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Articles by Eric Ormsby
The Critic’s Notebook
Art: “Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (November 8–February 16, 2026): Philadelphia is about to play host to “Dreamworld: Surrealism at 100,” organized to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the movement with the publication of the André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto.
Eric Ormsby | The New Criterion
Show AllShow ArticlesShow DispatchShow TNC+ MultimediaAll Authors, , Abel, LionelAbowitz, RichardAdams, HarryAdams, J.
The first lion king
One passion shared by academics, journalists, and contributors to internet blogs is debunking what you think you know. Naturally, it is the job of the serious historian to separate fact from fiction. But just as Keats warned of the danger that science poses to the “poetry of the rainbow,” attempts by recent scholars to demystify the great men of the past and deconstruct the legends surrounding them threaten the cultural significance of these historic figures.
Continental divides
Back before the United States, the culture, and the theater went insane (ca. 2014), crowd-pleasing boulevardier comedies about the dilemmas of upper-income white people who held up a mirror to the ticket-buying audience were a Broadway staple.
Forging a lasting peace
The peace terms required Hamas to release the twenty living hostages they had held since October 7, 2023. It also required Israel to release nearly two thousand Palestinian prisoners, including some of the most notorious murderers and terrorists. The Israeli-hostage release, being the predicate for peace, was the cause of much rejoicing. The terrorists let out? The peace terms call for Gaza to be demilitarized and Hamas disarmed. Will that happen?
Kingdom come - The New Criterion
Among the many miracles to come from Jerusalem, “To the Holy Sepulcher: Treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum,” now on view at the Frick Collection, is the latest revelation.1 The wonders of the works on display, with some sixty-eight individual pieces, are only outshone by the tales of their survival and the connections these treasures maintain to that singular place.
“Week in review,” by Suzanna Murawski
Recent stories of note: “Renewed Frick Collection balances tradition and transformation” J. Cabelle Ahn, The Art Newspaper The March 2025 issue of The New Criterion contained something out of the ordinary—photographs, of some of the homes of Henry Clay Frick (accompanying “The Fricks at home,” by Ian Wardropper).
“Ever Andsnes,” by Jay Nordlinger
Last night, Leif Ove Andsnes began his recital at Carnegie Hall with Grieg’s Piano Sonata (the only one he ever wrote). Did Andsnes do this because he wanted to? Or because he had to? What do I mean? Andsnes is a Norwegian pianist—the greatest in history, surely—and Grieg is Norway’s national composer. Does Andsnes feel a patriotic obligation? At any rate, Andsnes does well by Grieg, and Grieg is one of the most lovable composers we have. I have always liked the Grieg sonata.
The Critic’s Notebook
Art: Paul Landacre: California Hills, Hollywood, and the World Beyond, A Catalogue Raisonné, by Jake Milgram Wien (Abbeville Press): “There was nothing small about [Paul] Landacre’s vision,” writes Dana Gioia in his afterword to the two-volume catalogue raisonné of California’s greatest wood engraver. “Despite their modest dimensions, his best prints are monumental and perdurable.” The same might be said of this finely chiseled box set produced by Abbeville Press.
Is this the end of the DEI regime?
Within a day of taking the oath of office, President Donald Trump issued several executive orders terminating “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs in the federal government.
Pinchas & Co. | The New Criterion
Yesterday afternoon, in Alice Tully Hall, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center offered a concert of Beethoven and Bruckner. Bruckner, in a chamber concert? Yes. More on that in due course. The first half of the concert comprised two Beethoven sonatas. Our opening sonata was that for cello and piano in A major, Op. 69. The cellist: Amanda Forsyth, a Canadian. The pianist: Shai Wosner, from Israel. Both of these have long experience in chamber music (and other music).
“Week in review,” by Suzanna Murawski
Recent stories of note: “A Need for Roots” Adam Kirsch, Jewish Review of Books Plenty of Jewish thinkers in twentieth-century Europe had strained relationships with Judaism. The French philosopher Simone Weil, for her part, seemed to wish to renounce her Judaism altogether.
An opera orchestra in Brahms
The Metropolitan Opera has gone dark for a month or so, but its orchestra is free to play—as it did last night in Carnegie Hall. The program was all-Brahms. It is good to be able to see these players from time to time. The New York Philharmonic players are very familiar to us, onstage night after night. But the Met’s? They’re in a pit. Question: Is Brahms the only great composer not to have written an opera? Along with Bruckner and Mahler? (Bach, you could say, wrote things that amounted to operas . .
