Las Meninas, by Diego Velázquez, 1656. Prado Museum, Madrid, Spain.

Las Meninas (detail), by Diego Velázquez, 1656. Prado Museum, Madrid, Spain.

Arts & Letters

Volume III, Number 2 | spring 2010

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Preamble

Lady in a Veil

By Lewis H. Lapham

Despite being told that art is somehow sacred, it’s better to take a naive delight in the thing itself.

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Beauty Is Shoe

By Wendy Steiner

Is the model a subject, or is the subject a model?

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Map

Telling Tales

The evolutions of four stories.

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1961 | Provincetown

The Innocent Eye

Why painting is hard to do.More

c. 25 BC | Rome

Practice and Theory

Vitruvius defines the relationship.More

1908 | Perugia

Shivering Fragments

Virginia Woolf seeks symmetry through discord.More

Charts & Graphs

Life Is Long, Art Is Short

Artists who ended their lives.

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Portrait of young Arthur Schopenhauer wearing a brown suit and a cravat.

Black and white photograph of American poet Marianne Moore.

Black and white photograph of English writer Virginia Woolf.

Color portrait of Russian poet, novelist, and dramatist Aleksandr Pushkin.

American author and journalist Jamie James.

If a king loves music, there is little wrong in the land.

—Mencius, c. 330 BC

Friedrich Schiller & David Foster Wallace

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Lapham’sDaily

Roundtable

Walk on the Wild Side

By Virginia Woolf

On the lives passing through Kew Gardens on a summer day. More

DÉjÀ Vu

Dance Stance Revolution

2022:

Brazilian blocos ignore ban on Carnival celebrations.

1576:

Italian plague patients ignore ban on dance parties.

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The World in Time

Olivier Zunz

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville. More

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