Books
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.
Tim Keane
Art
Art on the Threshold of Visual Perception
Agustín Fernández’s visual innuendos seduce the viewer into lingering on the threshold of visual perception.
Books
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.
Books
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.
Books
A Poet Who Wrote the Way Abstract Expressionists Painted
Barbara Guest stands apart as a radical traditionalist, committed to poetry’s clairvoyant, mythical potentials.
Art
Albert Murray Talking Modernism, Race, and Jazz
Murray came of age at a time when brutal circumstances coincided with buoyant Modernity.
Books
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.
Books
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.
Art
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.
Art
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.
Art
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.
Art
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.