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.
Author Archives: Tim Keane
Tim Keane is a widely published writer based in Brooklyn, New York.
Posted inBooks
A Poet Who Wrote the Way Abstract Expressionists Painted
Barbara Guest stands apart as a radical traditionalist, committed to poetry’s clairvoyant, mythical potentials.
Posted inArt
Albert Murray Talking Modernism, Race, and Jazz
Murray came of age at a time when brutal circumstances coincided with buoyant Modernity.
Posted inBooks
Memoir as the Fragments of Memory
When Michel Leiris died in 1990 at age 89 he was a canonical figure in France, mainly for having remade the genre of memoir in his own image.
Posted inBooks
An Unconventional Art Critic of La Belle Epoque
Lacking formal training in art, Joris-Karl Huysmans had a knack for seizing on the unanticipated, the gritty, and the revelatory in painting.
Posted inArt
What Giacometti Learned From de Sade
Prompted by his friend André Breton, Alberto Giacometti first read de Sade in 1933, and his studio notes ruminated on seduction, idolatry, and fetishism.
Posted inArt
Mondrian Before Abstraction
Decades before becoming New York’s Pied Piper for nonobjective art, Piet Mondrian had established a reputation in Europe for navigating and remaking realism in his own image.
Posted inArt
The Unsparing Pages of Francis Bacon
Almost 30 years after his death, the unabated edginess of Bacon’s paintings, and the dark literary sources informing them, put the lie to our self-mythologizing.
Posted inArt
Seeing Ourselves in a Chimpanzee’s Art
Seeing works by Congo the chimp takes us from wild aesthetic conjectures to sobering ethical dilemmas around animal agency, art ownership, and basic rights of living creatures.
Posted inArt
Positively Ninth Street Women
By the mid-1970s, critic Thomas Hess acknowledged the critical favoritism shown to postwar male artists when he singled out the women of the Ninth Street Show as “sparkling Amazons.”
Posted inArt
Berenice Abbott’s Optimistic Modernity
Abbott aimed her lens at so many 20th-century subjects that her photographs challenge us to rethink modernity itself.
Posted inArt
Lee Krasner’s Second Act
Though Krasner often invited art historians to interpret her work biographically, she was too resourceful an artist for those reductive readings to overshadow her art’s complexity.