Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2025

DIOR AM A RÉ SI LLE DORÉE NECK LACE

Ye llow gold, pi nk gold, diamonds.

GAGOSIAN QUARTERLY VIDEOS

Studio visits, public art installations, interviews, and more on gagosian.com/quarterly

Carsten Höller: Giant Triple Mushroom

As part of Art Basel Paris’s public programming, Gagosian presented a new large-scale sculpture by Carsten Höller at Place Vendôme. In this video, the artist sits down to discuss the genesis of Giant Triple Mushroom (2024).

The Street: Curated by Peter Doig Doig

Join artist Peter Doig as he discusses the artists and works that inspired the creation of the exhibition The Street , at Gagosian, New York. Curated by Doig, and taking Balthus’s 1933 painting of the same title as its point of departure, the show is a portrait of urban life seen through the eyes of painters.

In Conversation: Urs Fischer and Róisín Tapponi

A conversation between Urs Fischer and film curator and writer Róisín Tapponi about fearless creativity and the artist’s most recent monograph, Urs Fischer: Monumental Sculpture

In Conversation: Takashi Murakami and Hans Ulrich Obrist

Join Gagosian for a conversation between Takashi Murakami and Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator and artistic director of Serpentine, at the Benjamin West Lecture Theatre at the Royal Academy of Art, London.

Editor-in-chief

Alison McDonald

Managing Editor

Wyatt Allgeier

Editor, Online and Print

Gillian Jakab

Text Editor

David Frankel

Executive Editor

Derek C. Blasberg

Digital and Video

Production Assistant

Alanis Santiago-Rodriguez

Design Director

Paul Neale

Design Alexander Ecob

Graphic Thought Facility

Website

Wolfram Wiedner Studio

Proofreading

Lindsey Westbrook

Gagosian Quarterly, Spring 2025

Founder Larry Gagosian

Publisher Jorge Garcia

Published by Gagosian Media

For Advertising and Sponsorship Inquiries

Advertising@gagosian.com

Distribution David Renard

Distributed by Magazine Heaven

Distribution Manager

Alexandra Samaras

Prepress DL Imaging

Printed by Pureprint Group

Contributors

Miriam Bale

Jane Bennett

Derek C. Blasberg

Richard Calvocoressi

Amber Collins

David Cronenberg

Walton Ford

Dan Fox

Tomás González Olavarría

Harmony Holiday

Christian House

Isabelle Huppert

Catherine Lacey

Nora Lawrence

Philip Lindsay

Myles Mellor

William Middleton

Ho Tzu Nyen

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Francine Prose

Alexander Provan

Francesco Risso

Jenny Saville

Ed Schad

Taryn Simon

Ross Simonini

Mike Stinavage

John Szwed

Masayoshi Takayama

Sam Wasson

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Robert Wilson

Josh Zajdman

Thanks

Ben Acrish

Richard Alwyn Fisher

Julia Arena

Jin Auh

Lisa Ballard

Priya Bhatnagar

Yuko Burtless

Michael Cary

Serena Cattaneo Adorno

Vittoria Ciaraldi

Maggie Dubinski

Julia Erdman

Paatela Fraga

Mark Francis

Hallie Freer

Brett Garde

Eleanor Gibson

Lauren Gioia

Darlina Goldak

Rebecca Guerra

Anthony Hartley

Andrew Heyward

Delphine Huisinga

Lisa Immordino Vreeland

Alex Israel

Sarah Jones

Shiori Kawasaki

Léa Khayata

Bernard Lagrange

Lauren Mahony

James McKee

Adele Minardi

Sabine Moritz

Olivia Mull

Takashi Murakami

Kelly Quinn

Stefan Ratibor

Helen Redmond

Abram Scharf

Nick Simunovic

Putri Tan

Harry Thorne

Jess Topping

Kelsey Tyler

Philip Valles

Timothée Viale

Millicent Wilner

Penny Yeung

HIGH JEWE LRY

SPRING 2025 FROM THE EDITOR

“The artists who become part of art history are the game-changers. They shift our perception of what art should be.” So says Jenny Saville about Cy Twombly, whose work appears on our cover. We are thrilled that Saville has shared with us her admiration for Twombly and her insights into the impact of his work on her practice. She speaks to what made Twombly so groundbreaking and profound, and to the way his innovations continue to shape the world of art.

Takashi Murakami is the subject of an essay by Ed Schad, who investigates the artist’s evolving engagement with historical touchpoints and the unique way his latest works bring Japanese art history into a contemporary dialogue. We continue our focus on painting with Francine Prose offering a fresh perspective on the bold new canvases of Sabine Moritz. The latest paintings by Alex Israel, an artist who finds endless inspiration in Los Angeles, take as their subject the city and the genre of film noir. Hollywood expert Sam Wasson

writes about the beauty at the heart of gritty noir films while considering Israel’s work and the way it honors Los Angeles.

We have a deep dive into cinema with David Cronenberg speaking about his latest film, The Shrouds ; a discussion of an enlightening new documentary on Jean Cocteau; Dan Fox offering a creative take on cyberpunk; and director Apichatpong Weerasethakul reflecting on his artistic process.

The issue features conversations on a wide range of topics: Isabelle Huppert and Robert Wilson discuss their new collaboration with William Middleton; political theorist and philosopher Jane Bennett talks with Ross Simonini; and Harmony Holiday meets with Alexander Provan to discuss her latest exhibition and upcoming publications.

Alison McDonald, Editor-in-chief

48

Cy Twombly by Jenny Saville: To Lift the Veil

In this excerpt from her Marion Barthelme Lecture presented at the Menil Collection, Houston, in 2024, Jenny Saville reflects on Cy Twombly’s poetic engagement with the world, with time and tension, and with growth.

56

Fashion & Art, Part 21: Francesco Risso

Francesco Risso, creative director of Marni since 2016, meets with the Quarterly ’s Derek C. Blasberg to discuss his symbiotic relationships with artists, childhood experiments with his family’s clothing, and the importance of the hand in creative pursuits.

SPRING 2025 TABLE OF CONTENTS

62

Thomas Schütte: Slippery Lineages

Amber Collins looks into the history of the artist’s Frauen series, eighteen works made between 1998 and 2006, and considers the artist’s radical explorations of the human body.

68 A Foreign Language, Part One

The first installment of a short story by Catherine Lacey.

78

Back to the Future: Takashi Murakami’s Kyoto Paintings

Ed Schad, curator and publications manager at the Broad, Los Angeles, examines Takashi Murakami’s interest in the copy and his innovations in its historical practice.

86

Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire: Ho Tzu Nyen

For the first installment of 2025, we are honored to present the artist and filmmaker Ho Tzu Nyen.

88

Chef Masa Takayama

Celebrated chef and restaurateur

Masayoshi Takayama speaks with Gagosian Quarterly ’s Alison McDonald about the evolutions and continuities in his approach to food, design, and cigars on the recent anniversaries of his two New York establishments: Masa and Kappo Masa.

96

Jean Cocteau: A Documentary

Filmmaker and author Lisa Immordino Vreeland has made a documentary on the life and art of Jean Cocteau. Here, Josh Zajdman reflects on the uncategorizable existence of this poet, filmmaker, artist, playwright, and novelist.

102

David Cronenberg: A Ghost Story Is Just Another Religion

David Cronenberg’s film The Shrouds made its debut at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Film writer and programmer Miriam Bale met with the auteur to discuss grieving, documentation, and the film’s cast.

106

Wires Spilling Out the Sides

Dan Fox travels through the matrix of cyberpunk.

112

A Mood and Awareness

Mike Stinavage meets with the film director Apichatpong Weerasethakul to discuss death and the artistic process.

116

Alex Israel: Noir

Sam Wasson brings his deep knowledge of cinema, Hollywood, and film noir to Alex Israel’s new paintings of Los Angeles.

122

Painting Jazz

Previous spread, left to right: Sabine Moritz, Ferragosto I , 2023 (detail), oil on canvas, 78 ¾ × 118 ⅛ inches (200 × 300 cm) © Sabine Moritz. Photo: Georgios Michaloudis, farbanalyse, Cologne, Germany

Jean Cocteau, 1929 © Estate Germaine Krull, Museum Folkwang, Essen

Previous spread, right: Marni’s Spring/Summer 2024 fashion show in Paris. Photo: Saint-Ambroise

Above:

Installation view, Harmony Holiday: Black Backstage , The Kitchen at Westbeth, New York, March 21–May 25, 2024. Photo: Kyle Knodell

Below: Taryn Simon, Kleroterion 2024, installation view, Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York © Taryn Simon.

Photo: Eli Baden-Lasar

140

Sabine Moritz: From Gray to Color

Francine Prose looks back to some of Moritz’s earlier graphite drawings, thinking through their relationship to the more recent explorations of color in oil paint.

146

Four Ways of Looking at Ice

Christian House reports from Norway, where he has been considering the predominance of ice, and the variety of modes of depicting it, in Nordic art and literature.

John Szwed identifies the crossrhythms between painters and jazz musicians throughout the twentieth century.

130

Taryn Simon: Kleroterion

Last fall, Taryn Simon debuted an interactive sculpture entitled Kleroterion (2024). Based on a device from the beginnings of democracy in Athens, the work was installed at Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York. As part of that presentation, Simon participated in a panel discussion with Nora Lawrence, Tomás González Olavarría, and Philip Lindsay about democracy, sortition, and art’s place in politics.

134

Coup de Théâtre: Isabelle Huppert and Robert Wilson

For over three decades, avant-garde theater and opera director Robert Wilson and actor Isabelle Huppert have shared a forceful and profound collaboration. Their latest piece is Mary Said What She Said . William Middleton caught up with the actor and the director in Paris.

150

Harmony Holiday: The Right Myths

Writer, dancer, and experimental filmmaker Harmony Holiday meets with Alexander Provan, author and editor of Triple Canopy, to discuss her 2024 exhibition Black Backstage at the Kitchen, New York.

154

Jane Bennett: Partaker of Influx and Efflux

Philosopher and political theorist

Jane Bennett corresponds with Ross Simonini about the development of her thought, the nature of material, and why she looks to literature and doodles for new perspectives on the liveliness of things.

166

Game Changer: Frank Auerbach

Curator Richard Calvocoressi remembers the extraordinary talent of Frank Auerbach.

Alexander Provan

Alexander Provan is the editor of Triple Canopy and a contributing editor of Bidoun . He is the recipient of a 2015 Creative Capital Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and was a 2013–15 fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. Provan’s writing has appeared in the Nation , n+1, Art in America , Artforum , Frieze , and several exhibition catalogues.

Tomás González Olavarría

Tomás González Olavarría is an economist, a fellow at the European University Institute, and the founder of Tribu, a nonprofit organization working to advance innovations and reforms in democracy. He led Latin America’s first national deliberativedemocracy process.

SPRING 2025 CONTRIBUTORS

William Middleton

The Paris-based writer William Middleton is the author of Double Vision , a biography of the legendary art patrons and collectors Dominique and John de Menil, published in 2018 by Alfred A. Knopf. He has contributed to such publications as W, Vogue , Harper’s Bazaar, Architectural Digest , House & Garden , Departures , Town & Country, the New York Times , and T

Ross Simonini

Ross Simonini is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and musician. His work comprises paintings, drawings, essays, dialogues, musical compositions, performance, and fiction.

Dan Fox

Dan Fox is a writer, musician, and filmmaker. He is the author of the books Limbo (2018) and Pretentiousness: Why It Matters (2016), and codirector of the BBC documentary Other, Like Me: The Oral History of coum Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle (2020). He is a consulting editor for the Yale Review and lives in New York. Photo: Matthew Porter

Miriam Bale

Miriam Bale is a writer and film programmer based in California.

Jane Bennett

Jane Bennett is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University and specializes in the environmental humanities, political philosophy, nature writing, American romanticism, political rhetorics and affects, and contemporary social thought.

Sam Wasson

Sam Wasson is the best-selling author of many books on Hollywood. He was born and lives in Los Angeles.

Jenny Saville

In her depictions of the human form, Jenny Saville transcends the boundaries of both classical figuration and modern abstraction. Applied in heavy layers, oil paint becomes as visceral as flesh itself, each painted mark maintaining a supple, mobile life of its own. As Saville pushes, smears, and scrapes her pigments over her large-scale canvases, the distinctions between living, breathing bodies and their painted representations begin to collapse. Photo: Paul Hansen/Getty Images

Ed Schad

Ed Schad is curator and publications manager at the Broad in Los Angeles, where he has curated large-scale exhibitions of the work of Takashi Murakami, Shirin Neshat, William Kentridge, and Mickalene Thomas. His writing has appeared in Art Review, Frieze , the Brooklyn Rail , and the Los Angeles Review of Books

Isabelle Huppert

Isabelle Huppert is a French actress and producer. A collaborator with Claude Chabrol, Benoît Jacquot, and Michael Haneke, Huppert alternates between stage and screen, art-house cinema and mainstream films. She was introduced to the public by the Swiss director Claude Goretta in 1977 in the film The Lacemaker ; her theatrical career has led her to work with renowned directors such as Robert Wilson, Claude Régy, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Jacques Lassalle, and Luc Bondy, and to interpret contemporary authors such as Yasmina Reza and Florian Zeller.

Photo: JEP Celebrity Photos/Alamy Stock Photo.

Derek C. Blasberg

Derek C. Blasberg is a writer, fashion editor, and New York Times best-selling author. He has been with Gagosian since 2014 and is the executive editor of Gagosian Quarterly

Robert Wilson

Robert Wilson’s productions have decisively shaped the look of theater and opera since the late 1960s. His signature use of light, his investigations into the structures of simple movements, and the classical rigor of his scene and furniture design have continuously articulated the force and originality of his vision. Wilson’s close ties and collaborations with leading artists, writers, and musicians continue to fascinate audiences worldwide.

Christian House

Christian House worked as a proposals writer at Sotheby’s for a decade before a period as an obituarist for the Telegraph . He now writes on visual arts, literature, and history for publications such as the Financial Times , Canvas , and CNN Style

Philip Lindsay

Philip Lindsay leads the Democracy Innovation Hub at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. Over the past three years, the Hub has hosted annual gatherings for advocates and practitioners of citizens’ assemblies in the United States. These gatherings led to the first major use of sortition in New York City, in 2023.

Mike Stinavage

Mike Stinavage is a writer and waste specialist from Michigan. During his political science masters program at CUNY Graduate Center, he was awarded Fulbright and Martin Kriesberg fellowships to research the politics of waste in Northern Spain. He currently coordinates a European project on biowaste policy and writes fiction in Pamplona, Spain.

Masayoshi Takayama

Masayoshi Takayama’s appreciation for food started at a young age, growing up working for his family’s fish market in a town of Tochigi Prefecture, Japan. Chef Masa is also chef/owner of Bar Masa (located next door to Masa), and is the chef at Kappo Masa (located at 976 Madison Avenue). Photo: Dacia Pierson

David Cronenberg

David Cronenberg has established his reputation as an auteur through his uniquely personal work as both film director and writer. Beginning his career in underground filmmaking, he has developed a dramatic oeuvre of outstanding depth and breadth and has been lauded as one of the world’s most influential filmmakers. Recognitions of his contributions to art and culture have included the Order of Canada and France’s Légion d’Honneur. Photo: Caitlin Cronenberg

Taryn Simon

Born in New York, where she lives and works, Taryn Simon received a BA in semiotics from Brown University in 1997. In 2001 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for what would become her first major photo-and-text work, The Innocents (2002), which was exhibited at MoMA PS1, New York. Incorporating mediums ranging from photography and sculpture to text, sound, and performance, each of her projects is shaped by years of research and planning, including obtaining access from institutions as varied as the US Department of Homeland Security and Playboy Enterprises, Inc.

