Jane Coombs

United States

New York–based arts writer. Published in The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, The Spectator World, The WholeNote, Intermission, First Things, and The Art Newspaper.

Portfolio
The Spectator World
08/04/2025
An American in Paris

Oh, to be a 19th-century Parisienne! A creature like no other, she arose “like Venus from the waters of the Seine,” as one fanciful journalist put it, “the supreme fruit of civilization.” An elegant arbiter of taste, she could be seen attending plays, concerts and exhibitions, or walking along Haussmann’s airy boulevards. By the time of the Third Republic, she did not need blue blood, so long as she had thoughts on paintings, poetry and music. To a city recovering from the horrors of the...

The New Criterion
03/12/2025
A present-day Paquita

What, or who, is Paquita? Unlike the eponymous heroines of Giselle, Manon, or Cinderella, the character Paquita has mostly faded from the collective memory of even the keenest ballet fans, her name now associated with a few spirited solo variations and excerpts presented at galas or on triple bills. So when “Paquita (World Premiere)” appeared at the top the “Innovators & Icons” program at New York City Ballet—known for its fast, athletic and sometimes jazzy neoclassical repertoire, not for...

The Wall Street Journal
07/03/2024
"Raffaella" Review: An Enchanted Elegy

“Once upon a time, in a kingdom far, far away” is not where most new ballets begin these days. Last weekend, however, at the Morris Performing Arts Center here, a new full-length story ballet called “Raffaella” transported audiences to a romanticized version of 18th-century Italy, where a young girl’s love for a mysterious prince blesses her life in unexpected ways. Choreographed for more than 30 dancers by Claire Kretzschmar, artistic director of Ballet Hartford and a former soloist at New...

The New Criterion
12/23/2024
Fashion-forward

The works shown in New York City Ballet’s annual Fall Fashion Gala typically, and perhaps unsurprisingly, elevate style (of one sort or another) over substance. The often-gaudy costumes are front and center, dreamt up by runway designers that sometimes end up obscuring rather than enhancing the dancers’ gorgeous lines and movements. So it was a welcome surprise to see the company’s own director of costumes, Marc Happel, listed as the designer for "Signs" by Gianna Reisen, the first piece on...

The New Criterion
07/15/2024
Triple Feature

Injecting some novelty into the final stretch of New York City Ballet’s seventy-fifth anniversary programming at Lincoln Center, which wrapped up last month with Balanchine’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, were two new pieces that underlined the company’s desire to be seen not only as a polisher of twentieth-century classics, but also as a dynamic troupe with a growing body of commissioned repertoire. Happily for admirers of the classics, Dig the Say by Justin Peck (his twenty-fourth work for NYCB)...

The New Criterion
03/01/2024
Mischief & mystey

Tiler Peck, a principal dancer of New York City Ballet noted for her exceptional musicality and command of the company’s jazziest repertoire, has this month unveiled her first ballet for her home company, on its program “New Combinations.” While it is hardly her choreographic debut—she has made works for Boston Ballet, Cincinnati Ballet, England’s Northern Ballet, Philadelphia’s BalletX, and several dance festivals—Concerto for Two Pianos, set to the 1932 work of the same name by Francis...

The New Criterion
03/27/2024
Funeral march

Solitude, Alexei Ratmansky’s seventh work for New York City Ballet and first as its artist in residence, was the centerpiece of the “Masters at Work” program in the company’s winter season. For a choreographer whose “natural habitat” is “humor, playfulness, irony, and complexity,” as Marina Harss writes in her recent biography The Boy from Kyiv, his latest subject is unusually dark. Neither narrative nor abstract—Ratmansky is comfortable working in between, using “narrative colors as...

The WholeNote
10/30/2020
Interview: This fall, two Toronto keyboard collectives are pushing forward

Over the last few weeks, The Piano Lunaire founder Adam Sherkin has been braving the cool autumn wind in order to rehearse with fellow pianist Stephen Runge - the two musicians recently managed to find a space suitable for playing fifteen feet apart, windows open, in advance of their next show, Lunaire Live III: The Blue Moon Gala.

The New Criterion
04/26/2023
Sakartvelo serenade

How Georgian was George Balanchine? It depends on whom you ask. Last week, the State Ballet of Georgia presented "Mostly B," a triple-bill program at the Lehman Center for the Performing Arts in the Bronx. The company danced Balanchine's "Serenade" and "Concerto Barocco" as well as Yuri Possokhov's 2008 piece "Sagalobeli." At the first intermission, the announcer described Balanchine as a “Georgian-born” choreographer, causing a few people to titter.

