When I returned to Paris several months ago, during the second Covid lockdown, I kept myself entertained by trying to see the city of my birth through new eyes, scouting out lesser-known corners and hidden places I had never visited before. It was during this roving exercise that I was introduced to Guillaume Féau, heir to the 150-year-old interior woodworking firm Féau Boiseries, acquired by his family in the 1950s and today regarded as one of the most important historical purveyors of its kind, among the last of a breed of French decorative specialists.

Until around twenty-five years ago, the art world was preoccupied with finding an audience for contemporary art, selling it and defending it from attacks; there were different camps and ideologies and an overarching agenda of expanding the idea of art and making convincing arguments for certain well-defined positions.

Sometimes it takes destruction for something to be remembered. History teaches us this; it also demonstrates that someone is often first a martyr before becoming a hero in the eyes of subsequent generations. Art history is no exception. The devastating fate of a masterpiece of monumental art—a half-destroyed mosaic depicting what used to be a huge bird fighting the wind—mirrors the tragic life of its creator, Ukrainian artist and political activist Alla Horska.

In this installment of the recurring Ursula series in which writer and editor Sarah Blakley-Cartwright asks artists to select a favorite book from their shelves, the New York painter and performer Stephen Tashjian, better known as Tabboo!, speaks about growing up post–peak Beatlemania, collecting Beatles ephemera, and a prized lime-green tome: The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, by Paul McCartney, published in 2021, with an introduction by poet Paul Muldoon.

For Ursula’s first new fiction, Alissa Bennett dreams of assisted living.

In November 1961, the Martha Jackson Gallery, in collaboration with the David Anderson Gallery, opened Lucio Fontana’s first major solo show in New York, an exhibition that introduced the artist to the general public in the United States. Fontana, who was in his sixties, was already recognized in Europe as a pioneer of the most advanced visual art, but this double New York show provided evidence of his exceptional talent on the other side of the Atlantic.