“Cry, uncle,” by Isaac Sligh
It’s raining Uncle Vanyas in New York lately. Steve Carell’s turn in the title role last year centered an impressive, big-budget staging on Broadway. This March, Andrew Scott will import his award-winning one-man Vanya from London’s West End. Jack Serio’s excellent off-Broadway production from 2023, which I reviewed, only looks better with each passing Vanya.
Beyond the Assisi frescoes
When we think of capital-V Vice being conquered in an artwork, we tend to think of Saint Michael the Archangel spearing the dragon. We are less likely to imagine Saint Francis of Assisi, the “instrument of peace” beloved for his connection to animals, crushing Lust under his heel. But a new exhibition in Francis’s home country of Italy shows us a saint more forceful and dramatic, and less gentle, than often depicted.
The Critic’s Notebook
Nonfiction: Lawless Republic: The Rise of Cicero and the Decline of Rome, by Josiah Osgood (Basic Books): The legal and political speeches of Cicero are so ingeniously constructed, so stylistically definitive, that even the non-Latinist might benefit from reading them in the original. But to read his arguments against their times, as Josiah Osgood does in the new Lawless Republic, affords a different sort of illumination.
“Mexican magic,” by Paul du Quenoy
As a deep freeze settled in the nation’s capital in the days before Donald J. Trump’s second inauguration, the National Symphony pursued a bold program with a tinge from south of the troubled border.
“Slipshoddiness,” by Anthony Daniels
If a Martian had visited the Earth just before the covid epidemic and returned now, how much difference would he notice? I suppose it might depend on how close an observer he was, but I confess that I suspect he would notice very little difference, unless Ukraine and Gaza were on his itinerary on both occasions.
The Critic’s Notebook
Events: Edmund Burke Award Gala honoring Ronald S. Lauder, The Metropolitan Club, New York (May 2): A few tickets still remain for The New Criterion’s eleventh Edmund Burke Award Gala on May 2. This year we are honoring Ronald S. Lauder, the leading philanthropist, art connoisseur, and businessman.
Music for a While #88: Shout it out
In this episode, Jay begins with a shout—“Carolina Shout,” the classic jazz number by James P. Johnson. There are songs by Schumann, Puccini, and Porter (Cole). There are piano preludes—starter pieces by their composers. At the end, there is a sunburst of calypso. Enjoy this smorgasbord.
20 Years of The Walrus: Poetry
The Walrus Over the past twenty years, The Walrus has been a steady bellwether of must-read writing. For our 20th anniversary, we’ve collected works that still surprise us, impress us, move us. Here are some of the best poems that we’ve published.
June 2023 | The Walrus
We need to be more open minded about who gets to work in the trades
A Portrait of the Pelican
The pelican upon Miami’s pier lofts his gullet in cadenzas and poses as if to yodel, Arawakan in extended silhouette. His fellows hunch like tchotchkes on credenzas in rococo living rooms; they peer with dimly lidded, idly anecdotal pupils; and when they defecate, they pirouette with senatorial finesse and sleek-billed smiling, each almost daintily upon his personal piling. When gobbling, this bird will snake mazurkas with syncopated throat.
The jewel in the cobra’s mouth by Eric Ormsby
Still, Napier was a savage and ruthless commander and it would be anachronistic, as well as plain wrong, to read simmering anti-colonialist sentiments into these words. Napier felt contempt for British administration and colonial hierarchy not for their mercenary motives, which he bluntly acknowledged, but for their hypocrisy and sheer incompetence.
The house in his mind by Eric Ormsby
In the two-volume set of Maxwell’s works, which the Library of America has brought out to mark the centenary of his birth, the novels and stories which have Draperville as their setting display a particular, almost indefinable vibrancy.1 But even The Château of 1961, his rather Jamesian version of The Innocents Abroad, which takes two guileless young Americans to post-war France, could be read as “Draperville in the Loire.” His remembered mid-Western birthplace had by then become a state of...
The cracked kettle of Flaubert by Eric Ormsby
The anecdote is illuminating, not only because it demonstrates the reverence of ear which sophisticated French readers once brought to cherished texts—and Caroline was far from unique in her attentiveness to such cadences—but because it furnishes an apt example of what the French call “la mélodie de la phrase,” the music of a sentence.
A true part of the story
Moses Jacob Ezekiel (1844–1917) was one of the most celebrated sculptors of his day. A religious minority in America who became an expatriate in Europe, his work was lauded the world over. Once, he kneeled to be knighted by European monarchs; today, his most famous memorial is slated to be torn down by our own Department of Defense. Ezekiel was a Virginian and a practicing Jew who sailed across the seas to live in Catholic Rome.