Nora Lawrence

Nora Lawrence is the executive director of Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York. Lawrence has played an integral role in raising the center’s profile, seeing its audience grow four-fold and bringing in a new generation of artists. In 2023 she cocurated a site-specific commission by the artist Martin Puryear there. Lawrence has developed nearly twenty exhibitions with Storm King’s curatorial team, working with artists including Lynda Benglis, Mark Dion, Rashid Johnson, and Wangechi Mutu.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Hans Ulrich Obrist is artistic director of the Serpentine, London. He was previously the curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Since his first show, World Soup (The Kitchen Show), in 1991, he has curated more than 350 exhibitions. Photo: Tyler Mitchell

Josh Zajdman

When not writing about books or art, Josh Zajdman is doom-scrolling Instagram or working on his novel.

Catherine Lacey

Catherine Lacey is the author of The Möbius Book , forthcoming from Farrar, Straus and Giroux in June 2025, and of five other books including Biography of X (2023). She has earned a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the Brooklyn Library Prize, and a Lambda Literary Award, and her work has been translated into a dozen languages.

Walton Ford

Walton Ford recasts, reverses, and rearranges the conventions of animal art. He is a devout researcher, responding to everything from Hollywood horror movies to Indian fables, medieval bestiaries, colonial hunting narratives, and zookeepers’ manuals. He grew up in the Hudson Valley, graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, and currently lives and works in New York.

Amber Collins

Amber Collins is the associate director of research at Gagosian Art Advisory. An art history graduate of the University of Chicago, she will contribute essays to the forthcoming publications Thomas Schütte: Major Sculptures (winter 2025) and Amorelle Jacox: Color Keeping (spring 2025).

Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is recognized as a major international filmmaker and visual artist. He began making films and video shorts in 1994 and completed his first feature in 2000. He has also mounted exhibitions and installations in many countries since 1998. His works are characterized by their use of nonlinear storytelling, often dealing with themes of memory, loss, identity, desire, and history. His films have won him widespread international recognition and numerous awards, including the Cannes Jury Prize for Memoria (2021), which featured Tilda Swinton and was his first film shot outside Thailand. His art prizes include the Sharjah Biennial Prize (2013), the Fukuoka Prize (2013), the Yanghyun Art Prize (2014), and the Artes Mundi Award (2019).

Photo: Chayaporn Maneesutham

John Szwed

John Szwed is the author and editor of many books, including biographies of Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Sun Ra, and Alan Lomax. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation and in 2005 was awarded a Grammy for Doctor Jazz , a book included with the album Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax.

Alison McDonald

Alison McDonald is the Chief Creative Officer at Gagosian and has overseen marketing and publications at the gallery since 2002. During her tenure she has worked closely with Larry Gagosian to shape every aspect of the gallery’s extensive publishing program and has personally overseen more than five hundred books dedicated to the gallery’s artists.

Richard Calvocoressi

Richard Calvocoressi is a scholar and art historian. He has been a curator at Tate, London, director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, and director of the Henry Moore Foundation. He joined Gagosian in 2015. Calvocoressi’s Georg Baselitz was published by Thames & Hudson in May 2021.

Francine Prose

Francine Prose’s most recent novel is The Vixen (2021). Her other books include Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles (2005), Reading like a Writer (2012), Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 (2014), and Peggy Guggenheim: The Shock of the Modern (2015). The recipient of numerous grants and awards, she often writes about art. She is a distinguished writer in residence at Bard College.

Ho Tzu Nyen

Steeped in numerous Eastern and Western cultural references ranging from art history to theater and from cinema to music to philosophy, Ho Tzu Nyen’s works blend mythical narratives and historical facts to mobilize different understandings of history, its writing and transmission.

Harmony Holiday

Harmony Holiday is a writer, dancer, archivist, filmmaker and author of five collections of poetry including Hollywood Forever and Maafa (2022). She curates an archive of griot poetics and a related performance series at Los Angeles’s MOCA and at a music and archive venue 2220 Arts, that she runs with several friends, also in Los Angeles. She has received the Motherwell Prize from Fence Books, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a NYFA fellowship, a Schomburg Fellowship, a California Book Award, a research fellowship from Harvard, and a teaching fellowship from Berkeley. She’s currently working on a collection of essays for Duke University Press and a biography of Abbey Lincoln, in addition to other writing, film, and curatorial projects.

A Racing Machine On The Wrist

IN SEASON

Gagosian Quarterly presents a selection of new releases coming this spring.

Collaboration

Louis Vuitton × Takashi Murakami

The celebrated artist and iconic luxury house reunite twenty years after their groundbreaking collaboration to launch the Louis Vuitton × Murakami reedition. This collection, featuring over 200 pieces, reimagines the vibrant motifs of the original, blending Murakami’s signature aesthetic with Louis Vuitton’s craftsmanship. From reworked Monogram bags to accessories, it celebrates creativity, technology, and a timeless artistic bond.

Photos: courtesy Louis Vuitton

Left: Perspective(s) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025)

Old Masters Perspective(s) by Laurent

Binet

Newly translated from the French by Sam Taylor, Laurent Binet’s Perspective(s) transforms the epistolary novel and Italian Renaissance history into a gripping mystery. When renowned artist Jacopo da Pontormo is found murdered in a church, a scandalous painting of Maria de’ Medici sparks further chaos. Art historian Giorgio Vasari is tasked with uncovering the killer, unraveling a web of political intrigue.

A New Space PLEATS PLEASE ISSEY MIYAKE

On December 12, pleats please issey miyake opened its new flagship store at 14 Kenmare Street, New York, in architect Tadao Ando’s debut New York building. With an interior designed by moment, the 2,224-square-foot space combines industrial elements with sleek pleated motifs. Exclusive pieces from the new soil & leaf collection marked the occasion, celebrating the brand’s light, functional beauty in this dynamic setting.

Above:

courtesy Issey Miyake

Right: Lauren Halsey: emajendat (Rizzoli International Publications, New York, 2024)

Exhibition Catalogue Lauren Halsey: emajendat

Published on the occasion of Lauren Halsey: emajendat at Serpentine, London, the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom, this extensive volume includes images of Halsey’s stand-alone works and installations from 2018 through 2024, alongside texts analyzing her practice by Will Alexander, LeRonn P. Brooks, George Clinton, Harmony Holiday, Douglas Kearney, and Bettina Korek. A conversation between the artist, Lizzie Carey-Thomas, and Hans Ulrich Obrist is also included.

Photo:

Well Versed Fitzcarraldo Editions: Poetry List

The publishing house Fitzcarraldo Editions, whose work with such authors as Svetlana Alexievich, Annie Ernaux, and Olga Tokarczuk belies its relative youth, has launched its inaugural poetry list. The series opens with Strange Beach , by Oluwaseun Olayiwola, and with two titles by Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Diane Seuss. As Seuss writes in her whip-smart collection Frank: Sonnets (2021), as if forecasting the ambitions of Fitzcarraldo’s poetry list: “The sonnet, like poverty, teaches you what you can do / without.”

Left: Frank: Sonnets (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2025)

Right: Self Portraits: From 1800 to the Present (Assouline, 2025)

Below, left to right: Helen Frankenthaler: Painting on Paper, 1990–2002 (Gagosian, 2024)

The American No (Atria, 2024)

A Look in the Mirror Self Portraits: From 1800 to the Present

This new book from Assouline, edited by Philippe Ségalot and Morgane Guillet, offers a journey through the art of self-portraiture. Spanning centuries, it showcases over sixty works—from classic paintings to modern photography and found objects—revealing artists’ personal interpretations of identity. Featuring legends such as Monet and Caillebotte, it explores how selfreflection has evolved in art history.

Art on Paper Helen Frankenthaler: Painting on Paper, 1990–2002

This book was published on the occasion of Helen Frankenthaler: Painting on Paper, 1990–2002 , at Gagosian, Rome. The exhibition presented eighteen large-scale works from the last years of Frankenthaler’s career, when painting on paper became her primary means of expression. Reproductions of the paintings exhibited are accompanied by details revealing their physical presence and textures, as well as archival photographs of the artist and her studio at Shippan Point, in Stamford, Connecticut, in the 1990s. The book also features a new essay by Isabelle Dervaux analyzing the impetus for the works and the techniques that Frankenthaler employed when making them.

Short (Brilliant) Stories

The American No by Rupert Everett

Rupert Everett’s The American No, praised by critics since its UK release, arrives in the US this February. This captivating story collection offers darkly humorous and poignant tales drawn from Everett’s film and TV career.

Monograph Made by MSCHF

Made by MSCHF, published by Phaidon, is an irreverent behindthe-scenes guide to the provocative Brooklyn-based art collective, known for boundary-pushing works that satirize popular culture. From the viral Big Red Boot to Jesus Shoes filled with holy water, the book explores twelve projects in depth, offering a glimpse into MSCHF’s creative process with never-before-seen images, essays, and a full archive of their audacious art.

On the Table

Howard Hodgkin Home: Souvenir Plate Set

This set of two porcelain plates produced by Howard Hodgkin Home features different details from the artist’s 1981 screen print Souvenir, which incorporates a wide variety of marks—including some made directly by the artist’s own hand—in five different shades of black.

Performance African Exodus by the Centre for the Less Good

Idea

The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain presents the North American premiere of African Exodus , a performance from Johannesburg’s Centre for the Less Good Idea.

Running February 27–March 2, 2025, at PAC NYC, this musical odyssey blends African and Western choral traditions, exploring migration, language, and history through music, movement, and powerful storytelling.

Right: Howard Hodgkin Home: Souvenir Plate Set (2023)

Below: African Exodus by The Centre for the Less Good Idea. Photo: Zivanai Matangi, courtesy Cartier

BEHIND THE ART

WALTON FORD: LA MARCHESA

Walton Ford’s exhibition Tutto opens on March 6, 2025, at Gagosian, New York. Here, the artist reflects on the life and passions of Marchesa Luisa Casati, the twentieth-century muse and patron of the arts.

The marchesa lived partly as a slave to her dream world. She was a great artist, but not understood by the common people or even her own friends, who were jealous spectators of her artistic successes.

—Alberto Martini, in Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati, 1999

In 1900, the newly married Marchese and Marchesa Casati were photographed perched side by side on a smooth boulder next to a waterfall. Camillo Casati wears a three-piece suit and sits in a confident and jaunty spread-legged pose, a proud crooked smile slanting beneath his waxed mustache. Luisa Casati sits by him ramrod straight, unsmiling, her large, melancholy eyes meeting ours. She is tightly corseted, trussed into a dark

Victorian outfit that completely covers her body save for her hands and face. She holds a riding crop and has donned a great floral hat. She does not steady herself by clasping her husband’s arm; instead she seems to be leaning on her unseen hand, touching the cool rock behind her back.

Thirteen years later, Luisa Casati was photographed in the center of a large crowd of costumed revelers, many in eighteenth-century dress. Now uncorseted, she wears an androgynous white harlequin costume, complete with loose high-waisted trousers and black mask, designed for her by Léon Bakst of the Ballets Russes. Again, her eyes look directly at the viewer. Her lipsticked mouth hints at a smile. One of her pet cheetahs sits calmly beside her and a large macaw rests on her hand. By that time she

had left her husband and had begun throwing massive parties at her halfruined palazzo in Venice.

Luisa made her palazzo into a kind of bohemian playground, hosting wild masquerades with live jazz, booze, opium, artists, writers, and socialites. She would dress outrageously and fearlessly, costumed as a fountain or as Catherine the Great, or covered with electric lights. She had lovers, both male and female, and ended up spending all of her vast wealth on clothes, jewels, artwork, parties, and exotic animals. The social events she created anticipated Andy Warhol’s Factory, artsy nightclubs, contemporary raves—in fact they propagated any idea we now have of a hot art scene.

In their book Infinite Variety: The Life and Legend of the Marchesa Casati

(1999), Scot D. Ryersson and Michael Orlando Yaccarino write, “More than one report details Luisa’s unusual nocturnal promenades: her spectral form, totally nude within the folds of a voluminous fur cloak, leading her pet cheetahs by jeweled leashes about the Piazza San Marco.” Having discovered only three rather blurred photos of Casati with her cheetahs, I found myself trying to imagine the cats’ life with the marchesa. These creatures contributed to the ferocity of Casati’s public image. They were also wild African animals caught up in a strange, frenetic world of parties, palazzos, gondola rides, and excess. I wanted to paint pictures about the world’s fastest animals living a fast life with a wild woman in Venice. The cheetahs got me invited to the party. Show me more.

Walton Ford, La Marchesa , 2024, watercolor, gouache, and ink on paper, 60 ¼ × 115 ¼ inches (153 × 292.7 cm)

© Walton Ford. Photo: Christopher Stach

ONLINE VINCENT GARDNER: ON BEBOP

Vincent Gardner, trombonist, composer, and arranger in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, speaks about the bebop genre and Jean-Michel Basquiat with the Quarterly ’s Alison McDonald on the occasion of “Bebop Revolution: JLCO with Wynton Marsalis,” two nights celebrating bebop at Jazz at Lincoln Center, New York. To read the full interview, visit gagosian.com/quarterly.

ALISON MCDONALD Please describe how the performance came together— illuminate a little bit about your process, from early ideas, inspirations, and conversations, to selecting music, rehearsals, and the final performance.

VINCENT GARDNER I’ve always been a fan of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, with Gillespie being one of my earliest musical references. My father, who was a trumpet player, showed me a picture of him when I first began to play trombone and was developing a bad habit and said, “He’s the ONLY one that can play an instrument looking like that. DON’T puff out your cheeks when you play!” As far as inspirations, I was thoroughly immersed in bebop by the amazing historian Phil Schaap and many of the older Brooklyn musicians and jazz fans I met when I lived there. The most prominent message that I learned from them is that the music was the statement from the youth of the 1940s on the way that they wanted music and the world to look in the years after World War II. It was to be based on both fun and virtuosity, and inclusive of everyone who had the skills to play it. This was the real “Bebop Revolution,” so in selecting music, I chose pieces that showcase not only the distinctive language that was only played during the bebop period but also pieces that were written by beboppers for some of the swing bands of the earlier era, showcasing how the music was being used to cross barriers of race and age. AMCD Bebop was groundbreaking when it emerged, and it has influenced generations of creators since. What impact did bebop specifically have on your work and early formation as a musician, and what thoughts might you have about jazz more generally and its traces in the works of Jean-Michel Basquiat?

VG First, I was astonished by the virtuosity of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and J.J. Johnson. As I learned more about jazz, I could hear that not only were they playing with astonishing technique and presence, but they were creating new language in jazz, putting notes and phrases together as no one had done before in earlier eras. They also did it at a time when the public, after a terrible war, would rather hear something familiar in their music instead of something new and innovative. Their integrity in proclaiming that this is the new music of that time and not bending to the pressure to conform is extremely inspiring. The cutting-edge nature of these new sounds, the bebop culture it created with the young people of the 1940s, and the folklore of Charlie Parker’s life influenced artists of all disciplines, and Basquiat created some of the most impactful references to it in his art.

My favorite out of those is Max Roach (1984). It has many clear layers to me that paint a powerful total statement. There are two ghostlike images in the painting, one which reminds us of Lester Young, clearly outlining the shape of his signature porkpie hat near the drums, and a larger, more menacing figure that seems to evoke how Roach’s influence took over all bebop drumming for a time and was the basis for the transition into the hard-bop style of the 1950s.

AMCD There is a conversational nature in improvised jazz, and I wonder if you see anything similar reflected in Basquiat’s work. There is an elevated harmonic language and rhythmic structure to bebop that you might also identify in the work of Basquiat. VG I do agree and see a parallel in Basquiat’s work. In anything improvisational there still must be both

balance between all of the contributing elements and also occasional moments of imbalance, which make it feel human and in realtime. I enjoy the interplay in Basquiat’s works between those features, sometimes reflected in color, texture, or a complete or partial reference to an image that may at first seem unrelated but only for a short time until you reexamine the work.…

Poster for Bebop Revolution: JLCO with Wynton Marsalis , featuring Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Untitled (Stardust) (1983). Published by Gagosian, 2024. Artwork © Estate of JeanMichel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York

Flo we r. Dendritic agat e, ameth ysts, gr een tourmalines and 1 8K gold. judygeib.co m

Spring

CROSSWORD

This puzzle, written by Myles Mellor, brings together clues from the worlds of art, dance, music, poetry, film, and beyond.