The New Criterion
12/15/2021
Revelry & revelation

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has returned to New York City Center for a three-week season looking sharp and energized. In their first live shows in over a year (apart from performances of Rennie Harris's Lazarus and Alvin Ailey's Revelations at Lincoln Center's outdoor " BAAND Together Dance Festival" last August), the modern dancers are presenting more than a dozen works ranging from new commissions to classics drawn from six decades of repertoire.

The WholeNote
05/25/2021
Concert report: AGO Virtual School Programs

Lauren Spring, Art Gallery of Ontario educator, shares a painting on her Zoom screen. It is a tense scene. An old man, fuming, rises from his throne and points threateningly at a young woman draped in white fabric. She reaches towards several male figures to the left, but cannot resist craning her neck to face her accuser.

The New Criterion
11/21/2023
Bodies full of light

After a summer performing Giselle, Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake, and the new Christopher Wheeldon ballet Like Water for Chocolate on the Metropolitan Opera stage, American Ballet Theatre returned to New York for a two-week fall season featuring short, mostly abstract works at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater.

The New Criterion
02/12/2022
Peck, Cunningham & more

"See the music, hear the dance." Balanchine's famous motto was undoubtedly an impetus behind Partita, a work premiered by the New York City Ballet resident choreographer Justin Peck for the winter season's "New Combinations" program, which will return in April for "Visionary Voices."

The New Criterion
10/15/2021
New moves

When watching dance, we tend to let our eyes dart around the stage freely, fastening on whatever catches our interest: perhaps the facial expressions of the lead pair, the design of a prop, or the feet of a particularly skillful corps member.

The WholeNote
03/23/2021
Concert Report: Toronto Consort's Of Tricksters and Trolls

A wraithlike water-dweller, a covetous goddess, a phantom bride. Welcome to the world of Of Tricksters and Trolls, the Toronto Consort's latest performance released March 16 on their new streaming platform, Early Music TV.

The Spectator World
01/03/2022
How did Walt Disney learn from Ancien Régime decoration?

"Make it pink! Make it pink!" says the chubby fairy Flora, aiming her wand at Princess Aurora's new ball gown in Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty (1959). A few magic sparks must have fallen on the walls of Disneyland's Sleeping Beauty Castle in Anaheim, California, which have been painted (and repainted) in several shades of cotton-candy pink since the faux fortress opened in the summer of 1955, well before the film itself was completed.

The Art Newspaper
09/05/2023
British invasion: how Frieze acquisition will change 'New York's fair'

This summer, the London-based fair and media franchise Frieze, which stages five major fairs around the world, announced that it had acquired The Armory Show and Expo Chicago. What does Frieze’s acquisition mean for the future of The Armory Show, which was founded as a hotel fair in 1994 by four New York dealers? For now, Nicole Berry, the fair’s executive director since 2017, remains in charge and no staff, schedule or format changes have been announced.

The New Criterion
04/29/2022
Tanowitz, Roberts & Peck

This week, the New York City Ballet presents "Visionary Voices," a program of four contemporary works by three New York-based choreographers: Pam Tanowitz, Jamar Roberts, and Justin Peck. Though the company usually surrounds new works with time-tested classics, it can be informative, once in a while, to see a few fresh pieces together in a single performance.

The Wall Street Journal
08/22/2023
'A Dark, a Light, a Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes' Review: A Loom of One's Own

In too many homes and offices, interior-design magazines and social-media collages, we see endless iterations of minimalistic rooms upholstered in tasteful whites, creams, tans and grays. Why not follow the color-scheme formula of the weaver and textile designer Dorothy Liebes (1897-1972) and throw together a dark, a light and a bright, instead? “Don’t be afraid of color,” she used to say. Let’s banish the black and bury the beige. It’s time to get the Liebes look.

Intermission
02/07/2020
REVIEW: Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train

"Our Father, who art in Heaven, Howard be thy name," says the terrified young man, kneeling alone on a not-so-silent night. But wait, those aren’t the right words. Forgive him – Angel hasn’t done this in a while. “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train” by Stephen Adley Guirgis is the latest play helmed by Soulpepper’s artistic director, Weyni Mengesha. It’s a challenging piece of theatre, exploring

The Wall Street Journal
01/27/2023
An Anglo-Saxon Celebration of the Senses in Silver

On the upper floor of the British Museum, in a gallery containing early medieval artifacts, most visitors will congregate around the swords, helmets, drinking horns and lyres. To a few, however, another object beckons. In a smaller display case, mounted on a vertical panel, is a large, disc-shaped pin that gleams beneath a small light fixture.

The Spectator World
09/02/2022
Not your average Jo

She appears in one of the most beloved paintings in Washington's National Gallery of Art - "Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl" (1862) - but few people know her name. No longer.