Victor Hugo: the ghost in the pantheon by Eric Ormsby
Hugo, avid if not insatiable, gulped down outrage and prestige equally with the alacrity of a tomcat swallowing minnows. As his fame grew, he continued to overspill all bounds: manuscripts in every genre (as well as drawings and paintings) flowed so copiously from his fluent pen that his publishers fell into permanent backlog; decades after his death new works of his were still being published. Mounting acclaim failed to hobble him.
The voice impersonator by Eric Ormsby
Ezra Pound. Photo: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. Ezra Pound. Photo: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Prague of a hundred towers by Eric Ormsby
Now, with Prague in Black and Gold, Peter Demetz, an emeritus professor at Yale and a well-known authority on German literature, has taken on the immensely ambitious project of writing the first detailed political and cultural history in English of his native city from its legendary origins to the death of President Thomas Garrigue Masaryk in 1937.[1] It is a groundbreaking work and one that all future historians of Prague will be obliged to consult.
Flashes of lightning
Tolstoy began writing War and Peace in 1863, just over fifty years after the Napoleonic invasion of Russia and the catastrophic retreat of the Grande Armée. Though the novel opens in July 1805, and Tolstoy carries the story well into the 1820s, most of the narrative centers on the events of 1812, culminating in the horrific battle of Borodino and the evacuation of Moscow.
Proust in person by Eric Ormsby
Of the multitudinous characters who populate the seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time, all indelibly depicted, none is more elusive in the end than the one we know the most about, whether we think of him as Proust himself or “the Narrator.” There is an “uncertainty” seemingly built into the narrative structure of the novel, the first and most significant of several that the acclaimed Israeli historian of the Holocaust Saul Friedländer explores in this brilliant extended essay on Proust and...
Fifty Twists of the Tongue
Eric Ormsby Times Literary Supplement January 15, 2021 In one of his letters Gustave Flaubert mused about writing a book “about nothing”, a book of pure style alone. The Maqāmāt of Abu Muhammad al-Qasim al-Hariri(1054–1122) may not be a book “about nothing”.
Franz Kafka & the trip to Spindelmühle by Eric Ormsby
When Kafka began drafting The Castle on the very day of his arrival in Spindelmühle, it was the first sustained writing he had attempted for over a year. From his diaries, we can see how even simple events, such as walking in the snow under the Riesengebirge, became charged for him with moral and spiritual significance.
‘God’s Shadow’ Review: Sword of the Caliph
How the brief but revolutionary reign of ‘Selim the Grim’ transformed an empire and a faith. By Eric Ormsby Updated Sept. 11, 2020 6:22 pm ET From the early seventh century, the question of succession became the thorniest, most divisive and indeed the bloodiest issue in Islamic history. Of the first four caliphs, the rulers of the faith after Muhammad, three were murdered.
July/August 2020
Here’s the thing I now know about dying. It looks like almost anything else
Lord Mayor Magpie
The Walrus Because he sticks his chest right out when he condescends to the ground, we think him arrogant: there’s parade-ground posh to his strut. Shrewdest of our local lords, Magpie idles in a limousine of black feather with a slash of white piping that outshines all chrome, and this makes of him the spiffiest parade; he has the brazen glamour of a motorcade. I’ve seen royalty arrayed in the print of his greedy feet.
Against the logicians by Eric Ormsby
Logicians are predators. They pounce on quavering fallacies. They eviscerate shaky premises that wobble, poor colts on spindle-shanks. Logicians are dogs who disembowel the ambiguous, ermine- throated ladies of inconsequence. I’m leery of logicians with their Chinese cleaver jaws and bone-saw fangs, their claw curettes and scalpel talons. They sever my fogs, they vivisect my mists, they savage all my smogginess. Yes, they are hyenas. After the lions leave they sterilize the gut-buckets of the veldt.
A mind emparadised
Paul Gustave Doré, Dante and Beatrice gaze upon the highest Heaven, The Empyrean, 19th century The ineffability of mystical experience is an ancient commonplace. Not surprisingly, Dante alludes to it often with baffled exasperation throughout his Paradiso.
Petrarch: a splendid excess
This year marks the seventh centenary of Petrarch’s birth, on July 20, 1304, in the town of Arezzo. The son of an exile—his father Petracco was of Dante’s generation and exiled from Florence in the same wave—Petrarch was to spend his life in restless peregrination, moving back and forth from Italy to France and venturing at times as far afield as the Netherlands and Prague. In “A Letter to Posterity,” he states (in J. G.