1 Siouxsie and the : postpunk band founded in the mid-’70s

5 African-American artist and musician known for assemblages and immersive environments, last name 11 Fermented malt beverage

12 Alicia Keys hit (two words) 13 Training Day star Mendes

15 Basquiat painting Untitled ( )

17 Brokeback Mountain director Lee

18 Flowers in a Van Gogh painting of 1888

21 First name of a prominent Mexican painter of murals

22 French word for soul

23 Actress Kunis of Black Swan

24 Caribbean music

27 Déjà (feeling of familiarity)

29 Memoirs of a movie

33 Epic Homer poem The

35 Belgian artist who lives and works in NYC, painter of Untitled (The Great Night), Harold

37 Elton John’s title

39 Life of , film about a boy and a tiger at sea

40 Celebrated New York– and

Hamptons-based interior designer Robert

41 “Bad Guy” singer Billie

44 Environmental watchdog org, abbr.

46 Repeated TV episode

48 Put two and two together

50 Subject of A Complete Unknown

51 Compass point, abbr.

52 Where the statue Cristo Redentor stands

53 Assist

54 24-hour period

55 “Queen of Pop” who dated Basquiat

Down

1 Hawking star Cumberbatch

2 Supermodel Campbell

3 Color

4 Role in Haydn’s The Creation

6 Military maneuvers, briefly

7 Last name of fashion designer and first name of a celebrated contemporary artist from South Central LA

8 Building addition

9 Georgia O’Keeffe painting

Sweet Peas

10 She starred alongside Angelina Jolie in Maleficent , Elle

14 Blue Ridge Mountains state, abbr.

16 Dates

19 Express verbally

20 Filled with intense emotion

21 Creator of Vitruvian Man (two words)

25 Global #1 hit for Chris de Burgh (commonly referred to in three words)

26 Ended

28 Los Angeles campus, for short

30 Electronic Arts, abbr.

31 Laughter sound

32 Dadaist artist Jean

34 Movie City, directed in part by Tarantino

36 Shakespeare’s fairy queen

38 India.Arie song “Strength, Courage, & ”

40 Legendary sculptor who created Thirty-Five Feet of Lead Rolled Up, Richard

42 Abstract Expressionist painter included in the 1964 exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction , Frankenthaler

43 American painter who was a friend of Degas and was part of the Impressionist movement, Cassatt

45 Father, informally

47 World body, briefly

49 Lady (British princess)

50 Family man

Twombly by Jenny Saville

Cy

To Lift the Veil

Jenny Saville reflects on Cy Twombly’s poetic engagement with the world, with time and tension, and with growth in this excerpt from her Marion Barthelme Lecture, presented at the Menil Collection, Houston, in 2024.

“Try and stay ignored for as long as possible.” This is what Cy Twombly said to me when I was twentynine years old. He was a hero of mine, so of course I thought, “This guy doesn’t like my work very much.” However, I know now that what he was saying was that a young painter needs time to learn, to develop. He was at the height of his powers when I met him, both artistically and in a career sense. Every artist wanted to know him and every museum wanted to buy his work. I was extraordinarily lucky that we were represented by the same gallery and for the last ten years of his life, I was around him and able to learn from him.

My first encounter with Twombly’s work was in my first term at the Glasgow School of Art, when I was eighteen years old. I saw two of his paintings in an art magazine—Suma from 1982 and an early-1960s work. I was a figurative painter, so I was only interested in depicting the body, but something about those images caught me and held me. From that moment on, I was hooked and sought out his work wherever and whenever I could.

Twombly spent his whole life with one foot in a cave and the other in a palace. He never left the cave really—he dealt with the fundamental themes of life, the need to survive, basic human desires, lustful needs, fears. Those foundational aspects of human nature are always there in his work. And he had an erudite love of the ancient world. This is already evident in the work he made at Black Mountain College in the 1950s. Seeing photographs from his travels, I suspect the whiteness of the buildings he encountered in North Africa and Greece must have influenced him.

Twombly showed the twelve-panel epic painting Lepanto (2001) at Gagosian, New York, in 2002, having made it for the Venice Biennale the year before. It depicts a battle between the Venetians and the Ottoman Turks, which took place on October 7, 1571, in the Gulf of Patras—a crushing victory for the Catholics of the Holy League Alliance. The work completely blew me away when I saw it; I couldn’t believe that painting could be this good in the current age. It changed my life and made me realize how hard you have to push as a painter if you want to do something significant. I was lucky enough to be at the gallery on the day the paintings were installed, and it was clear that this was history in the making.

For ten years, there was a challenge of sorts going on between Twombly and Larry Gagosian. Every time the latter opened a new space he would ask the former, “What paintings could you make to fill this space? And then if I open a space in Paris or Rome or London . . . ?” They had a one-upmanship between them that felt like a constant game and it was a thrill to witness two people being so expansive in their outlook. I’m not sure Twombly would have created this run of paintings without those spaces and that encouragement. And that he agreed to participate with this level of energy, at this moment in his life, made Gagosian the gallery it is today.

The artists who become part of art history are the game-changers. They shift our perception of what art should be. One of the reasons Twombly is so revered is the fact that he took avant-garde American painting and merged it

Previous spread:

Cy Twombly, Untitled , 1971 (detail), oil-based house paint and wax crayon on canvas, 79 1⁄8 × 134 ¾ inches (201 × 342.3 cm), Menil Collection, Houston. Gift of the artist © Cy Twombly Foundation

Above:

Cy Twombly, Untitled (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor), 1994, oil, acrylic, wax crayon, oil stick, pencil, and colored pencil on canvas, 13 feet 1 ½ inches × 52 feet (4 × 15.9 m), Menil Collection, Houston. Gift of the artist © Cy Twombly Foundation

Left:

Cy Twombly, Apollo, 1975, pencil, oil, and oil stick on paper, 76 ¾ × 59 ½ inches (195 × 151.1 cm) © Cy Twombly Foundation

with ancient history. There’s nothing that tells you about that more than his Duchampian act of writing “Apollo” on a work from 1975. In that single gesture, he embodies four thousand years of Western culture in one word. When you read it, you think of all the poetic, literary, painted, and sculptural representations of Apollo throughout history. It’s an extraordinary act. Knowing Twombly, it was most likely instinctual—he probably just did it and thought, “Oh, that looks kind of good. I’ll write that again.” But, it is nonetheless a profound Duchampian statement that he’s making.

My favorite example of this is in Fifty Days at Iliam: House of Priam (1978). On the canvas he has repeatedly written, “Cassandra.” Cassandra was one of the daughters of King Priam of Troy, who proclaimed that the Trojan War was going to happen, but nobody believed her. There’s a kind of mania in the way Twombly has written “Cassandra, Cassandra, Cassandra,”—there’s a vibration to it. With this literal burying and dragging up of history, he creates a beautiful journey. By layering paint over text and inscribing the time needed for you to read the words, he plays with notions of time, balance, and tension. Twombly made language pictorial and artists like Basquiat followed him. You might never have had the same Basquiat without Twombly, without that decision to write “Apollo.”

What makes a great painting stand out forever? Tension. Any work from art history that has lasted has incredible tension within it. If you look at Michelangelo’s sculpture Moses (1513–15), it depicts an aged man from the Old Testament whose body is incredibly youthful. His arms have the muscles

of a twenty-five-year-old, but you don’t realize it at first. When you first look, there is a believability to it. And that’s what art does—it creates tension by bringing improbable elements together. Another example is Francis Bacon’s painting of George Dyer, Triptych May–June (1973), with flat panels of organized design and areas of very thick paint. The tension lies in the juxtaposition of impastoed paint over clear modernist design and flat color— another layer that adds to the tension of the scene itself: the toilet and vomit, knowing the figure has died. It doesn’t matter whether a painting is a complicated figurative painting or a minimalist Barnett Newman Zip painting, it’s usually tension that makes the work powerful.

There is so much literature about Twombly, his love of poetry, and how he worked with ancient history. I think J. M. W. Turner and Claude Monet were major influences. When you look at Catullus , and read it from right to left, it’s a journey from a landmass in Asia Minor, but it’s also a passage through life and about the fleeting nature of life. You first see these incredible blossom shapes and you move through mistiness toward a battle. A journey through life, the epic battles and quests we know from ancient history—but also a journey that every human being has taken.

Twombly used a range of techniques—scraping and dripping paint, laying down different surfaces—to create different atmospheres. He had incredible hand skills when it came to dripping. We all know that a drip is actually part of nature— it’s the way rain works. With his drips he became a conductor of nature, harnessing its possibilities. He used drips to bury things within the painting, to give depth, or to bring things forward.

Sometimes he used very thinned-down white

paint, to apply over the top of text or an earlier image. If he started with yellow and then dripped white, that yellow would become misty, which is exactly what happens in traditional landscape painting, or indeed how we actually see things in nature. This “mistification” process was a device to create the feeling of space without having to depict anything at all. He used it throughout his career. There’s the horizontal canvas with the vertical drip, and the gravitational force that the drips harness create a dynamism within the painting. The misty nature adds a three-dimensional feeling. It is a very sophisticated approach that comes out of traditional painting techniques—laying down a hazy light to create a sense of illusionistic distance. The strongest contrast appears on the surface and it gives the structures three dimensions.

At the far right of Catullus , there is a bulbous shape. I’ve stared for ages at these forms thinking, “Cy, what on Earth are they? Are they blossoms? Are they stars? Are they going up or coming down?” I think they are the embodiment of fertility—the embodiment of spring. T. S. Eliot would call this “breeding.” They hint at blossoms, fruits, or a harvest. They have so many connotations in their color combinations. I find it interesting that Twombly painted Quattro Stagioni (A Painting in Four Parts) (1993–95), held in the collection of Tate, London, just before making this painting.

There is a text by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that has driven my work for more than a decade now, which connects to Twombly. While he was in Sicily, Goethe discovered the mothers of Angion— ancient fertility goddesses who are responsible for the fertility of the world and for creation in all its forms. He invented a place called the “Realm of the Mothers.” It is somewhere outside of time

Above: Cy Twombly, Lepanto, 2001 (part 10 of 12 parts), acrylic and wax crayon on canvas, 85 × 131 ½ inches (215.9 × 334 cm), Museum Brandhorst, Munich © Cy Twombly Foundation

Below: Jenny Saville, Red Stare Head IV, 2006–11, oil on canvas, 99 ¼ × 73 7⁄8 inches (252 × 187.5 cm) © Jenny Saville

and place, and it is where all forms are created. In Goethe’s Faust Part II (1832), Mephistopheles says:

Take hold of it without disparaging. It shines and flashes, grows in my hand. How great its worth, will you now understand? The key will sense the right place from all others. Follow it down, t’will lead you to the Mothers. The Mothers like a shock, it smites my ear. What’s in this word I don’t like to hear? So limited in mind by each new word disturbed, will you only hear what you’ve always heard? Let naught perturb, however strange it rings, you’re long-accustomed to most wondrous things. In apathy I see no wheel for me. The thrill of all is man’s best quality. Whatever toll the world lays on this sense, enthralled, man deeply senses the immense. Descend then, or I could also say ascend. It’s all the same. Escape from the created into the unbound realm of forms. Delight in what long since was dissipated, like coursing clouds the throng is coiling around. Brandish the key and keep them out of bound. Good grasping it I feel new strength arise. My breast expands on to the enterprise. At last a glowing tripod tells you this that you’ve arrived in deepest deep abyss. You’ll see the Mothers in its radiant glow. Some sit, some stand, some wander to and fro, as it may chance. Formation, transformation, eternal minds, eternal recreation. Girt round by images of all things that be, they do not see you, forms alone they see. Do take courage then, for the peril’s great. And to the tripod go forth straight and touch it with the key.

Above: Francis Bacon, Triptych May–June, 1973, oil on canvas, in 3 parts, each: 78 × 58 inches (198.1 × 147.3 cm) © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved/ DACS, London/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2024

Below: Cy Twombly, Quattro Stagioni (A Painting in Four Parts), 1993–95; part 1: Primavera , acrylic, oil stick, wax crayon, colored pencil, and pencil on canvas, 123 × 74 ¾ inches (312.5 × 190 cm); part 2: Estate, acrylic, pencil, and colored pencil on canvas, 123 5 8 × 84 5⁄8 inches (314 × 215 cm); part 3: Autunno, acrylic, oil stick, wax crayon, and pencil on canvas, 123 ¼ × 84 5⁄8 inches (313 × 215 cm); part 4, Inverno, acrylic, oil stick, oil, and pencil on canvas, 123 3⁄8 × 86 ¾ inches (313.5 × 220.5 cm), Tate, London. Purchased with assistance from the American Fund for the Tate Gallery and Tate Member 2002 © Cy Twombly Foundation

When I’m working in my studio, trying to access something in my work by running colors together or almost being self-destructive and pushing at something, I feel a connection to this text and I think something in it also connects to Twombly’s fertile blossoms.

Twombly developed a whole vocabulary to get nature into painting. I often think of him as a child running toward a rainbow, trying to catch it in his hand. Once he’s got it, he puts it on the canvas and then he samples things—he takes a little bit of the sea, a little bit of the rainbow, and distills their essence, putting it all into paint. He had a keen sense for the way tonal transitions from nature occur. For example, we all have a relationship with sunsets—we all recognize them. When we see tones that are in tune with nature, we feel soulful. He could bring that into a painting the way others can hold a note. That was his gift. He didn’t have to be Turner or Monet, who spent their lives in nature, depicting what they were looking at. Instead he took aspects from both artists and used the potential of painting itself to show us the nature of things.

It’s similar to the way blossom works. There is a fleeting moment in spring of incredible abundance. It’s so beautiful and we can’t wait for it to come, but it only lasts a short time. And then there is a sense of sadness when it disappears. That arc of time wouldn’t be the same if we experienced blossom

all year round—the beauty exists in part because it is fleeting. And when Twombly created his, he tapped into our collective memory.

I’m a figurative painter but in summer I go to Greece and try to paint the sky without any forms, to observe the way light moves. I take the studies back to my studio and put them in my figurative paintings. There’s nothing more violent than a sunset at its peak. I’ve spent time in pathology rooms and anatomy rooms, I’ve seen heads that have been blown apart by shotgun fire, but nothing is as violent as a full sunset. As it begins you see blue and yellow, then fire, then comes the darkness and it grays off—things become misty, forms become soft, and you can no longer see the edges. I try to harness that through watercolor studies, and I can see Twombly’s influence in them.

Twombly uses ambiguity, which is king in modern contemporary painting. We love ambiguity— it’s where the poetry lies. He employs it time and again. And this brings me back to Lepanto, which references a battle. He used impasto and line, introducing a series of contradictions. I believe Turner’s Peace: Burial at Sea (1842) influenced this picture, particularly its quieter, mystical mistiness. I think he used Turner’s watercolor studies for inspiration. Twombly talked about his painting not having gravity; speaking with Robert Pincus-Witten in 1994 (and cited in Pincus-Witten’s essay in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition at Gagosian in 1994) he speaks of “a generic space, a loose gravitation, comparable to mythology itself, which also has no center of gravity.” His mistiness created a feeling of being ancient.

Twombly often employed impasto in his work, layering sections of paint on top of the canvas to give them a presence in themselves. This technique of using paint for its material quality is embedded in art history. Just look at the sleeve of the infanta at the top right-hand side of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656). The Spaniard used dots of pure white pigment on top of the painting. The last section of Catullus is one of the most magical parts of the piece. Two-thirds of the way across, the canvas changes tone. It goes from a mid-gray to a slightly lighter gray in the last third. It’s hard to imagine that he created a work on such a vast scale with a pencil nib—you can’t ask for more physical tension in a painting than that. He added boats using pencil and silver oil bar. The silver may have been a reference to Andy Warhol, because he was collecting the Pop artist’s work at the time, or to Delos, which was very important in the ancient world. The granite on the Greek island has silver flecks in it which shine, and it is referenced in poetry from ancient times. So many people have spoken about the references to poetry in Twombly’s work. He not only uses the words from poems but he employs them as blocks of text to act as a counterbalance to those circular blossoms. He uses text as horizon lines; he doesn’t create a true horizon because if he did, you wouldn’t buy into the blossoms—the painting would become too fixed in the real world. He can only suggest the real world. He plays with the tension of sequencing and time, and that in itself creates another world. Including text also transports you via the language and historical references it conjures.

