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.
Author Archives: Tim Keane
Tim Keane's writing on art has appeared in Modern Painters, The London Magazine, Brooklyn Rail, and many other publications. He has written extensively on visual art and poetry, most recently in Joe Brainard's Art (University of Edinburgh Press, 2020) and Abstract Expressionist Women of the 9th Street Show (Katonah Museum of Art, 2019). His writing earned a fellowship from The National Endowment for the Arts and he holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from CUNY Graduate Center, where he focused on Modernism.
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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.
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A Poet Who Wrote the Way Abstract Expressionists Painted
Barbara Guest stands apart as a radical traditionalist, committed to poetry’s clairvoyant, mythical potentials.
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Albert Murray Talking Modernism, Race, and Jazz
Murray came of age at a time when brutal circumstances coincided with buoyant Modernity.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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Berenice Abbott’s Optimistic Modernity
Abbott aimed her lens at so many 20th-century subjects that her photographs challenge us to rethink modernity itself.