Ultimately the legacy of the classic modernist novel may reside in how attentively and scrupulously it concentrates on the music of tentative, shambolic, open-ended urban lives.
Tim Keane
Tim Keane's writing on poetry and visual art has appeared in Modern Painters, The London Magazine, Utne Reader, The Brooklyn Rail, Vision China, and in Joe Brainard's Art (University of Edinburgh Press, 2020), Irish Urban Fictions (Springer Intl., 2019), and Abstract Expressionist Women of the 9th Street Show (Katonah Museum of Art, 2019). His writing has earned awards from The National Endowment for the Arts and The Bronx Council on the Arts. He teaches at BMCC, CUNY.
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The Hidden Truths of Lou Reed’s Musical Poetry
Reed’s terse song-stories rely on humorous and torqued and poignant metaphors, and serve up pop cliches in order to turn them inside out and reveal hidden truths.
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The Iranian Poet Who Became an American Action Painter
A new book introduces two Manoucher Yektais: the stateless, anti-historical Modernist painter and the poet writing narrative verse exclusively in Farsi.
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Reuben Kadish’s Enduring Portraits of Human Anguish
Kadish’s fossil-like heads, forms, and figures remind us that every civilization, including our own, eventually collapses.
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The Ceaseless Optimism of Woody Guthrie’s Activist Life
Somehow, the poisonous American anger that swirled around Guthrie never corrupted that innate creative optimism. Empathy was his reliable muse.
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Transformation and Dreams in Dorothea Tanning’s Later Work
As Tanning took up midcentury painterly abstraction, key philosophical themes from her earlier phantasmal narrative paintings undergo transformations and reiterations.
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David Byrne’s Hopeful Drawings
Byrne’s drawings makes me wonder what else art is for, but to remind us that what we call “being reasonable” is too often our expedient alibi for not using our imagination.
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Reading Anne Ryan’s Poetic Collages
Ryan harnessed visual art as a means for creating poetry through the relatively new, nonverbal idioms of American abstract art.
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Painter Edith Schloss Remembers a Life Lived in Art
Schloss’s The Loft Generation creates a mirror-memoir, as literary portraiture doubles as veiled self-portraiture.
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Art on the Threshold of Visual Perception
Agustín Fernández’s visual innuendos seduce the viewer into lingering on the threshold of visual perception.
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Joan Mitchell, More Like a Poet
Curators and scholars have increasingly highlighted the importance of poetry to Mitchell’s art, though usually with so much circumspection that the link still remains obscure.
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The Modernist Poet Who Took on Colonialism
Since Aimé Césaire’s death in 2008 at the age of 94, as democracies devolve into autocracies, his Discourse on Colonialism remains prescient about the barbarity that informs civilization.