Above: Leonardo da Vinci, A Deluge, c. 1517–18, chalk, pen, ink, and wash on paper, 6 3⁄8 × 8 inches (16.2 × 20.3 cm), Royal Collection Trust, London

Left: Cy Twombly, Camino Real (II), 2010, acrylic on wood panel, 99 3⁄8 × 72 7 8 inches (252. 4 × 185.1 cm) © Cy Twombly Foundation

Throughout his career, Twombly used devices that connect with time. People often talk about space in painting, but people talk less about time, and I think in fact it is one of the things that separates painting from the other arts. If you think about film, literature, and music, you need a certain sequence of time. In painting, you have a collection of present moments and the work is a document of those moments. Whether abstract or figurative, it’s a collection and record of time. In a way, a painting exists outside of time completely, and what you can do in the act of making is freeze a particular moment.

There’s a beautiful room of blackboard paintings in the Menil Collection. That body of work might be my favorite. In these Twombly tries to personify a line. When you’re standing in front of a surface making marks, you think in three dimensions, and those marks are never made by pulling, they’re always made by pushing into the surface. In a short statement published in the Italian journal L’Esperienza moderna in 1957 he explained, “Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history. It doesn’t illustrate—it is the sensation of its own realization.” This comes from looking at Cezanne. It’s the kind of thinking that continues due to where and what it is and nothing else—it is of itself. Twombly epitomized this throughout his life—trying to find those moments, trying to embrace different ways of using materials. It’s also connected to the action of his body— the top is created by the rotation of the wrist, the

next line uses the rotation of the arm, and the bottom relies on the rotation of the torso. The association between the blackboard works and Leonardo da Vinci’s Deluge drawings is well-known (c. 1517–18). Da Vinci made a series of about ten works of a similar size in the last years of his life in France. They’re cataclysmic visions of studying water, which I think influenced Twombly. They also seem to be related to the Pyramid Texts—the oldest religious writings known to humans, located inside the temple of Unas in Egypt—which explain how to get to the afterlife. They’re made up of repetitive sounds, which Philip Glass used in a piece of music in the early 1980s, and I think Twombly probably tapped into that.

The ancient Egyptian goddess Isis was seen as the embodiment of fertility, all the secrets of nature were held within her. It has long been suggested by historians that over the course of time, the idea of Isis moves from Egypt to ancient Greece, where she becomes Artemis and later still Athena. She moves to Rome because sailors were going between there and Egypt. Then slowly, you see her become the Madonna and Child. So this journey, this hybridity, through Western history, which she embodies, is an allegory of nature. The Veil of Isis was made in ancient times in the north of Egypt and inscribed with these words: “I am all that was, all that is, and all that shall be and no mortal has lifted my veil.” If anybody tried to lift her veil and get us as close as possible to the secret of nature in our time, it was Cy Twombly.

This page: Cy Twombly, Untitled , 1971, oil-based house paint and wax crayon on canvas, 79 1⁄8 × 134 ¾ inches (201 × 342.3 cm), Menil Collection, Houston. Gift of the artist. Artwork © Cy Twombly Foundation

FASHION AND ART PART 21: FRANCESCO RISSO

Francesco Risso, creative director of Marni since 2016, meets with the Quarterly ’s Derek C. Blasberg to discuss his symbiotic relationships with artists, childhood experiments with his family’s clothing, what he learned from his time working with Miuccia Prada, and the importance of the hand in creative pursuits.

Derek C. Blasberg: Ciao, Francesco! The last time I saw you was at Jadé [Fadojutimi]’s opening in New York, who you’ve become pals with. You made her a custom look for the night too.

Francesco Risso: I did! It’s funny, I met Jadé in Venice at the Biennale opening this year, but I wasn’t aware she’d come to so many Marni shows before that. I don’t know why I wasn’t aware because if there’s somebody I want to be aware of, it’s exactly someone like her. I’ve been following her work for a long time and it was incredible to realize that we were following each other.

DB: So she was a fan of your designs, and a client too?

FR: A huge client! And I was happy to realize that she was present at so many of my fashion shows. She was at the show in New York, she was even at the Tokyo show! We had a laugh because we were both like, “Oh my God, I know your work,” to each other. It was a nice epiphany.

DB: Tell me how the custom look she wore to the opening in New York came together. Is it fun for you to collaborate with someone like that?

FR: I love to do these kinds of things because, first of all, every person is different, and every person has a different lens on the brand and on me, and me on them. It generates curiosity and interesting conversations, and Jadé is an endless tunnel of creativity. Part of what I’ve been promoting at Marni is the idea of people wearing the brand, as opposed to the brand wearing

the people. The moment we sat down to think about what we could make, we started fleshing out her perspective around colors, shapes, ideas, even around the most stream-of-consciousness thoughts. She had a set list of songs, and she wanted what she wore to make her feel like those songs made her feel. It was a beautiful gesture. It’s so nice when you make clothes for people and it becomes a pleasurable tool. This is one side of my job that really makes me happy.

DB: When the exhibition opened, the New Yorker profiled Jadé and explained that she has a physical reaction to color, which I imagine for a designer is a perfect response.

FR: Yeah, absolutely. There’s something about the way she interplays and interlays multiple threads of colors. In the studio in London, she has assistants prepare her colors when she’s painting in the zone. I told her, “I want to be that assistant, just serving you the colors!” It would actually be a dream for me to do that.

DB: Maybe you guys can be interns for each other. You can come and help

Previous spread: A self-portrait by Francesco Risso

Below: Marni’s Spring/Summer 2024 fashion show in Paris. Photo: Saint-Ambroise

her with the colors, and then she could help you choose fabrics.

FR: It’s a deal. Will you tell her?

DB: Are you friends with many artists?

FR: I’ve been at Marni for nearly a decade and I’ve had the chance to approach a lot of people to work with me on projects there. But I have to tell you, I never approached any of them like, “Oh, send me a PDF of some drawings and we’ll print it on a T-shirt.” That’s the opposite of what I want to do. I despise that method of art fusing with fashion. When we worked with Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, she had broken her arm while she was making ceramics, so she started drawing, and she said, “I’m having an epiphany with my left hand.” Those drawings, which were created in our activity together, were exhibited at LACMA [the Los Angeles County Museum of Art]. Piero Golia is one of my dearest friends, and this summer we were focused on reprocessing the way we collaborate, focusing less on just works and more on a process. We did a very extensive artist residency, which was beautiful. I like that I wasn’t just working with them as a Marni designer, I was painting with them too. We created something beautiful. That feels like part of the process but also part of the person that I am, and how I bring people toward work and life.

DB: Let’s go back before Marni, way back to your childhood. As you know, I grew up in an ordinary American family in the middle of the country, in the same house my whole childhood.

FR: Which is my fantasy!

DB: Because I know your childhood was much different. I fantasize about your childhood, living on a boat surrounded by such a colorful, complex family, with step-siblings and grandparents and everyone coming and going.

FR: Well, it was fascinating. My brothers and sisters are ten years older than I am, so when they were eighteen, I was just a child, and I had the luck to observe from another point of view. They were very loud, too! My father would come home unannounced with twenty people for lunch, and it would be so spontaneous, even messy. My grandparents from both sides of the family were living there too. It was really, really hectic. And I was rather silent.

DB: You were in the eye of the storm.

FR: It was chaos! When I was a kid in this chaotic environment, I started to make things. The use of the hand, for me, was the way to express myself, to talk, to say things. After so many years now, I discover that this is still what I love when I make clothes: it’s about making them with my hands. Even my own clothes never stay as they are—they always lose a piece, or I break a hem so that they can break even more over time.

DB: So you always knew you wanted to be a designer?

FR: I was nine years old when I started making clothes for myself, but I don’t think I knew what a fashion designer was until much later. I started with classical studies, then I did art school, thinking I loved literature, but I also loved to draw and I loved art, so it took me a while to say to myself, “I have to make clothes” as a career. It came as a surprise, in a way. But at that moment I fully dived into my mission, which I feel so lucky about now. My dad, for instance, was this incredibly good-looking, eclectic guy, who always had one crazy idea on top of another crazy idea, but I don’t think he ever knew what his mission was, I don’t think he ever used his creativity the way he had inside of him. So, for me, to feel that, yes, I found

my thing—it was a relief.

DB: You were very lucky to find a path to unleash this chaotic energy.

FR: Yes! Completely unleashed!

DB: When you’re eight or nine, and you’re working with your hands, are you only doing fashion and clothes, or are you also doing drawing and painting?

FR: The easiest elements I could play with were things I’d find in the wardrobes of my grandma, my mom, my sisters. I was literally Frankenstein, making my own version of their reality. I’ve tried to analyze this for a while with my shrink, but this was a drug for me. Of course it would make my sisters quite uncomfortable, and quite unhappy, because they couldn’t find their favorite skirt anymore because their skirt had become a shirt merged into a coat.

DB: Perhaps now they understand it was a sacrifice to the greater fashion good?

FR: An investment! Exactly. Fair enough.

DB: How did you transition from the Frankenstein kid in your family’s closets into the influential designer we know now?

FR: As a teenager I did classical studies in Italy, and then, when I was sixteen, I made my escape to New York. I came to FIT [the Fashion Institute of Technology] for my degree and then I went to London for an MA at Central Saint Martins.

DB: That’s when Louise Wilson, the infamous fashion professor who helped nurture talent like Alexander McQueen, was there, right?

FR: Yes. She hated me.

DB: Ha! Why?

FR: She hated me because I’d learned English in America, so I had a slight American accent. She couldn’t even talk to me. But I was grateful for how tough she was on me—on everyone—because she opened a gate for understanding what it means to not surrender, how to find creativity, and how to work around people. Her skills in that sense were incredible. So she was amazing, even if she didn’t let me speak in front of her.

DB: After Central Saint Martins did you move back to Italy?

Backstage at Marni’s Fall/Winter 2024 fashion show in Milan. Photo: Jason Lloyd Evans

FR: My first fashion job was for Anna Molinari. I spent some time in the outskirts of Modena, which coming from London was a shock. Then I moved to Milan. I worked for Alessandro Dell’Acqua for four years and then I had this incredible opportunity to work for ten years with Mrs. Prada.

DB: Of course Mrs. Prada is a creative director who has blurred the lines between fashion and art for years. How was it to be in her universe?

FR: She always referred to art, not in a direct way but more around what art brings as a thinking to society. Yes, she created the Fondazione Prada in Milan, but at times she was quite against the fusion of the two. I admired that because she didn’t want one to spoil the other. It was a great way of embracing all of it without spoiling either, which can happen in fashion when someone hires an artist to design a logo for a T-shirt. With Miuccia, it was completely different. What I treasure the most, which in a way is not far from what I learned from Louise, was the power of a concept. For example, at Prada there were months of sitting around a table and talking about ideas, and then making the clothes in one week, literally. That takes so much courage. [The design team] would have to be there in front of one of the most incredible people on the planet and talk about art and defend their position. I was so young, I was twenty-three or twenty-four, and you have to be brave at those tables and be able to express yourself. She would love it! I really treasure that surfing brain of hers. And yet it was always a balance around pushing. Some days we would push so much around creativity and create things that wouldn’t make any sense; then it was about stripping them down. One of the most important things is her passion to make clothes that are so impactful but also so applicable to reality, and therefore very human.

DB: The question that everyone ends up asking is, Can fashion be art? Can art be fashion?

FR: I hate speaking in that binary. This idea of fashion being art is reductive. The relationship I have with the making of clothes is completely different. And art and fashion are both marketed at the moment, but the message that one conveys is another landscape. Processes can be similar— the way you get to a place can be very similar to an artist’s. But whenever somebody comes up and says,

“Oh my God, this is a piece of art,” I want to vomit.

DB: You mentioned drawing on canvases and painting on canvases and painting on these dresses. Do you still work outside the design studio?

FR: I did for years, and then I stopped. To my surprise, throughout covid I became an obsessive writer. I’m not a good writer but I love to write! I love to compose things through writing.

DB: Do you write in English or in Italian?

FR: You know what’s funny? The best time I write is when I’m on a plane. There’s something about the pressure, or the fact that there are no phones. I have stuff that’s like half English and half Italian. I’m noticing that I have a harder time forming words in Italian. My boyfriend is French and we speak in

English. At the studio I speak English all the time because most of the people are from all over the world. I don’t speak so much Italian anymore; I’m actually kind of shy about it because sometimes I have to present things in Italian and my brain will occasionally go blank. Nowadays, when I’m not in the studio, I write. But I’d like to paint more and I think I will soon.

DB: Tell me about the residency you established. I know this is very personal to you, and it’s a project that you financed fifty-fifty with your own money and Marni’s investment.

FR: The residency was a journey, ha! Originally, it was going to happen in Milan last July with two artists who are Nigerian and live in London. They’re called Soldier and Slawn. I started this long and unnerving process with their visas. It was incredibly difficult to get them to Italy because whereas Nigeria and London have good agreements, that’s not the case for the rest of the world. I have to tell you that this was quite tough, and I finally said, “This is going to happen, even if it’s over my dead body.” After three months of their passport at the consulate, I said, “Fuck this,” canceled my summer holiday, and moved everything I’d built in Milan for the residency to London. I found a space online, rented it, and said, “Fine, we’ll just do it here.” I said, “It’s going to fucking happen” and I was so glad it did. The guys have such incredible personalities and are so talented and so soulful that they dragged me back into painting. We built a body of work that included more than a dozen triptychs, some of them painted alone and some painted all together. I had such an amazing time; it felt like when I was learning at school, or when I was making my clothes when I was a child. At times I was so shy, as if I was

Marni’s Spring/Summer 2022 fashion show in Milan. Photo: Martina Ferrara

Hand-painted upcycled look at Marni’s Spring/ Summer 2022 fashion show in Milan. Photo: Alessio Costantino

a kid again, and at other times I’d stand in front of the canvas and think, “I can even just throw this out of the window and it’s fine.”

DB: Perhaps those feelings of nervousness and anxiety are motivational factors? When you took over Marni ten years ago, were you anxious or daunted?

FR: Oh my God, yes. Starting at Marni was a different type of fear. One of the things I feared most was my Prada history, and the fact that I was going to bring a part of that with me.

DB: Meaning, Would people say what he’s doing is too Prada?

FR: I was trying to refuse everything that I’d learned in order to be planted in a new garden and bloom with the rest of the people in the most honest way. I never tried to be somebody else. I never tried to be Consuelo [Castiglioni, the former designer of Marni]. And yet, I would say half the people say I’m the Antichrist of Marni and the other half say I’m very Marni. As you go from one family to a new family, you have to understand people’s language and people have to understand your language. More than fear, it was about trying to hold still and be patient about allowing these flowers to grow and bloom. I remember after the third year, one day I entered the studio and I felt, Wow, we’ve made this incredible synergy and group of people. So many times I felt goosebumps about what we’ve made through just holding hands and making peace and love. Does that sound so lame?

DB: No, it sounds like Woodstock, ha! You’ve done such an incredible job of building a Marni world. People are excited to come to one of your shows because people know that at a Marni show you’re going to have some sort of experience or sensation. That has to be intentional.

FR: Yes! I’m very aware that I want to use everyone’s energies for a good purpose, and of the money that a fashion show costs too. And for the editors and buyers and people who go to many shows, I know it’s an insane schedule, so there has to be a power of delivering emotionally. This comes from the incredible synergies that I have with the people I work with. What I do is extremely connected, and it starts and dies every season with [music producer] Dev Hynes. I don’t call him up and say, “Give me a song”; we work together from the start and talk about what we’re going to build. That plays a big role in even the most simple settings. Last season the models could decide where to walk among only pianos and spotlights, that was it. Simple, but it made such an incredible theater.

