Paul du Quenoy on a concert of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington.

On French wallpaper, restitution & digital technology.

On Shakespeare’s Tragic Art, by Rhodri Lewis. Shakespeare knew all this, of course. He exhibits a dazzling mastery of rhetorical tropes and techniques of persuasion, endowing his characters with an ...

Sabin Howard has been at the center of a battle over sculpture for over three decades. I first wrote about him in this space nearly twenty years ago, when I paid a visit to his studio in the South ...

In 1815, the British and American navies were at war. The war in question was the economic warfare of British blockaders. It was backed by the naval strength that made possible attacks on American ...

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While we are accustomed to thinking of the Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863–1923) as an essentially cheerful figure, a man whose scenes are imbued with a refulgent Mediterranean light, ...

On Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America’s Soldiers, by David Suisman.

“Orphism” is what, exactly? According to Guillaume Apollinaire, who coined the term, It is the art of painting new structures out of elements which have not been borrowed from the visual sphere, but ...

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series.

“I was asked to write a five-minute orchestra work expressing the current world situation and to do it as soon as possible.” That is an interesting, possibly daunting, assignment. What was “the ...

There is an old Cape Cod legend about a whale named Crook Jaw. The story goes that Ichabod Paddock, a masterly shore whaler from Yarmouth, was time and again routed by the great leviathan. His usually ...