Rebecca Saltzman

Like Eiren Caffall, I have spent many hours in the Long Island Sound. On its beaches I have watched tiny barnacles feed in the tide, ospreys hunt for fish, horseshoe crabs scuttle like living fossils in the surf. And then there were the jellyfish. They appeared one day out of

In 1999 my mother introduced me to John Singer Sargent. I was fifteen, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston was exhibiting the largest retrospective of John Singer Sargent’s works since 1926. Many of Sargent’s most famous paintings were at the MFA retrospective. There was Madame X (1883–84), the scandalous

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, July 2023, 354 pp. To make art in a monstrous world, must we embrace the monstrous? Lauren Elkin’s newest book, Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art, is a meditation on this question. Elkin takes her title from Jenny Offill’s 2014 novel, Dept. of Speculation, in

BALLANTINE BOOKS, JULY 2022, 368 PP. IF ART ALLOWS humans to touch the sublime, then one can’t help but ask where we went so wrong with art school, that expensive immersion in the petty and profane. Two recent debut novels recreate the world of visual and literary arts programs replete