DB: My favorite Marni show was right after covid, the first time I’d been back to Milan, and you created sort of a religious experience in a theater in the round. You’d also asked to dress everyone who came to the show, as if we were one fashion congregation.

FR: When I had the first meeting with everyone back at the office [after covid], we said, “We have to get physical.” We’d been secluded for so long, and our work is so sensorial, we missed that sort of entanglement. We wrapped our rooms in canvas and we started painting for two weeks. From there everything kind of unraveled. I decided that I wanted to dress everyone, so everyone got an outfit we had painted. Everybody came in one week before—it was like 700 fittings plus the models—and it was such a memorable moment, running around to the changing rooms and greeting everyone. That show underlined in my head the purpose of what we do.

DB: I still have my outfit, Francesco.

FR: I’m glad!

DB: Francesco, when you talk, I can see the tattoos on your hand. What do the two moons mean?

FR: They symbolize symbiotic vision. Whatever mission I’m going for in terms of making and creativity is for me not an individual process. It’s about being in symbiosis with people and with brains. The tattoos remind me every day that my greatest passion is to learn. So I had them tattooed on my hand.

DB: So when you’re waving at someone, you’re signaling that life is about collaboration.

FR: By the way, it was the most painful thing I’ve ever done in my life.

DB: The tattoo or the symbiotic relationships?

FR: The tattoos! Working with people I love is a constant source of inspiration, the ultimate pleasure.

Marni’s Fall/Winter 2020 menswear fashion show in Milan. Choreography: Michele Rizzo. Photo: Pietro S. D’Aprano at Getty Images All photos: courtesy MARNI Group Srl

THOMAS SCHUTTE: SLIPPERY LINEAGES

Thomas Schütte’s monumental sculptures were the subject of a recent exhibition at Gagosian, New York. Here, Amber Collins looks into the history of the artist’s Frauen series, eighteen works made between 1998 and 2006, and considers the artist’s radical explorations of the human body.

There is a quickness and a looseness to the fluidity of Schütte’s sculptures, but like the geology of a mountain, beach, or ocean, it couldn’t be any other way.

—Charles Ray 1

How does Thomas Schütte manage to simultaneously embrace and reject modernism in a single work? Tradition is invited, but only to a point. Suspended between distant pictorial realities, his sculptures can be fluid and elastic, strong and confined, buoyant and heavy, melting and coiled, playful and graceful, abstracted and whole. Schütte’s work, which spans sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, and architecture, is persistently contrarian and multidirectional—a place where past, present, and future are nonchronological, and where three left turns somehow never equal a right.

The Frauen sculptures, Schütte’s most ambitious and complex body of work to date, constitute a radical aesthetic statement on the figure in contemporary sculpture. The series, made between 1998 and 2006, is a sequence of eighteen works based on the female nude, each cast in bronze, steel, and aluminum. In them, the artist engages in a dialogue with the figurative tradition of the female nude, a subject that stretches back to antiquity. The works also build on the revolutionary iterations realized by such early modernist masters as Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Henry Moore, casting their transformation of the figure and liberation of form into the contemporary landscape. Emphasizing both figuration and abstraction, the Frauen , with their vast range of poses and styles, propose a vision of sculpture tethered not

to representation, but to the fundamental possibilities of form.

The Frauen originated from brick-size blocks of clay rapidly formed by hand, then glazed and fired. Between 1997 and 1999, in the renowned ceramics workshop of Niels Dietrich in Cologne, Schütte created an astounding one hundred and twenty Ceramic Sketches . Describing the process, he said, “I was handed a small board with clay and given an hour to model it into a figure. It was sheer ambition: I made five, six, seven pieces a day.”2 The artist selected and scaled up eighteen of the one hundred and twenty Ceramic Sketches to make the Frauen . Thus each Ceramic Sketch , whether ultimately cast or not, belongs to a continuum within the series, as each assumed a new form in the passage from one to the next. In other words, the Ceramic Sketches are embedded in the DNA of every Frau

Often shown on shelves alongside the Frauen , the Ceramic Sketches are important in our consideration of the large-scale works. In 1999, Frauen (Nrs. 1–4) were first exhibited at Dia Center for the Arts in New York alongside seventy-five Ceramic Sketches . And the Frauen have been connected to their ceramic origins from that debut presentation onward—“every mistake in this quest for form, each blind alley, was just left there,” Schütte later said of the installation.3 Exhibiting the Ceramic Sketches with the Frauen invokes the sculptural thinking of Medardo Rosso, an Italian contemporary of Auguste Rodin. Rosso broke from the sculptural gravitas of late nineteenth-century Europe by elevating the bozzetto, or rough sketch, to the stature of a finished artwork. 4

Rosso’s sculpture and Schütte’s Ceramic Sketches

both manifest strong evidence of the artist’s hand. Rosso preserved the wax shell from the bronze casting process—a wax barrier is typically used to create a mold, then melted out and replaced by molten bronze—and reinforced it with plaster to create works such as Ecce Puer (Behold the Child , 1906, cast c. 1958–59). He worked up the wax by hand, leaving traces of his fingerprints and deliberately manipulating his surfaces to capture the fleeting and ephemeral qualities of light. In the last twenty years of his life, Rosso did not choose any new subjects, but continued to make new casts of existing models, reworking these in constantly different ways and ultimately producing roughly two hundred sculptural versions of just thirty-five different subjects. Though his work is aesthetically quite different from the Frauen , Rosso’s singular focus and transformation of each cast into a unique object parallels Schütte’s process.

To create the large-format Frauen , Schütte worked with the Kayser art foundry in Düsseldorf to enlarge the ceramic figures into polystyrene blocks prior to being cast. After sawing out each shape, he coated the Styrofoam dummy in plaster of Paris and jute, and over the course of six to nine months, hammered, sanded, and polished the model that would be used to make the casting mold.5 Over the next two months, the Frauen were created in parts using the sand casting method, then welded together. Each work was cast five times: twice in steel, twice in bronze, and once in aluminum.6 The patinated bronze and roughened steel surfaces were achieved with acid and heat, and the reflective aluminum surfaces with polishing. The finished forms were positioned on bases consisting of welded steel beams, mirroring the

Previous spread: Thomas Schütte, Bronzefrau Nr. 1 (Bronze Woman No. 1), 1998–2000 (detail), patinated bronze on steel table, 63 × 101 × 49 ¼ inches (160 × 256.5 × 125.1 cm).

Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio

Opposite: Installation view, Thomas Schütte: Major Sculptures , Gagosian, West 21st Street, New York, January 22–February 22, 2025. Photo: Maris Hutchinson

This page: Thomas Schütte, Aluminiumfrau Nr. 8 (Aluminum Woman No. 8), 2001, lacquered aluminum on steel table, 50 × 105 1⁄8 × 49 1⁄8 inches (127 × 267 × 124.8 cm). Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio

Following spread: Thomas Schütte, Bronzefrau Nr. 13 (Bronze Woman No. 13), 2003 (detail), bronze on steel table, 70 ¾ × 98 3⁄8 × 49 1 8 inches (179.7 × 249.9 × 124.8 cm). Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio

Artwork © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

worktables in the foundry where they were created as well as the bases of the Ceramic Sketches Schütte’s choice of steel for the first Frauen exhibited in 1999 explicitly acknowledged the history of this material across the twentieth century. I am thinking in particular of David Smith, whose economical use of welded steel in the Depressionera United States made it a dominant practice for the sculptors who followed. In 1930, Smith saw reproductions of Picasso’s welded metal sculptures published in Cahiers d’Art and “learned that art could be made with steel, the material . . . that had previously meant only labor and earning power.”7 Smith’s turn to industrial materials in works that merged abstraction and figuration prefigured the Minimalists, for instance Richard Serra, who would leave figuration entirely and decisively behind. Over the past century, figurative cast steel forms have been increasingly rare, and steel has itself become rarer in contemporary art. And so, in 1999, when Schütte cast his first four Frauen in steel, the artist connected his contemporary practice with the cast steel figure lost to abstraction.8

For turn-of-the-twentieth-century artists, the female nude figure was so ingrained as a subject that it begged for departures from conventional modes of representation. In appearances from Aphrodite in ancient Greece to Venus in the Renaissance, she had been staunchly upheld as a symbol of divine love, fertility, desire, and sensuality. Think of the Venus de Milo (130–100 bc), Sandro Botticelli’s Nascita di Venere ( Birth of Venus , c. 1485), or Titian’s Venere di Urbino (Venus of Urbino, 1538). By the twentieth century, this stalwart subject was no longer firmly wedded to these ideals. In discussing Schütte’s reclining sculpture, Penelope

Curtis has said, “The fragmented figure is a central part of the modern figurative tradition, taking us back to the age of the great excavations and then on to its effect on sculptors from the late nineteenth century onwards: Schütte is hardly alone in removing parts of the body. This is another tactic for converting the figure into sculpture and it is one employed by Rodin, Maillol, and many others (and even by Moore, in terms of his massive reduction of the head). Removing the head, it might be argued, is not to objectivize the female body as simply a body, but rather to convert it into a piece of sculpture.”9

Henry Moore, arguably the foremost British sculptor of the twentieth century, presented sculptural variations of the reclining figure from the mid-1920s until his death in 1986. Moore was a disciple of the French sculptor Aristide Maillol, who worked almost exclusively with the female nude (as in La Montagne [The Mountain ], 1937). Following Maillol’s example, Moore viewed the reclining nude as an ideal starting point for experimentation: “The vital thing for an artist is to have a subject that allows [him] to try out all kinds of formal ideas, things that he doesn’t yet know about for certain but wants to experiment with, as Cézanne did in his Bathers series. . . . In my case the reclining figure provides chances of that sort. The subject-matter is given. It’s settled for you, and you know it and like it, so that within it, within the subject that you’ve done a dozen times before, you are free to invent a completely new form.”10 Moore’s manifold reinventions of the reclining figure included works like his first life-size example from 1951, in which buoyant, biomorphic limbs oscillate between naturalism and abstraction. Echoing

Moore, Schütte stated in an interview in 2004, “I am merely trying to find form. How else can one still find a form? Picasso, Matisse, automatically spring to mind . . . their works are crucial in this regard.”11

Picasso, after completing what is considered one of the most climactic images of his career, Les femmes d’Alger (Version “O”) (Women of Algiers [Version “O”] , 1955), famously remarked to his biographer Roland Penrose, “When Matisse died, he left his odalisques to me as a legacy.” 12 Before Matisse, they likely belonged to Eugène Delacroix, and before him, to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Evidenced by this inheritance, the odalisque forged a long-standing dialogue across artistic generations, capable of expressing homage, emphasis, denial, rebuttal, or, in the case of Picasso and Matisse, elegy. Speaking of this lineage, Schütte noted that his very first cast Frau , Stahlfrau Nr. 1 (Steel Woman No. 1 , 1998), “had several faces, a Picasso face, Walt Disney arms, a Matisse body, and a picture-book breast.”13 The hurtling Stahlfrau Nr. 6 (Steel Woman No. 6 , 2003), with her protruding, accented spine, also immediately invokes Ingres, who added three extra lumbar vertebrae to his La Grande Odalisque (Large Odalisque , 1814) to enhance her sexuality.

Schütte’s Stahlfrau Nr. 4 (Steel Woman No. 4, 1999), a dense, pancaked figure in pseudo-basrelief, nods to Matisse’s Les Nus de dos (The Backs , 1909–31), an imposing quartet of bas-relief nudes depicted from the back, often on view in the sculpture garden of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. 14 About The Backs , Schütte has said, “Sometimes I have the need to look at history, I am very interested in looking again at . . . these brutal sculptures of Matisse, they are really brutal, and there is a lot to learn from them.”15 In the Frauen , Schütte seemingly inverts Matisse’s approach by rotating the vertical plane of The Backs onto steel tables. Characteristic of Schütte, however, attempts to trace a direct lineage to a modernist predecessor prove slippery. Aluminiumfrau Nr. 8 ( Aluminum Woman No. 8 , 2001), when viewed from one angle, replicates the elongated silhouette and curvaceous form of Ingres’s La Grande Odalisque , and when viewed from another, appears downcast, dejected, anything but La Grande Odalisque.

Still, Picasso’s statement begs the tantalizing question: When he died in 1973, to whom did he leave the odalisque? In 2003, Schütte said of his use of the female nude: “If it were convention I would be delighted. Except no one is doing it. Because it is not a convention. I’m doing it and no one else is.”16 His Frauen do relate, in their many iterations, to the late period of Picasso’s career, when he returned to and reinvented the female nude in endless iterations. 17 The Frauen can also easily be read as a brilliant synthesis of Cubism, a much earlier moment for Picasso. In their sharp planes, angular contours, and shattered perspectives, the works readily conjure Picasso’s Tête de femme (Fernande) (Head of a Woman [Fernande], 1909), historically considered the first Cubist sculpture. Rose-period Picasso might also come to mind in our experience of Stahlfrau Nr. 6 , whose weathered surface and taut waist recall Picasso’s coral-clouded vision of Fernande Olivier, Nu sur fond rouge (Nude on Red Background , 1906). The Surrealist angle Picasso took in the 1930s, dominated by sensual visions of his then-muse MarieThérèse Walter, is also reflected in Schütte’s ever-present curves. Yet Schütte’s use of reflective

surfaces, especially in aluminum, has no connection to the modernist master whatsoever.

Not long before beginning work on the Frauen , Schütte initiated his enigmatic Große Geister (Large Spirits), a series of seventeen colossal aluminum figures made between 1995 and 2004. These alluring, seemingly extraterrestrial figures coil up toward the heavens, and when installed in groups, they seem to know the choreography of Matisse’s Dance (I) (1909). 18 Like the Frauen , the Große Geister derive from preparatory works. Schütte made approximately one hundred miniature Kleine Geister (Little Spirits) by twisting wax cords together into spirals and then immersing the resulting forms in liquid wax. The related work Torso (2005) is a cross-section of a Große Geist that emphasizes the progression of the bulging Geister folds into the expressive Frauen furls, perhaps most evident in Aluminiumfrau Nr. 8 . These pieces riff on Constantin Brâncu�si’s poised Torso de jeune homme (Torso of a Young Man , 1924), with its eloquent and balanced juxtaposition of brass, limestone, and wood. A historically minded glance at Aluminiumfrau Nr. 8 and its undeterred leak of aluminum beyond the base also recalls Umberto Boccioni’s triumphant Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio (Unique Forms of Continuity in Space , 1913, cast 1931 or 1934). Epitomizing Futurism and the machine age, Boccioni’s polished figure bleeds into space as if confessing to gravity, air, or light. In the Frauen , powered too by energy and motion, we can make out Boccioni’s spirited call: “Let us fling open the figure and let it incorporate within itself whatever may surround it.”19

The Frauen became increasingly abstract over the course of the series. One of the most abstract iterations, Bronzefrau Nr. 14 (Bronze Woman No. 14, 2003), is a lackadaisical figure in repose with cartoonish eyes (as if sharpied in) and one raised arm. The hole in her heart cues Picasso once more— in this case, his groundbreaking Guitare (Guitar, 1914). Another hole, this one an ovoid piercing the figure’s head, evades a reading of violence and rather is legible as an ode to modernist British sculptor Barbara Hepworth and works like Figure (Nyanga) (1959–60). (Hepworth first introduced the pierced form in her work in 1931, predating Henry Moore’s similar use of holes by two years.)

Larger than life size, the Frauen do not return our gaze. They seem to look through us, back and ahead. If we were to imagine a contemporary response to these works, Pierre Huyghe’s bee-swarming reclining female nude, decapitated and crowned with a hive, could be it. Like Schütte, Huyghe draws on the figurative tradition of the female nude as a framework for metamorphosis. However, it is not Schütte’s mere use of the female nude, but rather his collapse of a multitude of figurative traditions within the genre and invention of form therein, that position his Frauen in the history of sculpture. Schütte’s subject is distorted, bent, twisted, fragmented, compressed, exaggerated, built, demolished, rebuilt, and then abstracted all over again in a search for pure form. Seemingly pried from the margins of imagination, the forms found are distinctly Schütte: strangely exquisite and beautifully absurd.

