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How Diaghilev Reimagined Ballet
THE BRITISH DANCE and opera critic Rupert Christiansen has written a history of Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes that is not aimed at scholars or specialists. Referring to his morbid addiction to “watching, thinking or dreaming about classical dance and dancers,” Christiansen chooses “to [make] connections that can explain the allure of ballet to those uninfected with my mania.”
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The Way Things Were
YIDDISH has entered the American language so extensively by now that most people have probably heard the word “shiksa”—especially if they’ve read Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. It’s the Yiddish word for a gentile woman. Robert Hofler’s new book on the making of the Barbra Streisand-Robert Redford movie The Way We Were (1973) is about its masculine equivalent, the much less euphonic “shegetz.”
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Lincoln Kirstein’s Greatest Get
What follows is excerpted from a longer piece that will soon appear in The Line of Dissent, a collection of the author’s essays published in this magazine over the years. Some of the material that follows has previously appeared in these pages (in 2017)—in a three-part essay on impresario Lincoln Kirstein, who cofounded the New York City Ballet with George Balanchine—but much of it is brand new.
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The Skeleton in the Old Left’s Closet
The Communist Party attracted a wide array of progressives: labor and union organizers, garment workers, farm workers, miners, steel workers, artists, and entertainers. Official membership peaked in the late 1940s, then declined after 1947 during the Cold War. The postwar “Red Scare,” a Communist witch hunt, was concurrent with a “Lavender Scare”—an attempt to purge “sex perverts” from the government.
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Absconding to Arcadia
John Amos Chaffee was born in 1823 in Woodstock, Connecticut, and Jason Palmer Chamberlain two years earlier in Windsor County, Vermont, but they met in Worcester, Massachusetts, where Chaffee worked as a wheelwright and Chamberlain as a carpenter. The attraction was immediate and mutual, and they pledged to spend their lives together, but New England was not a welcoming place for men who loved men.
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Léonor Fini, Impresario of the Self
“I PAINT PICTURES which don’t exist and which I would like to see” (“Je peins des tableaux qui n’existent pas et que je voudrais voir”). That is how Léonor…More
Jean Lorrain, Ambassador from Sodom
Detested by most of his contemporaries and undervalued by his immediate posterity, [Jean] Lorrain’s amalgam of lowlife culture and preciosity, of exhibitionist journalism and artistic aspirations, has come to be seen as forerunners of Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet. His musky writing may be an acquired taste, but, then, so is caviar.
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The Inscrutable John Singer Sargent
The Grand Affair is not reductive; it’s a full-scale, fascinating story of an exceptional artist, informed by the new freedom to discuss homosexuality in a way that was not possible before. And it makes a persuasive case that Sargent, whether or not he acted on his feelings, was drawn to other men.
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Joining the Rosa Bonheur Revival
Bonheur painted herself into The Horse Fair as a participant, dressed in the standard attire of the other (all male) riders.
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