Proust’s mid-career struggles with writing led him to art criticism, which provides clues to the qualities prized by readers of In Search of Lost Time.
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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Van Gogh’s Japanese Idyll
Through willful imitation of Japanese art, van Gogh became the van Gogh we know, perhaps the world’s most famous painter.
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A Painter’s Extraterrestrial Journey Through the Light of Day
In recent decades, living and working in and around Cape Cod, Paul Resika’s imagery has veered between the naturalistic and the mythical.
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Photographing Northern Ireland’s Mean Streets
During the decades that Northern Ireland’s paramilitary violence garnered worldwide attention, most people were busy making ends meet.
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How August Sander and Otto Dix Recorded Fascism’s Rise
Questions posed in a two-artist exhibition at Tate Liverpool reflect back on our own politically desperate era, often with eerie resonance.
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Walter Benjamin on How to Stop Worrying and Love Late Capitalism
Benjamin’s gargantuan Arcades Project brims with philosophical propositions, poetic digressions, lyrical aphorisms, and experimental theses.
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The Heroes and Villains of New York’s Changing Cityscape
There once was a time when the resistance movements of New York pushed back against the regimenting, state-sponsored programs known as “urban renewal.”
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America Is Trembling: Jean Genet’s Answer to Donald Trump
Jean Genet believed that money was inherently evil and the quest for power was a form of necrophilia.
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The Irish for Noh: The Masks of William Butler Yeats
Although the poetry of William Butler Yeats is often misconstrued as autobiographical, the poet scorned such transparency, calling it “unimaginative” and comparing realism to “putting photographs in a plush frame.”
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Bohemian Rhapsody: The Love Songs of Franz Kafka
How did a sharply dressed insurance agent with a desultory love life, who preferred brothels to relationships, who held crappy middle management jobs before retiring early due to poor health, become, as his one-time lover Milena Jesenská puts it, a “clairvoyant” storyteller, let alone one with a still-unrivalled capacity to take readers deep into the cold core of what it means to be alone and to be human?
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The Eternal Returns of Richard Pousette-Dart
In a socially boisterous art world inspired by Existentialism, jazz, and booze, Richard Pousette-Dart preferred introversion, secular spiritualism, and depth psychology.
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A Poet’s Paintings, In and Out of the Void
“I never wanted to be a poet,” says the famously prolific poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in “More Light,” an autobiographical essay about his first ambitions as a painter.