In 1898, Auguste Rodin’s Le Monument à Balzac ( Monument to Balzac , 1898) proposed a form so inconceivable that it took more than four decades to cast in bronze and permanently home. This homage to the French novelist Honoré de Balzac was finally erected in 1939, long after Rodin’s death in 1917, at the crossing of Boulevard Montparnasse

and Boulevard Raspail in Paris. When initially presented in plaster at the Salon of 1898, the work was described as “a block of salt caught in a shower,” and “a snowman in a bathrobe whose empty sleeve suggests a strait jacket.”20 Similar descriptors have been leveled at Schütte’s work. In the New York Times , the Frauen have been described as “women put through the spin cycle” with “featureless faces like pie plates.”21 Comments like these indicate the discomfort and insecurity that arise when we are confronted with radical, truly new forms. “Art is beautiful but requires considerable effort,” Schütte has said. 22 The artist asks us to sit with this difficulty—it is part of the work.

1. Charles Ray, “How Do You Tie a Bronze Knot,” in Thomas Schütte (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2024), 23.

2. Thomas Schütte: Ernst Franz Vogelmann-Preis 2014 (Munich: Hirmer, 2014), 97.

3. Dorothea Zwirner, ed., Thomas Sch ü tte (Berlin: Friedrich Christian Flick Collection; Cologne: DuMont Literatur und Kunst Verlag, 2004), 162. Quotes from this monograph come from an interview between Ulrich Loock and the artist.

4. Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 32. Krauss further explains, “He saw his own roughened surfaces, eloquent with the imprint of his fingers as he worked them and his own presentation of gesture through fragmentation of the body, as furthering that claim” (32).

5. Linda Walther, SCHWEBEZUSTÄNDE: Frauen von Thomas Sch ü tte (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2020), 19–20. All details pertaining to the production of the Frauen , including Schütte’s use of the sand casting process and achievement of desired surfaces, come from Walther’s research.

6. The works are not considered part of an edition. As Schütte has explained, “It wasn’t an edition, they are all quite different. Either the bronze is patinated differently or the tables are different . . . sometimes they are sitting squarely on it, other times angled.” Zwirner, Thomas Sch ü tte , 173.

7. Smith quoted in Jane Harrison Cone, David Smith, 1906–1965: A Retrospective Exhibition (Cambridge, MA: Thomas Todd, 1966), 6.

8. Walther, SCHWEBEZUSTÄNDE , 61.

9. Penelope Curtis, “Reclining Sculpture,” in Thomas Schütte: Hindsight (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2010), 59.

10. Christa Lichtenstern, Henry Moore: Work, Theory, Impact (London: Royal Academy of Arts; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2008), 95.

11. Zwirner, Thomas Sch ü tte , 166.

12. Sir Roland Penrose and John Golding, eds., Picasso, 1881–1973 (New York: Portland House, 1988), 217.

13. Zwirner, Thomas Sch ü tte , 172.

14. Schütte was the subject of a 2024–25 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, also home to Henri Matisse’s Backs . The exhibition included four Frauen (Nrs. 1, 6, 16, 17 ), which provided an opportunity for viewers to perceive similarities across the works. It does not seem a coincidence that the museum installed a work by Picasso (Night Fishing at Antibes [1939]) on the wall adjacent to the escalators leading up to Schütte’s exhibition.

15. “James Lingwood in conversation with Thomas Schütte,” in Thomas Schütte (London: Phaidon, 1998), 24.

16. Zwirner, Thomas Sch ü tte , 170.

17. From 1960 until his death in 1973, Picasso painted more than three hundred depictions of the female nude, including his Le peintre et son modèle series and works after Rembrandt and Édouard Manet.

18. This work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

19. Jon Wood, David Hulks, and Alex Potts, eds., Modern Sculpture Reader (Leeds, England: Henry Moore Institute, 2007), 38.

20. Mary Blume, “Saga of a Statue: The Struggles of Rodin’s Balzac,” International Herald Tribune , August 15, 1998, https:// www.nytimes.com/1998/08/15/style/IHT-saga-of-a-statuethestruggles-of-rodins-balzac.html.

21. Jason Farago, “The Acid Comedy of Thomas Schütte, the Man in the Mud,” New York Times January 1, 2025, https://www. nytimes.com/2025/01/01/arts/design/thomas-schutte-art-humormoma-sculpture.html; Blake Gopnik, “A Slippery Devil Finally Gets His Moment at MoMA,” New York Times , September 28, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/28/arts/design/thomasschutte-moma.html.

22. This quote comes from the press release for Schütte’s 2024–25 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition’s curator, Paulina Pobocha, explains, “This quote reveals so much about Thomas’s approach to art-making. Even the simplest gesture arises from a concentrated study of form and content, reflections on history, and how art—whether sculpture, drawing, or architecture—relates to the world beyond itself. More than this, he implicitly asks his audience to meet him halfway, to take time with the work. This too requires effort, but the most rewarding kind.”

A FOREIGN LANGUAGE BY CATHERINE LACEY

catherine lacey

None of them were locals. Their common language was that of their adopted country, the second or third tongue for each of the three — a husband, a wife, and Nile.

Though the wife had known Nile, and her husband had also once known Nile, all three met for the first time during a winter’s early sunset, a meeting perhaps even caused by that sunset, wild amber streaks of sunlight broken and bent by the emptied rain clouds that hung over the city. Nile would later remember the light itself as the beginning of everything, that year that seemed to turn something in him or return something to him he’d long ago misplaced. Odd how accidental it all was, how weather patterns could begin or put an end to seemingly anything in this life.

Though they were running late to a matinee, the couple took a slight detour through the western edge of the park so that they might marvel at the light’s intensity, and as they were coming around the curve of that massive fountain with the strange centaur in the middle, there was Nile. He saw Ismail first, then Tomasa.

There was a second of hesitation until recognition and memory came to each of them, out of sync. Tomasa was the first to start to introduce Nile to her husband, reaching out to touch Nile’s arm (in that camelhair coat she remembered) but almost simultaneously Ismail began to introduce Nile to his wife, each of them using terms still new to them — the word for “husband,” the word for “wife.” Tomasa kept forgetting how to correctly pronounce the word for “marriage,” and always used the verb “to wed” in a way that was technically correct but sounded unnatural. It had been almost three years since her brief weeks with Nile and more than five years since he’d seen Ismail.

Oh, so you already know each — and you — so you’ve met before — we have  — and I didn’t know you’d gotten married, that you even — it’s been an age — what a small world — oh — you look the same, the exact same — and you — I had no idea you were still around — yes, but where have you been — here, only here, and you, have you done some traveling, or — no, I’ve been here, we’ve been here, how strange not to have seen you — I thought you’d moved away — I thought the same thing —  Tomasa and Ismail and Nile had been speaking this language for long enough that they no longer thought of it as a neutral ground between themselves and others, though it is true that it was the only language these three shared in common, completely, and it is true that this language was native for none of them, yet if we imagine a language to be a neutral ground, then where is the war?

But we have to be going — don’t let me keep you — oh but it’s so nice to see you — and you — only three minutes until curtain, but let’s meet again — yes,

same phone number? — same for me, yes, do you have it? — I remember it, yes —  we’ll talk soon then, make a plan — so nice to see you — so nice to see you both.

Neither Ismail nor Tomasa spoke as they walked away, a bright agitation between them, their mouths smiling without their awareness, their hands growing faintly damp against the other. So you know him too, one of them said, and the other replied, Yes, pertly, without breaking stride. They made it to the theater just in time, were ushered to their row, clammy in their coats, shrugging them off and folding them across their laps just before the curtain rose. She rested a hand on his thigh and he laid his left hand over it.

The play took place in a lifeboat after a large passenger ship had just sunk. Four children, six women, and one elderly man sat huddled together and barely spoke for all four acts. The set design was elaborate: a weathered wooden boat was suspended in a tank of black blue water that rose and fell and occasionally splashed out onto the feet of those on the front row. The sound of the water was the play’s only score. The actors were different each night, all of them volunteers who’d been trained into their parts for several hours before the curtain rose. The script called for an enormous amount of silence and those in the boat tended to grow ill as the acts went on. There was an intermission, but the actors were not allowed to disembark, and had to stay there rocking in the darkness while the audience went to the lobby for something intoxicating or sweet. Intermission passed silently save for the sound of the cash register chiming or coughs or sneezes or the clink of ice cubes against glass. Distantly, everyone could still hear the stage sea churning. The audience tended to rush back to their seats with chocolate still dissolving in their mouths, whiskey still wet on lips.

By the time Tomasa and Ismail went to the play, it had been running for two sold-out weeks and had just been extended for another three. There had been some concern, at first, that the roles were too demanding for untrained actors and children, especially the children, but everyone who’d been on stage had reported a deep satisfaction; they all agreed that even though the performance was exhausting and almost terrifying to sustain, it had been worth it to be witnessed so carefully by such a rapt audience.

I feel I’ve been truly comprehended for the first time in my life, one woman told the local newspaper, entirely comprehended by the world at large. Such reports inspired hundreds to fill then overfill the waiting list to be onstage. The play’s extension was due in part to that high demand.

The husband and wife, like almost everyone else in the audience, left the theater in a state of unease and awe. They clutched each other, each of them

steadying the other, as they walked silently through the dark streets. Though they had an impulse to discuss the play, as they often did with works of art, the play had left them with nothing to say. The play had said everything that needed to be said about it.

Ismail had made a dinner reservation at a café where no one ever really needed reservations; there was always room. Still — he liked to reserve a specific table because it so delighted the café’s owner, an older man with an accent so peculiar that few could understand him. The menu was always the same: a slaw, some sort of root-vegetable stew, a glass of plain wine poured from an unlabeled glass carafe, then an orb of frozen pistachio milk at the end. The café had been there for nearly four decades and nothing had ever changed.

After dinner, and after taking the long way home, and after arriving home, and after feeding the cat, and after they’d washed their faces and brushed their teeth and gotten into bed, Ismail then remembered they hadn’t said anything else about Nile, hadn’t even explained to each other how they knew him.

Nile, Ismail said, and Tomasa replied, Oh right, right, how strange.

But strange wasn’t the right word and she knew it.

Not strange, she corrected.

No, it was . . . something — but he didn’t know what it was.

But then what was it? she asked, but neither of them suggested an alternate word. They fell asleep with the question left open.

It makes no difference what country this all took place in, nor does it matter which year it was in the twentieth century. It’s also unimportant which countries — different countries — each of them had expatriated. All three held unglamorous jobs that were neither a delight nor a nuisance, but their work is also of no concern. Also insignificant are the languages they learned before they refracted themselves into this common one.

Elsewhere in their lives these origins and professions and first languages had discrete consequences — at borders, in streets, in split seconds — but when it came to what passed between the three and their six eyes, six lungs, twelve limbs, and three minds, none of it, for once, amounted to much of anything.

In the morning Ismail and Tomasa both remembered the unanswered questions about Nile, but neither asked the other about him. They’d overslept. They dressed quickly and ate toast while standing and rushed out into the street and kissed goodbye on the corner where they so often kissed goodbye.

It’s not that they forgot about Nile that week — they did not — but their inability to clearly describe the sensation that had arisen between the three there in the sunset, with the statue of the centaur looking on, had made it difficult to

know how to ask the other about Nile, and in that time five days passed and it was time for the party at Rin’s house

Rin was a Nepalese photographer in his eighties whom Tomasa and Ismail had met in August in the street. His annual Christmas party was locally legendary, a tradition Rin had kept going for many years, though he was not Christian. He’d begun the party for Carlos, a Catholic from New Orleans who’d lived with Rin for years. After Carlos had died, more than two decades ago now, Rin kept the party going in memoriam. For a few years it was a somewhat muted affair, as Carlos had died tragically and quite young, but after some time the Carlos Party became just a party again, partly because this is the nature of grief and partly because fewer and fewer guests had ever known him. Lately some of Rin’s guests assumed “Carlos” was a misspelling of “Carols,” as in “Christmas Carols,” though Christmas carols were rarely sung at the Carlos Party unless the right people got drunk enough.

Tomasa and Ismail arrived with a bottle of wine and a small potted plant. The crowd in Rin’s high-ceilinged apartment were mostly people he had met in the streets, strangers he’d approached to photograph over the last fifty years, a wide range of ages and personalities and professions, but a vast majority were foreign to this country. Rin’s guests also included a few of the famous people he’d been hired to take portraits of over the years — an opera singer, a politician, a stage actress whom everyone adored — as well as several of his wealthy patrons. The unlikely mix of cultures and class gave the party an undeniable momentum. Something always happened there.

Tomasa and Ismail had met Rin outside a museum during an idle and uncertain moment in an unbearably hot afternoon. Their first impulse had been to decline his request to take their portrait, as they’d just been having a terse and rare disagreement, and they were hungry and a little overheated and a little dazed from having just spent too long in the museum, but there was something rare in Rin’s face, a clear and pointed sense of curiosity, so they nodded that it was fine.

Rin began his work immediately, before the couple had a moment to prepare themselves or anticipate the shutter’s blink. He took five shots, no more, and once he was done they spoke for a few minutes, then Tomasa invited him for supper later that week, at their apartment, and though the couple were not in the habit of so impulsively inviting a stranger to their home, it felt natural to do so.

Rin was quite accustomed to such invitations. For the first years he’d lived in this city, newly defected from Nepal, many locals had been openly hostile toward him. Naturally he gravitated to those who also did not belong. Nearly every time he took a photograph of someone he didn’t know, he soon found

out — even when they seemed to be local to this place — that his subject had, yet again, a distant origin or a complicated sense of home, or was an outsider in some other way.

The photo of Ismail and Tomasa was one of Rin’s favorites of his more recent works; it was strangely intense for a street portrait. The rest of them tended toward whimsy, a word Rin didn’t care for, but to which he had surrendered himself. At dinner, Rin gifted Ismail and Tomasa his best print of the five, still cold from the darkroom.

Tomasa’s left hand was reaching out toward Ismail, who stood with one leg in front of the other, looking straight into the lens as if about to ask a difficult question. A fine mist of sweat was visible on both of their foreheads. Neither were smiling.

The photograph had moved Ismail to tears, a common reaction for him but a genuine one. They had so few photographs of themselves together. The oldest was from a visit to a circus in the countryside shortly after they’d met; a traveling photographer had taken it in his tent. The newest was the government-issued portrait immediately after their courthouse wedding. But Rin’s photograph had captured such a minor and unembellished moment — hunger, fatigue, and indecision — and yet some kind of tenderness was still present between the two. Tomasa often stopped in the hallway just to look at it, as if calibrating herself.

The Carlos Party that year took place on a mild December night, but no one’s enjoyment of the weather was yet undercut by the anxiety about what the warm air might ultimately mean. Rin had left all the windows open and put all the ashtrays on the terrace in the hope that no one would smoke too much inside this year.

The apartment was not yet at full capacity when Tomasa and Ismail arrived, and Nile was already there, too, in another room lost in a long conversation with an ornithologist, but they would not find him in the crowd for at least another hour. The guests were all lively, dressed in bright colors and silk and feathers. Some of them had fled wars while others had simply drifted to this city, with family money or with no money but plenty of ambition, or no ambition but simply an intention to feel finally at home someplace they technically did not belong.

