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

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

Arts & Letters

Volume III, Number 2 | fall 2010

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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In the Gloom the Gold

By Jamie James

Consider the legacy of Ezra Pound—no poet has ever been so influential, so controversial, and so little read.

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Map

Telling Tales

The evolutions of four stories.

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1509 | Vatican City

Injured on the Job

Michelangelo’s labor pains.More

1922 | Chicago

Up North with the Greats

Louis Armstrong makes a dream come true.More

1995 | Los Angeles

Robert Towne on the Plight of Screenwriters

The difficulty of maintaining the cinematic illusion.More

Charts & Graphs

Adaptations

Artists who overcame physical disabilities.

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Japanese artist Hokusai.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

—G. K. Chesterton, 1928

Arthur Schopenhauer & Theodor Adorno

Lapham’sDaily

The Garden of Earthly Delights (detail), by Hieronymus Bosch, 1490–1510. Prado Museum.

Roundtable

Old Master Cats

By Desmond Morris

The felines of Leonardo da Vinci and Hieronymous Bosch. More

U.S. secretary of agriculture Sonny Perdue meets with German minister of food and agriculture Christian Schmidt, 2017.

DÉjÀ Vu

Equal Climates

2017:

U.S. Department of Agriculture bans words related to climate change.

350 BC:

Aristotle denies that the climate is changing.

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The World in Time

Mark Kurlansky

Lewis H. Lapham talks with Mark Kurlansky, author of Paper: Paging Through History. More

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