Christopher S. Wood’s A History of Art History will be eye-opening for anyone who cares about art.
Author Archives: Barry Schwabsky
Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. His recent books include The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (Verso, 2016) and a collection of poetry, Trembling Hand Equilibrium (Black Square Editions, 2015). Imminently forthcoming is a new book of essays, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017).
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Why Matisse Thought “A Picture Should Always Be Decorative”
For Matisse, decoration was never a secondary matter.
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Constructing the Language We Breathe
For half a century, Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop have been (despite some serious competition) the most reliable conduit for poetry traveling from French and German into English.
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A Poet Invents Her Voice
Ursula Andkjær Olsen’s Third-Millennium Heart is a beautiful monster of a book coming at you straight, with no padding of preface or foreword to warn you what you might be in for.
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The Hard-to-Find Chapbooks of Geoffrey Young
Young is one of those poets, it seems, who prefers to do it all himself, how and when he feels like it.
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Put On Sunglasses and Write a Poem
Almost every line in Chelsey Minnis’s Baby, I Don’t Care could have been lifted from a hard-boiled detective flick or a tough-talking screwball comedy.
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On Impious Poetry and Poetic Faith
Navid Kermani puts his finger on what’s divisive in poetry and culture.
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Vivian Maier, the Photographer Who Wanted to Go Unobserved
Maier didn’t want people to know where she lived, and often lied about her personal history.
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The Earth as a Dump and Refuge
The Astropastorals, a new collection of poetry by Douglas Crase, brings together two decades of material in 18 pages.
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How Not to Look at Pictures
Robert Walser was likely to find in images a reason to look into his own fervent imagination.
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A Study of Art Galleries Reveals Their Aesthetic of Transcendental Experience
David Carrier’s The Contemporary Art Gallery is a small but well-stocked treasury of first-hand observations by someone who’s spent a lot of time in art galleries, but who has retained enough critical distance to see them with a certain objectivity.
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A Painter Speaks, so that His Paintings Can Remain Silent
When René Magritte wrote “This is not a pipe,” he wasn’t negating the pipe so much as he was negating the language with which we attempt to grasp it.