Rin’s anxious, elderly dog steadily paced the room, weaving between ankles. It wasn’t the party itself that roused his anxiety but rather the strange fact that he was a dog who had gained some splinter of consciousness about the state of his life, the state of being a dog. His only true joy came when Rin would lie flat on his back on the Persian rug and let the dog crawl onto his stomach to rest. His name was Po-Boy II, named so in honor of the dog that had survived Carlos,

Po-Boy, named after the only thing Carlos unequivocally missed about New Orleans. Precisely five years after Carlos had died, Po-Boy had died, and Rin, unable to bear it, had almost immediately gotten Po-Boy II, who had grown a bit plump and lumpy in his old age, despite his constant nervous shuffling around the apartment. His body was shaped like a bear’s body but he was much smaller than a bear, more like a large loaf of bread. He paced around the Carlos Party, sighing his little dog sighs while the partygoers laughed as they looked down at him, amused, smiling. Their laughing, too, pained the dog. When he looked up at the humans with his all-too-human eyes they only laughed more. This was the inescapable state of Po-Boy II’s life. Everyone kept saying he was “so cute.”

As anticipated, a scandal began to unfold at the party, gossip told in whispers over the flutes of fizzy wine. It was this: a psychoanalyst had unexpectedly crossed paths here with a patient, a young woman with wild ginger hair and black combat boots, and instead of politely avoiding each other they had fallen into each other’s arms on the chaise longue while the psychoanalyst’s husband, seemingly oblivious, smoked a cigar on the terrace. Theories arose that perhaps the cigar signified that the husband (one of Rin’s wealthy collectors) did in fact know that his wife (so regal in her green caftan) was involved with this young woman. Perhaps the cigar meant he had entirely avoided the castration this indiscretion implied. The cigar said: I am in on it, above it, accepting of it all.

There was a rumor that the redhead was also a lover of the husband’s and there was a rumor that she was actually an employee of the husband’s vast real estate business and there was a rumor that in fact the redhead was not a patient of the psychoanalyst at all, but this rumor was entirely false and generated by the collective desire, at the party, for the psychoanalyst to not be in the wrong, as she was so well-liked and well-respected and had published several books that many at the party had consulted as if they were absolutely true and moral; no one wanted to disrupt their admiration.

Still — the specter of deception hung over the party, lighting it warmly. The patient buried her face in her analyst’s neck and whispered things that no one was able to overhear; the analyst’s face melted in pleasure.

For some reason, the sight of the couple on the chaise longue reminded Tomasa immediately of a page she’d recently come across in an old diary. She’d written it at the end of a long and bitter relationship with a man who sometimes beat her but more often doted on her with an addictive intensity; Tomasa had clung to this man, for many years, with the grip of a terrified child. The line from her diary: “I’m tired, I don’t care, I hate you, I love you, I do care, don’t touch me, don’t look at me, come here, go away.”

Tomasa had been engaged to marry him, ten years her senior and widely respected in her small town. When she had finally confessed to her brother, trembling, that she was thinking of leaving him because of the violence, her brother responded that she was a fool, that this marriage was the only hope their small family had. Tomasa left by train three days later, transferred to a larger train, then a larger one, then boarded a boat. She told no one where she was going. Years later now, she sometimes worried it was all an overreaction. She missed her brother, despite herself. Now he was the only one there. Their parents were dead and her younger sister had fled the moment she had been old enough to do so.

A drunken Christmas carol took over the room, a secular one to which everyone knew most of the words. Every December it played on the radio and the radio played in the shops and at the market and over time these words had inserted themselves, subliminally though perhaps incompletely, in so many minds. Music could be invasive like that, Ismail thought, as he sang some of the lines in half-disbelief, half-delight.

Between singing, everyone kept stealing glances at the wife and her lover on the chaise longue, and at the husband, still patiently smoking his cigar, now alone, on the part of the terrace that was just visible from the other side of the apartment.

Ismail’s mother had taught him, strictly though hypocritically, that gossip was for lowlifes, that it was cruel and crude and always to be avoided; at the same time, he had, as a boy, often overheard his mother gossiping over black tea with her friends, or sharing secrets with the fruit vendor at the market when he occasionally accompanied her on shopping trips. So as Ismail walked along the outer edge of the living room, seeming to put all his attention on Rin’s many portraits, he listened in on the conversations about the analyst and the many salacious associations it brought up.

Here was a photograph of an elderly woman shouting in joy, and Ismail examined it while eavesdropping on a woman saying that every time she read in the papers about that distant but horribly troubling war, she immediately wanted to go have anonymous sex and often did. Here was a photograph of a young man playing a saxophone in the street. Every time? another woman asked the other woman. But Ismail couldn’t hear her reply clearly — something about pleasure and destruction and the end of the world. Here was a photograph of a small child and a large dog. I usually don’t want to be human, one of the women said, I almost always want to be an animal, mating.

Ismail had lost track of Tomasa in the crowd. He looked over his shoulder for her, then turned back to the photos to see Rin’s portrait of Nile. Nile was carrying

a stack of books and had a longer beard, just the way Ismail remembered him from years prior. He stared into Nile’s two-dimensional eyes for a while, then turned to look for Tomasa again, but instead he saw Nile, such strange timing, walking toward him from the other room. Behind him he saw Tomasa as well, her eyes glinting at him through the crowd. The sight of the two at once seemed more like a staged photograph than life itself — this young man he’d known so briefly but intensely, and Tomasa, the woman with whom he’d been able, now, to make a livable life.

But before Tomasa or Nile could reach him, the husband with the cigar entered the room, and as he saw his wife, his voice burst through the singing —

What are you doing?

Everyone was still and silent as the wife raised her face from a kiss —  I thought you’d left.

The husband put his cigar out on someone’s slice of cake. The room was silent, then the husband fled, though not quickly, and everyone could hear each step he took toward the door.

No one moved for a moment and a sense of guilt spread like cool water poured into a hot bath. A few turned to look at the wife and her lover, her patient. Then Rin raised his voice, asked for the carol to begin again, and it did, though unsteadily.

An hour later, after cups of mulled wine and a conversation between Ismail and Nile and Tomasa that avoided revealing the stories of how they’d met him and when and under what circumstances, the three all left the party at once. In the street they could still hear the voices and half-sung carols and laughter pouring down on them from above. The couple said their goodbyes to Nile warmly, clutching waists and necks with fondness and joviality, then Nile got on his bike to head home, but almost immediately the bike’s wheel got stuck in a streetcar rail and threw Nile to the pavement. Ismail and Tomasa rushed to him like parents, and though Nile was laughing his knee was bloodied and his pant leg was ripped, and when he stood he couldn’t totally stand. Ismail held him at the shoulder and Tomasa at the hip as they walked him the two blocks to their apartment.

They spoke steadily all the way there, laughing, their faces wine warm, and when it was time to ascend the staircase to their apartment Ismail and Tomasa practically carried Nile, though he was taller than the two. Ismail put a washcloth-wrapped ice pack on Nile’s leg and Tomasa give him a tincture for the pain, dripping it from the bottle directly into Nile’s mouth. How right it was for something as sudden and unplanned as an injury to force them together. Hours later, they were all asleep.

© CATHERINE LACEY

TEXT

BACK TO T TAKASHI M KYOTO P

HE FUTURE URAKAMI,S AINTINGS

Ed Schad, curator and publications manager at the Broad, Los Angeles, examines Takashi Murakami’s prolonged engagement with the practice and concept of the copy. An exhibition of new paintings by the artist, Japanese Art History à la Takashi Murakami , opened at Gagosian, London, on December 10, 2024; Schad reflects on Murakami’s recent works in the wake of his visit to the artist’s 2024 exhibition at Kyoto City kyocera Museum of Art.

In 2022, I curated an exhibition of Takashi Murakami’s work at the Broad in Los Angeles that took as its inspiration his monumental, eighty-twofoot-wide In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow (2014). The culmination of a body of work made in the aftermath of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear-powerplant disaster, the painting features imagery taken from the eighteenth-century artists christened “eccentrics” by Murakami’s mentor, the art historian Nobuo Tsuji—notably, motifs from Soga Sh ōhaku’s Gunsenzu (Immortals, 1764) and The Daoist Immortal Liu Haichan (Xia Ma, Gama) (c. 1770), and from Itō Jakuch ū’s Whale Screen (1797). I made the argument in the exhibition that In the Land of the Dead revealed an ongoing emphasis in Murakami’s work on responding to disasters, a theme legible in his early work’s navigation of the wreckage and energies of post–World War II Japan, in this painting responding to 2011, and in later work addressing the covid -19 pandemic, including NFTs, augmentedreality projects, and a new series of paintings, Unfamiliar People .

eighteenth century; capturing the looks and energies of the city of Kyoto, these works are known for their intricate documentation of the everyday life and rituals of the city.

Sweeping across twenty feet of the entrance gallery, Murakami’s Rakuch ū-Rakugai-zu echoed Matabei’s similarly scaled bird’s-eye view of Kyoto from Nij ō Castle to the H ōkoku Shrine—around thirty miles as the crow flies, a scene that one would have to climb up into Kyoto’s famous surrounding mountains to see. Having converted the 2,500 people depicted by Matabei into his own, signature graphic-line work and color, Murakami added to them his own, instantly recognizable flower people, now giants, transported back in time and walking through the scene. Using AI, he was able to fill in and augment spaces that in the original paintings were particularly hard to see and re-create. He went on to saturate Matabei’s gold leaf (a feature of both Rinpa- and Kano-school paintings) with skulls built up out of paint. The preliminary sketch for the painting alone took eight months of work.

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While the covid -related works spoke directly to a global crisis, Murakami’s exhibition Mononoke Kyoto, at the Kyoto City kyocera Museum of Art in 2024, seemed to focus instead on the artist’s strategy of making work in conversation with historical Japanese art in and of itself. The occasion for the exhibition was an invitation from Shinya Takahashi, general manager of the museum’s project management office, to stage an exhibition in dialogue with the history of Kyoto. Murakami ambitiously followed that direction, not only presenting recently produced copies of some of the best-known works of his own career but also taking up Kyoto’s Rinpa and Kano schools to engage with works by Ogata K ōrin, Tawaraya S ōtatsu, Ogata Kenzan, and others. The show opened with an extraordinary statement: Murakami’s version of Rakuch ū-Rakugai-zu (Scenes in and around Kyoto), a pair of screens by Iwasa Matabei from c. 1615. Matabei’s diptych was but one example of Rakuch ū-Rakugai-zu , a painting genre spanning from the sixteenth to the early

Murakami’s Rakuch ū-Rakugai-zu both is and is not a copy. In that it started as an ultra-highresolution image of the original, and that in size and spirit it exudes the original’s presence and ethic, Murakami’s diptych is a copy. In that it has been converted for present viewers through Murakami’s hard-earned style, and that it is populated with contemporary characters, the paintings are not copies. The key conundrum and provocation of the work might in fact be the line between a copy and an original, in that this line matters differently in the West and in Japan, where a copy can be equal to, stand in for, and replace an original without incident and without any ethical or taste-induced concerns. A copy has long been a way of both praising and affirming the past as well as breaking from it, making the past one’s own. It can be a conjuring, a renewal, or even a refusal.

As both the Kyoto exhibition and my conversations with Murakami showed, his copying and inhabiting of historical works are not only here to stay but have been a guiding thread in his work for

Takashi Murakami, RakuchūRakugai-zu Byōbu: Iwasa Matabei RIP, 2023–24 (detail), acrylic and gold leaf on canvas mounted on aluminum frame, in 2 parts, each: 9 feet 10 inches × 21 feet 5 inches (3 × 6.5 m).

Photo: Josh White

Above: Takashi Murakami, Rakuchū-Rakugai-zu

Byōbu: Iwasa Matabei RIP, 2023–24, acrylic and gold leaf on canvas mounted on aluminum frame, in 2 parts, each: 9 feet 10 inches × 21 feet 5 inches (3 × 6.5 m).

Photo: Josh White

a long time. The strategy is both old (Murakami is the third prominent artist, for instance, to produce a version of S ōtatsu’s seventeenth-century Wind and Thunder God , a designated national treasure) and in dialogue with recent developments in art history. In that Murakami has always been intent on using methods of European and American art to analyze and reinvent Japanese art, his works of this kind face a compounded risk of being misunderstood, of being seen by eyes outside Japan as mere copies or collagelike amalgams of historical works, and by eyes inside the country as a traditional affirmation of Japanese culture.

Murakami, though, sees these new works as both a fulfillment of ideas that have been incubating for him since the early 1980s and an exciting preview of developments to come. In this essay I will examine this history, both to affirm Murakami’s belief in the importance of his copying strategies and to illustrate some of their provocations. We must recognize that for Murakami and within certain traditions in Japan, to make a copy is simultaneously a far more reverential and far less precious activity than it is in the West. The fact that Murakami arrived at his copying method through his engagement with American and European art makes his strategy all the more complex and interesting.

Over the Edge of Superflat

At the age of nineteen, Murakami saw in a department-store museum the work of the German artist Horst Janssen, specifically his Hokusai’s Spaziergang (Hokusai’s stroll, 1971–72), a series of forty-six etchings. 1 Murakami found Janssen’s take on Hokusai’s woodblock prints wild and personal, “centered purely in the joy of drawing.”2 It is easy to guess why a young Murakami felt this way: Janssen’s etchings are a translation of a sort, and also a grotesquerie; Hokusai is visible in them but only as a starting point for a chaotic journey of frenetic, almost frowsy line work. Murakami would later buy editions of the prints, which now reside in his Superflat Collection. He has displayed them in his Superflat exhibitions among other works

demonstrating a cross-pollinating, interdimensional, and hybrid world of global art. Hokusai’s Spaziergang struck Murakami powerfully, but Janssen’s influence was not recognizable in his work for a long time. Instead, Murakami took his early inspiration from American and European art of the 1980s and early ’90s. He has spoken often of being taken with the return to painting of artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Julian Schnabel, and Terry Winters. He was also profoundly affected by artists who, in his view at the time, adopted a satirical, often cynical stance toward the excesses of American economic power. In an article in the New York Times in 1987, the critic Grace Glueck attempted to classify this work, using terms such as “Neo Geo,” “Smart Art,” and “Post-Abstract Abstraction” to describe the works of a diverse group of artists including Jeff Koons, Julia Wachtel, Peter Nagy, and Haim Steinbach.3 Looking at New York and European art from Japan in the late 1980s, and encountering it in person on a New York residency in 1994, Murakami found an interesting contrast to the traditional Nihonga painting that he had been studying and practicing. Nihonga uses mineral pigments and ink on silk and paper and is seen in Japan as a direct contrast to Western-style painting, called Yōga. For Murakami, to step out of the world of Nihonga (which few young artists studied in the 1980s) to engage with American contemporary art was an unusual and iconoclastic decision.

Murakami himself uses the term “Simulationism” for the art that he encountered in New York, which I find telling. The artist Peter Halley also liked the term, and his explanation of it seems apt in thinking of Murakami’s development as an artist: “Simulation, the fact of technical mediation replacing the natural thing, is such a big experience in our society. Air conditioning is a simulation of air; movies are a simulation of life; life is simulated by bio-mechanical manipulations.” 4 In many ways the remark recalls Murakami’s early stance toward Japanese society: on the heels of their devastating defeat in World War II, he looked at his proud people and saw a culture obsessed

with what he thought were infantilizing activities— an otaku culture devoted to anime, manga, and other cultural energies. The disaster of the war and the atomic bomb had created alternate realities, strange cultural mirrors for a society unseated and unsettled. In his embrace of these energies, his use of their techniques and imagery in works such as Hiropon (1997) and My Lonesome Cowboy (1998), Murakami could look closely at the physical and psychological damage through its creative forces. His work, in fact, was a form of simulation of culture for critique and absorption:

I was in my second year or so as a contemporary artist and was being influenced by New York Simulationism, making gadget-like works. I had majored in Nihonga at art university . . . so when it came to making contemporary art, I had to start from scratch and feel my way around. That’s why I had tried to imitate the New York movement, which was at the global forefront. At the same time, I was also searching for a way to break away from the gravitational pull of the American movement, and to that end I was working with Japanese product makers . . . to create high-quality works with craft-like worldview with Japanese sensibility.5

The two touchstones of Murakami’s early career are his Superflat theory, developed over the course of three curated exhibitions from 2000 to 2005, and @Murakami , curated by Paul Schimmel at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2007. Murakami’s Superflat exhibitions looked at the flat, two-dimensional nature of both contemporary and old Japanese art to speculate on the conditions of the post–World War II world through the lens of the interconnected economies of Japan and the United States, a theme that Murakami would take up energetically in his own work. ©Murakami summed up and classified this period of his art, tracking and contextualizing his work from 1991 to 2007.6 The central figure of the exhibition was Mr. D.O.B., who began as Murakami’s take on

characters from Japanese popular culture such as Doraemon, from a manga series, and Sonic the Hedgehog, from the video-gaming world, but transformed over time to reflect both societal changes and personal changes in Murakami’s life.