First Things
05/10/2024
Briefly Noted | "Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century"

George Balanchine (1904–1983), a founder of the New York City Ballet and choreographer of some of the most heavenly yet intensely complex works in dance, is the subject of this engrossing biography by the historian and former professional dancer Jennifer Homans. Peppered with snippets from diaries, letters, notebooks, and conversations, "Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century" often reads like a sweeping novel. It covers Balanchine’s early years training in St. Petersburg, his time...

The New Criterion
07/07/2021
From darkness to light

A rescue mission to the underworld, a moment of madness, a fatal mistake: the tragic story of Orpheus, the lyre-playing son of Apollo, and of his wife Eurydice has remained as popular among modern choreographers as it was among ancient poets and craftsmen. Balanchine, for example, found it a lifelong source of inspiration.

The New Criterion
08/24/2022
Elegance and humor in late summer

For the last three decades, the Sarasota Ballet has labored to revive and popularize works by the Royal Ballet choreographer Frederick Ashton (1904-88), who developed and refined English-style classical ballet in over one hundred creations including Symphonic Variations (1946), Cinderella (1948), and Marguerite and Armand (1963).

The Spectator World
04/18/2022
Jewel aid

In the late 1890s, the workshop of Maison Cartier adorned its Belle Époque clients in "garland-style" jewelry fashioned from white diamonds in platinum settings shaped like curled ribbons and bows. Soon, however, a more streamlined style began to emerge. In 1904, the workshop produced a small, rhomb-shaped brooch, decorated with smaller rhombs in diamonds and rubies.

The New Criterion
07/12/2023
Evergreen monoliths

Since 1881, visitors approaching the Metropolitan Museum of Art from Central Park have been able to glimpse the towering, tapering form of Cleopatra’s Needle (ca. fifteenth century B.C.), one of two granite obelisks that stood beside a temple to the Egyptian sun god Atum in Heliopolis. In an 1889 letter to his younger brother, Theo, Van Gogh compared this type of ancient monument and its beautiful “lines and proportions” to the modest Mediterranean cypresses of southern France.

The New Criterion
01/24/2024
Exhibition note: “Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality” at the Morgan Library

While journeying through “Medieval Money, Merchants, and Morality” at the Morgan Library, take care not to fall at the first hurdle. Just inside the exhibition entrance is a glinting pile of coins from a late-fourteenth-century hoard found in Chalkis, Greece. These torneselli, forged from copper-silver alloy and stamped with the lion of St. Mark, were used for everyday transactions in the Republic of Venice’s Greek colonies. After admiring the seductive shimmer of this loose change,...

First Things
04/01/2023
Briefly Noted | "Hieronymus Bosch: Time and Transformation in the Garden of Earthly Delights"

The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch’s ­oil-­on-wood triptych housed in Spain’s Prado Museum, has ­enchanted and bewildered viewers since the early sixteenth ­century. Across two shutters and three ­interior panels, the Netherlandish artist painted a biblical history of the world from its creation to its destruction, stopping just before the Last Judgment (a subject Bosch had explored in an earlier triptych).

The Spectator World
10/03/2022
Kimono Style is more than just East-meets-West fashion

It is not easy to achieve serenity in Manhattan, but after living in a hectic part of Midtown, I have managed to find a few peaceful places dotted around the island. Central Park's well-groomed Conservatory Garden makes the cut, as does Gramercy Park (if you can find a key), but perhaps the most tranquil destination of all is the Asian Wing at the otherwise bustling Metropolitan Museum.

First Things
02/28/2022
The Man Who Painted the Reformation

In July 1519, Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote a letter describing his friend and fellow humanist Thomas More. "His expression," Erasmus wrote, "shows the sort of man he is, always friendly and cheerful, with something of the air of one who smiles easily, and (to speak frankly) disposed to be merry rather than serious or solemn."

The New Criterion
04/23/2022
Buy the book

On Thursday, the sixty-second annual New York International Antiquarian Book Fair opened at the Park Avenue Armory after a two-year hiatus. Nearly two hundred prominent book dealers have gathered in the building's former drill hall, an eighty-foot-high, 55,000-square-foot space built by "the first volunteer militia to respond to President Lincoln's call for troops in 1861," as the Armory's guidebook tells us.

The New Criterion
12/22/2021
Exhibition note: “Imperial Splendor: The Art of the Book in the Holy Roman Empire, ca. 800–1500”

If you ask someone to explain the phrase "Holy Roman Empire," he might mutter something about the Habsburgs, the Reformation, or the Thirty Years' War before throwing his hands up in defeat. Attempts to simplify the history of this patchwork entity—which at times included parts of modern-day Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and northern Italy—often end in frustration.

The Spectator World
11/18/2021
A dream of a dress

In America: A Lexicon of Fashion, now at the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute, leads with a quote from Jesse Jackson: "America is... like a quilt - many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread."