernist architecture with its white concrete, flat roof,…
There is no one way to grieve or process a tragedy of an unimaginable scale. Still, few displays of grief are as curious as that favored by the 92-year-old Israeli artist Dov Or-Ner, a Holocaust survivor who appears in public dressed as Adolf Hitler. Or-Ner, a veteran sculptor and painter whose parents died in the…
I’m not sure what to make of the title of the Martha Rosler retrospective at the Jewish Museum, “Irrespective.” According to the wall text, it’s supposed to be a portmanteau, “a clever play on terms that lie somewhere between the words ‘retrospective’ and ‘irreverent.’” The exhibition, we’re promised, will be no mere shrine to its…
Following this August’s far-right rallies in Chemnitz, Germany, many participants got off easy. Of the estimated 7,000 attendees, many of whom were caught using illegal Nazi salutes and accosting immigrants, nearly all evaded arrest and, crucially, identification. Now, The Daily Beast reports that an effort by the German leftist art group the Center for Political…
The National Rifle Association has removed an image of Anish Kapoor’s sculpture, “Cloud Gate” from an advertisement that, according to the Genesis Award-winning artist, “perverts everything that ‘Cloud Gate’ — and America — stands for.” The removal follows a legal battle that began this summer The Guardian reports. The one-minute ad titled “The Clenched Fist…
The trouble with museums is they tend to stay in one place. While any museum’s permanent collection makes up the bulk of the institution’s bragging rights, those of us who don’t live near the Louvre, MOMA or the Art Institute of Chicago don’t have ready access to the masterpieces on display. Luckily for us, that…
Raji Sabateen, 56, lives in the village of Husan in the Palestinian West Bank, a place where few Israelis dare to visit. But over the past five months, thousands of Israelis have spent time inside Sabateen’s home through the power of virtual reality. Sabateen’s home is featured at Jerusalem’s Israel Museum as part of “Eye…
The photographer Roman Vishniac resettled many times. Born in St. Petersburg, he fled to Berlin in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution; in the 1930s he returned to Eastern Europe to document shtetl life; and he ultimately fled from Germany in the 1940s to live in New York, where the bulk of his photographs have…
You push a button. A spring releases a bowling ball, which hurtles down a ramp toward a switch that uncages a bird, whose beak twirls a dial that activates the printer that spits out your ticket. That’s not actually how admission to “The Art of Rube Goldberg” works, but it’s how the legendary cartoonist might…
Oskar Rabin, a leading figure in subversive Soviet art who first gained international attention for hanging from a moving bulldozer, died November 7 in Florence. He was 90 years old. Rabin was in Florence for an exhibition of his work, The New York Times reports. The filmmaker Evgeny Smoljanski, who directed a documentary about the…
Objects and images, linking memory and history, are a mainstay of museum exhibitions. They are the embodiment of synecdoche, the part standing in for the whole. A photo album, a china set, a teddy bear — even the most quotidian of artifacts — all resonate with special poignancy when associated with stories of persecution and…
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