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J.W. Waterhouse’s “Echo and Narcissus” (1903, oil on canvas). Courtesy Walker Art Gallery. Narcissus falls in love with his reflection not because he has an inflated sense of self but because he has no strong, healthy core identity. These days, he is too much with us.

The 2024 presidential election and the irrational cult of narcissism

October 31, 2024

These days, everyone is making closing arguments — Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Donald J. Trump, comedian Jimmy Kimmel of ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” — as if we the people were we, the jury, which I suppose we are. I might as well make one as well.

Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” is a lightning rod for climate activists. But why?

Environmental outrage -- whose art is it anyway?

February 6, 2024

On Jan. 28, activists from the environmental group Riposte Alimentaire (Food Response) tossed soup at Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” to protest the state of the French agricultural system.

The painting 1503-06, poplar on panel), which hangs behind bulletproof glass in the Musée du Louvre, was unharmed and guards soon restored order.

This isn’t the first time the painting has been attacked nor is it alone in its appeal to climate activists looking to make a statement. Their point seems to be we care more about art than the environment. But is that a valid point?

Gordon Parks’ 1946 photograph “American Gothic: Portrait of Government Cleaning Woman Ella Watson” plays off of Grant Wood’s iconic painting of the same name, stating in no uncertain terms that Watson’s contribution to American society was no less important or dignified than Wood’s dour White farmer and his wife. *Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs.*

The paintbrush and the gun

October 28, 2023

Many years ago now, I interviewed Renaissance man Gordon Parks — photographer, composer, writer and film director (“Shaft”), a man whose photojournalism in the 1940s through ’70s captured both the civil rights movement and Hollywood.

Parks had grown up poor and Black in Kansas. I asked him what kept him from being embittered by poverty and racial prejudice. He said something that has stayed with me ever since and that I have thought about a lot in the past few weeks of war and other violence: “It’s easier to pick up a paintbrush than a gun.”

“Achilles in the Court of King Lycomedes“ (marble, 240). Musée du Louvre. The Greeks’ greatest warrior and a king in his own right, Achilles is the main character and antihero of Homer’s “The Iliad.” His rage at his humiliation by Agamemnon, the Greek high king and commander, during a quarrel over women as war prizes sets in motion the catastrophic events of Homer’s “The Iliad,” about a critical moment in the Trojan War.

The once and future war: Israel and 'The Iliad'

October 15, 2023

Do we believe in coincidence or predestination? Is everything happenstance or is it a case that there are no accidents (Freud) and that “God does not play dice with the universe” (Einstein)?

Is that universe sending us a message by releasing a new translation of Homer’s “The Iliad” by University of Pennsylvania classics professor Emily Wilson just as Hamas savagely attacked Israel and Israel responded with a ferocious declaration of war? It would seem so, for the ancient Greek epic has much to tell us about issues that speak to our time, not the least of which are overweening male pride and rage, power as a zero sum game and stupefyingly bad leadership.

Allison Zuckerman’s “Woman at Her Toilette” (2017, acrylic and inkjet on canvas) is part of “Framing the Female Gaze: Women Artists and the New Historicism” (Tuesday, Oct. 10, through Jan. 20 at Lehman College Art Gallery). *Courtesy Lehman College Art Gallery.*

A gaze of their own: women rethinking art history

September 28, 2023

In the late-20th and early-21st centuries, an age of cultural appropriation that has seen minorities adapt and reinvent the masterpieces of Western civilization, women artists have reasserted the so-called “female gaze,” not only by creating wholly original works but by reclaiming the art historical canon, either interpolating themselves and women arts leaders into iterations of great paintings or imagining men from a woman’s perspective.

A new exhibit at the Lehman College Art Gallery explores this subject through the prism of 19th-century French art.

This stained-glass window in the chapel of the former Academy of Our Lady of Good Counsel complex in White Plains, N.Y., contains a portrait of foundress Mother Mary Veronica as St. Veronica, the woman who wiped Jesus’ face with her veil on his road to Calvary and received the imprint of that anguished face on the cloth in return. *Photograph by Georgette Gouveia.*

Reunion and remembrance: Good Counsel revisited

September 21, 2023

When Katharine Hepburn made her first and only appearance at the Academy Awards as a somewhat old lady on April 2, 1974, she said, “I’m the living proof that a person can wait 41 years to be unselfish.”

I, now also a somewhat old lady, beat the great Kate by nine years, waiting 50 to be unselfish enough to attend my high school reunion on the former grounds of the Academy of Our Lady of Good Counsel in White Plains, N.Y.. A former classmate and friend who was on the reunion committee told me she had made it her mission to get me there and, not wanting to disappoint, again, I hustled my considerable butt to meet her at the chapel for the Mass that would begin our journey into the past.

Center of attention: (From left foreground) French culture minister André Malraux, wife Marie-Madeleine and President John F. Kennedy have eyes only for Jacqueline B. Kennedy in her pink Oleg Cassini. Even today first ladies like Melania Trump and first lady wannabes like Casey DeSantis channel Jackie’s look. *Photograph courtesy the White House.*

Moving forward: the endurance of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

July 12, 2023

What would Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis make of J. Randy Taraborrelli’s “Jackie: Public, Private, Secret” (St. Martin’s Press, $35, 439 pages) — out Tuesday, July 18, 10 days before what would’ve been her 94th birthday?