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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

A History of the Rectangle, Van Gogh’s Last Painting, and the Robert Penn Warren Option

Also: The danger of humanitarianism, how banking has changed, and more.
640px-Vincent_van_Gogh_-_Tree-roots_-_Google_Art_Project

What was Van Gogh’s last painting? Most people think it was Wheatfield With Crows, but according to scholars at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, that is unlikely. “According to their research, a more obscure painting named Tree Roots (1890) is the likeliest final painting made by the artist.”

Verse outlaws: A notebook containing poems by notorious bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow has been put up for auction. “According to Heritage Auctions, the ‘year book’ was used by Parker and Barrow to write poetry about ‘their life of crime and doomed efforts to elude capture’.”

Alex J. Pollock writes about how banking has changed—and hasn’t changed—in 50 years. There are fewer banks and many more failures today than in the 1950s, but one thing hasn’t changed: “the tight connection between banking and the government. As banking scholar Charles Calomiris has convincingly summed it up, all banking systems are a deal between the politicians and the bankers.”

Is it time for an Agrarian Option? Mary Cuff makes the case: “For Warren, looking back on what had united the various beasts in that tent, the dominant concern had been ‘the disintegration of the notion of the individual in that society we’re living in . . . and the relation of that to democracy. It’s the machine of power in this so-called democratic state; the machines disintegrate individuals, so you have no individual sense of responsibility and no awareness that the individual has a past and a place. He’s simply the voting machine; he’s everything you pull the lever on if there’s any voting at all.’ He proposed that the agrarian program had been ‘trying to find a notion of democracy’ that saved individuals and society from such a fate. Warren’s reaffirmation of agrarianism in these terms can be a valuable model for conservatives today who approve of the agrarian diagnosis yet remain unconvinced by recent popular and popularizing versions of its solutions.”

Love in the abstract: Barton Swaim reviews Daniel J. Mahoney’s The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity: “Humanitarianism in this sense holds that the Christian’s highest and, perhaps, only duty is to exhibit compassion and fellow-feeling toward humanity as a whole. The humanitarian’s chief concern is with humanity in the abstract, the supposed plight of faraway peoples of whom the humanitarian likely has little or no direct knowledge. Humanitarianism looks with suspicion on any attitude or religion that treats one’s own family, church, neighborhood, city, or country with special affection . . . That may sound like a merely stupid failing—an obsession, say, with injustices done to illegal immigrants thousands of miles away but hatred for one’s neighbor who takes a different view—but Mahoney contends that religious humanitarianism is much worse than that. As the citizen’s love and loyalty attach less and less to those nearest to him and more and more to an abstract and idealized agglomeration of ‘humanity,’ social bonds loosen and politics itself becomes meaningless.”

Deborah Warren writes about the poetry of William Baer: “Robert Frost said, ‘Poetry is what gets lost in translation.’ More than on an idea or a story line, poetry depends on idiom and nuance. It plays and plies the language by using unexpected words, imagery, voice, irony. By this definition, Baer is one of today’s top poets.”

Essay of the Day:

In Cabinet, Amy Knight Powell tells the history of the rectangle and explains how it became so popular in the West:

“This is about the dominance of the rectangular format in a certain tradition of picture making, a dominance that still holds today and extends well beyond the medium of painting. The book, the photographic print, the screen, and the museum—which has tended to favor this format—all guarantee that we encounter most pictures in rectangular frames.

“A picture that comprises figure and ground requires an enclosed field. Without an enclosure, the space around its figure(s) will not necessarily read as part of the picture; enclosure is, therefore, the originary act that gives rise to the picture but also limits it. Nothing says this enclosure needs to take the shape of a rectangle, but the history of Western art, at least, makes the rectangle look like a virtually inescapable anatomical limit. What follows are three episodes in the longue durée of this rectangle, each a moment in which the rectangular format moves into an ascendant position over one curvilinear format or another.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Sakrisoy

Poem: Rachel Hadas, “Departure”

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