Daniel Baird

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  “Picasso: Painting the Blue Period”

  They are, rather, the most straightforwardly humanist of any of Picasso’s paintings. They are meditations on what is most basic: flesh, food, drink, earth, sunlight. They depict human beings to sight, touch and taste.

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  Quilt World

  It’s difficult now to fully imagine what it was like to see Rosie Lee Tompkins’s quilts for the first time—not on a museum’s clean white walls but draped over a card table in a flea market or spread out on a couch in a living room. Though far less exotic, I imagine it must have been a little like hearing Robert Johnson on a Mississippi street corner or in a juke joint in the 1930s: you would be startled, and even baffled, by the sudden and unexpected presence of something profound.

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  Steven Beckly

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  The Very Rich Monsters of Art

  When I was in high school, I spent a day in the office of a pathologist at a small, drab hospital. What struck me most were the huge jars set on shelves on one side of the pathologist’s cluttered and windowless basement office. They were filled with formaldehyde and diseased organs—brains, hearts, lungs, livers, kidneys and things I could not begin to identify.

• Indices of a Wandering Mind

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  The End of Telling

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  Patti Smith: Making the Past Present

  The Patti Smith I encountered when she opened her hotel-room door in Ottawa this past November, while she was in the middle of a whirlwind, eight-city international tour with Neil Young and Crazy Horse, was hardly the frenzied, spit-spraying performer she was in the 1970s—and, incredibly, still is.

• Dark Utopias: The Dream Life of New Cinema

• Beauty’s Progenitor: The Film Art of Jonas Mekas

• Iain Baxter&

• The Indecisive Moment: The Photography of Elaine Stocki

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  Self-Inventions: The Photography of Suzy Lake

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