To a chickadee in winter by Eric Ormsby
My little champion, Staccato-eloquent, My ventriloquist of skeleton Stalks, you: fuzz-affluent Against the broken prism December dandles when the snow is still. Shy profiteer of schism, You preach relinquishment along my windowsill. Strip! Strip! Strip! You cheep. The only luxury is in the chill; The only perch of rest is in the steep Crystal dissolution of the will. I hear you chirp in sleety hiddenness, In occultation most articulate.
The disaster parade
Richard Yates. Anyone who aspires to write the Great American Novel should read Blake Bailey's new biography of Richard Yates and think twice. By turns modest and affable, psychotic and raging, courteous to a fault and touchy to the point of derangement, this dapper, handsome, immensely appealing man could turn after a drink or two into the cruellest, most irrational, and abusive monster of paranoid monomania imaginable.
Cellar by Eric Ormsby
This is where we keep them: toy trucks with busted wheels, the broken stuff we cant get rid of, our old books, the splintered chair, the fractured tabouret. Theres something stagey in our garbage. The furniture is theatrical and grim. Our repudiated gestures still live there, six feet under the kitchen. They wear the vague insulted look of slighted relatives, belonging, but pushed aside. The dark place gives reluctant nobility to these disowned things.
Honoring the ancestors by Eric Ormsby
See how those savage peoples prettified their fathers' and their mothers' skeletons with cochineal and cowrie, with fish bones and feathers, how they enhanced the well- polished molars in the jaws and rimmed the sockets of the great-gaped eyes with nacreous mosaics made of oyster-shells. Just so in memory we festoon our dead with assuaging plumes. The envy of their eyes we plug with pearl. Their discontented mouths we rouge with rich pigments quarried from old hand-me-downs.
Delousing the soul
According to Baudelaire, the devil’s best trick was to convince us that he doesn’t exist. But for Joris-Karl Huysmans, though he doubted the existence of God, belief in the devil was never a problem. For him the devil may not have been omnipresent, but he was certainly ubiquitous. Almost to his dying day, Huysmans shielded himself against the Prince of Darkness with amulets, votive statues, and talismans of all sorts.
Paul Mason | Michael Mosbacher | Standpoint
The far-left celebrity broadcaster’s vision of the future falls into the same traps as all his fellow Marxists Paul Mason (illustration by Michael Daley) Alex Salmond, SNP MP and failed independence leader, took Channel 4 News’s economics editor Paul Mason’s new book, Postcapitalism: A Guide to the Future (Allen Lane, £16.99), on his summer holidays.
‘Arabs’ Review: One Tongue, Many Peoples
In 10th-century Basra, in present-day Iraq, a shadowy group of Muslim intellectuals called the Brethren of Purity compiled a massive encyclopedia of all the scientific and philosophical knowledge of the time. It included, at one point, a discussion of sectarian conflict, in which a king on his death bed admonishes his subjects to strive for unity: “When two sticks are joined together, even if they are little, they become big,” he is quoted saying.
Embracing the Strangeness of the Bible
Eric Ormsby, Wall Street Journal March 18, 2019 Andy Jacobsohn /The Dallas Morning News via AP The difficulties of translating the Hebrew Bible begin with the first word of Genesis. The King James Bible of 1611 translates Genesis 1:1 as “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Almost all succeeding versions have followed this formulation. But, as it turns out, the Hebrew word bereshit, traditionally rendered as “in the beginning,” has long been misconstrued.
From Moses to Musa
This is a book people have died for, often haplessly, often bravely. I’m not aware that anyone has gone to the stake over a deviant reading of Proust (or at least, not yet). I note this at the outset of a discussion of translation because Kafka’s dichotomy seems to me to go to the heart of the enterprise, particularly when a sacred text is involved. In the case of the Bible, translation is unusually thorny (though certain of the same problems vex the translator of the Koran).
‘The Hebrew Bible’ and ‘The Art of Bible Translation’ Review: An Ear for Scripture
By March 15, 2019 10:14 am ET The difficultiesof translating the Hebrew Bible begin with the first word of Genesis. The King James Bible of 1611 translates Genesis 1:1 as “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” Almost all succeeding versions have followed this formulation. But, as it turns out, the Hebrew word bereshit, traditionally rendered as “in the beginning,” has long been misconstrued. For grammatical reasons, this term has to be understood as a conjunction.
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