To hear Murakami tell it, while he looked to Simulationism to develop his art-making strategies, his deeper understanding of Japanese culture came through Tsuji’s book Lineage of Eccentrics: Matabei to Kuniyoshi (1970), which showed a long line of painters taking a critical and satirical approach to Japanese culture. Tsuji’s “eccentrics”—notably the painters Jakuchū , Sh ōhaku, Nagasawa Rosetsu, and Kanō Sansetsu—were countercultural outlaws whose works sprang from tradition but innovated radically away from it. They were ahead of their time, and in their techniques and style—in alternating slow vectors of meditation with fast thrills of painterly virtuosity, for example—they often looked ahead 200 years to anime and manga, sharing a connection between image and story that Murakami considers essentially Japanese. Murakami saw the eccentrics as hungry to absorb the work of artists who had preceded them, both well-known figures and anonymous practitioners working in folk traditions, producing crafts and fine-art objects that were distributed in Japan as coming from China. Theirs was an art of hybridity and engagement with the past, of distortion and mistranslation.

But as with Janssen’s etchings, the art of the eccentrics was not directly visible in Murakami’s work, present only as an ethic of critique and satire. That would start to change, though, as Murakami began to take on historical imagery and the traditions of his predecessors directly. A key moment of this transformation could be found in ©Murakami in the paintings I open wide my eyes but see no scenery. I fix my gaze upon my heart and That I may time transcend, that a universe my heart may unfold (both 2007). These works were directly based in the paintings of Hakuin Ekaku, an eighteenth-century Zen monk and painter of the Rinzai school, whose lineage lay in China. Murakami’s paintings were versions of Hakuin’s Daruma—the Japanese name of the sage Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen Buddhism and grand patriarch of Zen art—but they also carried the contemporary moment. Murakami’s Darumas have stunned, hallucinating eyes right out of the

artist’s Time Bokan works (2001– ), which in turn were taken from the Time Bokan anime series. To see them was to consider that the Darumas were reflections less on their culture than on ours, looking out to us from the distant past.

Murakami sees the Daruma paintings as his first successful attempt to “digest and rework” the images of others, “eating them” into his paintings and “absorbing art history and practice to nourish my own creativity.” 7 Although he was uncertain of the approach at the time, he would grow to see it as a fulfillment of his earliest motivations in art—of seeing Janssen “eat” Hokusai in a Tokyo department store. When he displayed the Darumas in 2007 at the Gagosian gallery in New York, he launched the exhibition with a traditional tea ceremony: “I wanted to bring something spiritually and culturally Japanese to a wider audience. . . . This is only the second time in my whole life I’ve dressed up like this. The first time was when I was at the tea master’s house.”8

Battle Royale

After the Daruma paintings, one might be tempted to assume that there are two Murakamis. The first continues as he has since the 1990s, gathering and deploying cultural energies including anime, manga, otaku, and kawaii to create the world of Mr. D.O.B. (continuously morphing into characters such as P anda, Tan Tan Bo, Kaikai, and Kiki) and placing them back into culture using their own mechanisms of distribution. One can now find Murakami trading cards, cookies, and skateboards, as well as numerous commercial collaborations—merchandise (with the South Korean pop group NewJeans), NFTs (with the design studio RTFKT), watches (with the Swiss watchmaker Hublot), handbags (with Louis Vuitton), and music (with jp the wavy). There is also a feature-length film, Jellyfish Eyes (2013), and at the time of this writing Murakami has just opened a replica of a Chinese restaurant he frequented for years, kijyakutei , in Asaka, Japan.

There is also a second Murakami, who went on from the Daruma paintings to create Murakamistyle replicas of Zen ens ō paintings, flower paintings by K ōrin, Edo-period Shunga erotica, woodblock prints by Hiroshige, and fish paintings

based on blue-and-white Chinese jars from the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). There are also works— for me the most mysterious of all—that cannot be recognized as having any Murakami signature at all: his collaboration with the ceramist Shin Murata, for example, to re-create the twentiethcentury works of Kitaōji Rosanjin, themselves copies of the pottery ware made in Shigaraki, Japan, since at least the twelfth century. These ceramic works are contemporary yet they also vanish into history, making no distinction between the original and the copy at all, as though they were of the same essence.

The second Murakami seems to have matured through his increased interaction and friendship with Tsuji. In 2008, he and Tsuji collaborated for the Japanese magazine Geijutsu shincho. In what became known as their “picture contest,” Nippon e-awase , Tsuji would send Murakami images and thoughts chosen from a long history of Chinese, Japanese, and Indian art. In response, Murakami would make work based on Tsuji’s proposals. In one of the most important books published on Murakami’s work since the Superflat exhibition catalogue series—Battle Royale! Japanese Art History (2017)—the contest is tracked as a call-andresponse between the two men.9

During the picture contest, Tsuji introduced Murakami to Rosetsu’s painting Five Hundred Arhats (1798), an entirely resolved narrative world of hundreds of Buddhist saints occupying a space about 1 ¼-inch square. The 500 arhats were Buddhist saints who had reached nirvana but remained on earth to guide humans on the path to enlightenment (arhat is Sanskrit for “one who is worthy”). It was only near the end of this collaboration, though, when Tsuji offered Murakami the same story in an eighteenth-century work by Kanō Kazunobu—the arhats deployed over a series of a hundred scrolls—that Murakami became absorbed by the legend. Tsuji continued to offer Murakami paintings from the pictorial tradition dealing with these saints, or arhats, including a series of ninth-century scrolls attributed to the Chinese painter Guanxiu, notable for the figures’ bizarrely world-weary appearances. The repetition of the images lent power to the tradition and applicability across the span of centuries.

Opposite: Takashi Murakami, Poyoyon

Wind God and Munyonyon Thunder God , 2024, acrylic, gold leaf, and platinum leaf on canvas mounted on aluminum frame, in 2 parts, each: 60 ¾ × 66 7⁄8 inches (154.5 × 169.8 cm)

This page:

Takashi Murakami, Maiko in Springtime Kyoto, 2024, acrylic, gold leaf, and platinum leaf on canvas mounted on aluminum frame, 43 3⁄8 × 43 3 8 inches (110 × 110 cm)

In the spirit of Kazunobu’s monumental project, Murakami and his studio prepared 100 panels, each measuring three meters by one, with the aim of completing the painting in one year. (Kazunobu spent ten years on his scrolls and died before finishing them.) They delved into the theme of the arhats, researching the individual characters who populate the story and the religion that gave rise to the legend. Early in the process, they visited Kazunobu’s grave, at the temple of Z ōjō-ji in Tokyo, during which chief priests there asked them pointed questions that were tough to answer: “What brought you to be involved in the production of a Five Hundred Arhats painting and to study Buddhism? What is Buddhism in today’s world, and what is the relationship between Buddhism and painting?”10 Murakami not only finished the 100-meter Arhat painting, which debuted at Al Riwaq, Doha, in 2012, but in its wake seemed to be an artist transformed.

Murakami’s artworks based on the arhats are now seen as direct reactions to the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. 11 But it is important to remember the details of how he became

engaged with the imagery—that his involvement with Tsuji developed organically as a call-andresponse before the crisis, that the collaboration expanded his studio toolbox with new techniques and approaches from many different historical and contemporary sources, and that his work never illustrates a specific event.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, the zenith of this period with Tsuji was the painting In the Land of the Dead, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow, which debuted at Gagosian, New York, in 2014 alongside a large gate and two enormous demon sculptures, one red and one blue. Murakami’s gate was inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s famous film Rashomon (1950), based on stories by the writer Ry ū nosuke Akutagawa and set on the ruins of Raj ōmon, a gate to the ancient capital of Heian-Kyo (now called Kyoto). In the Land of the Dead took up the subject of the Immortals, masters of Daoist spiritual discipline who have been symbols of resilience and prosperity in China and beyond for well over a thousand years. In the grouping of the gate, the painting, and the demons, the exhibition could be seen as a threshold between

This page: Takashi Murakami, Re: “Kujaku-Tachiaoi-zu Byōbu” After 40 Long Years, I Managed to Paint the Peacock Painting, the Encounter with Which Had Made Me a Painter, 2024, acrylic and gold leaf on

75

Opposite: Takashi Murakami, Re: Ogata Kōrin’s “Kiku-zu Byōbu”, 2024, acrylic and gold leaf on canvas mounted on aluminum frame, 59 × 128 ¾ inches (150 × 326.9 cm).

Photo: Kei Okano

Artworks © 2023–24 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved.

a hurting earth and a troubled heaven in the aftermath of the Great Tōhoku Earthquake. Also on view in the Gagosian exhibition were paintings (all 2014) based on imagery from a painting by Winters, works showing the ongoing metamorphosis of Mr. D.O.B. and paintings using the spray-paint language of street tagging. The energies of the moment—steeped in disaster and death—and Murakami’s relationship with Tsuji had created a two-way street between the deep past and the present.

There are, of course, not two Murakamis, but there is a temptation (especially for Western viewers) to separate the new from the old, to celebrate one side of Murakami to the avoidance of the other. Instead, Murakami finds a synthesis of history and his breathlessly new material in the very idea of the copy itself, and in the rootedness of the craft of reproduction in Japanese culture. One becomes an artist in Japan, traditionally, by painstakingly copying a teacher’s originals. One becomes Murakami by painstakingly copying a teacher’s originals in the spirit of Janssen, of “eating” history and using it to reawaken its logic and to find its action in the present. The logic of simulation, the logic of Janssen, and the logic of a very Japanese form of honoring and reconjuring a historical form all come together in a seamless way.

Kyoto

On a recent trip to see Murakami’s new work in Kyoto, on the artist’s advice I took a day trip to the Ise Shrine. Ise is one of the most sacred locations in all Japan, and its buildings are rebuilt in their entirety every twenty years. For this reason, unesco does not consider Ise one of its world heritage sites, despite its importance to the Japanese people. 12 I knew that visitors could not enter this working Shinto shrine, but I was surprised that I was able to see the gravel footprint of what would become the next shrine next to the current one. I arrived at Ise at a time when the construction of the next complex had not yet begun; it was striking to see the shrine on one side and the empty space reserved for the new shrine on the other. For me, growing up in the United States, the idea of rebuilding a building every twenty years was as strange as it was to unesco

The reconstructed building is not a replica; it is no more and no less the Ise shrine than the old building. They are both the Ise Shrine, though one building is physical and the other is currently empty space. The idea of the Ise Shrine both does and does not live in the shrine’s structures, and the cycle of building neither entirely creates nor destroys the shrine. What is important, it seems, is the spirit of renewal, the transmission of knowledge, and the embedding of human activities in the ethic of nature, which is

canvas mounted on aluminum frame, 63 ×

¾ inches (160 × 192.6 cm).

Photo: Kei Okano

cyclical and predicated on death and rebirth. There is no “original” Ise Shrine. This is not easy to understand for a Westerner. After 9/11, for instance, one of the rejected proposals for the disaster site was to re-create the World Trade Center towers exactly as they were. While the practice is common in Japan, it is not in the West. When something is re-created in the West, it is often seen as involving a loss of meaning, or as kitsch (an example would be Colonial Williamsburg). In Japan, however, there seems to be no essential loss of meaning in the re-creation of something lost—or even of something not lost, as in Ise. (The question is known in philosophy as Theseus’s Paradox.)

I am not a philosopher, so I am probably ill equipped to grapple with these ideas properly, but Murakami’s projects involving replication or copying seem to me to meditate on this phenomenon in Japan. In copying there is an affirmation, but also a translation, a distortion, and a remembrance. There is not—as is perceived in similar gestures in the West—a loss or a destruction of what is called “aura.” I am not troubled by Murakami’s copying, but instead find it expressing something vital about culture in Japan and something important for people outside Japan to understand, despite the difficulty. And that Murakami adds Janssen’s expressive takes on tradition and the idea of simulation to these ideas gives them an additional dimension.

I think it is difficult, at times, to understand how closely Murakami’s world holds the past, and how closely Japan itself holds its traditions. Murakami tells me that this is especially true in Kyoto, whose people still identify themselves as the Heian people and separate themselves from the rest of Japan, although Kyoto has not been the site of the Japanese capital since 1869. Murakami lives in Kyoto and is often in transition between it and his studio in Miyoshi, a suburb of Tokyo, observing weekly, sometimes daily, the transition between the two cultures. Perhaps his engagement with Kyoto, at the invitation of the kyocera museum, began as an exhibition and is now personal. Perhaps Murakami—whose early career developed in Tokyo

and in the enthusiasms of the Akihabara, Nakano City, and Harajuku neighborhoods—now turns to Kyoto to, in his words, “express it as a part of Japan.”13

The paintings that Murakami made and continues to make in the wake of the kyocera exhibition are deeply personal. His reproduction and riff on K ōrin’s eighteenth-century Peacock and Hollyhock Screen is filled with thoughts of another of Murakami’s teachers, Mataz ō Kayama, who once validated Murakami’s aesthetic judgment by praising Kōrin’s screen as Murakami was admiring it. Another diptych is based on Kanō Eitoku’s sixteenth-century Chinese Lion Screen ; Murakami began this work after watching the 2024 television series Sh ōgun , based on James Clavell’s novel of the same title (1975). Watching the TV show, Murakami had an overwhelming feeling of being in the Sengoku Warring States period (1467–1600)—he felt he was engaging with the art of the time in its context. Another work inspired by Sh ōgun , based on a section of the six-part folding screen Shihon chakushoku daigo hanamizu , made by an unknown artist in the sixteenth century, is rooted in Murakami’s desire to show moments of peace within times of turbulence, an “underlying gentleness and quest for happiness.” “In the upper left corner” of the work, he wrote in a letter to me, “my signature character, Flower, smiles brightly, giving the impression of observing this historical scene through the lens of 2024, as though time-traveling to witness it firsthand.”14

When I read this note, I was taken back to a moment in Kyoto during my travels to visit Murakami. During the run of Mononoke Kyoto at kyocera , Murakami installed his monumental gold-gilded Flower Parent and Child (2020)—thirtytwo feet high—in the middle of a small pond. The sculpture was situated beautifully, its reflection mirrored on the surface of the water, and I was told that in its placement, the sculpture was meant to recall Kinkaku-ji, the Golden Pavilion—one of Kyoto’s most famous temples. Flower Parent and Child was heavily photographed, and during the run of the exhibition, many of its 460,000 visitors took a selfie with the sculpture. On my last day in

Kyoto, I decided to climb up to the Taho-to Pagoda at the Eikando Temple, off Kyoto’s Philosopher’s walk, a location known for its fall foliage. From the pagoda, one can take in the scale and majesty of Kyoto, seeing modern residences, traditional houses, and, at times, the roofs of Kyoto’s many temples and shrines peeking through the trees. All told, the view is a lot like Rakuch ū-Rakugai-zu . From where I was sitting, in the city directly echoed in Matabei’s painting, which was made to preserve a moment in the history of the place, it was a delight to see Flower Parent and Child in the distance, now out of Murakami’s copy and inhabiting the scene.

Aspects of this essay are taken from “Arhats at the Gate of the Metaverse,” in Ed Schad, Takashi Murakami: Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: The Broad, 2022), 12–27.

1. Horst Janssen had three large exhibitions in Japan in the 1980s and early ’90s. For those unfamiliar with Japan, it is important to note that the country’s patronage of art is most often funded by corporate giving. It is common to find displays of both contemporary and historical art in department stores and the like. The line of demarcation between museums and places of commerce—a distinction still affirmed in the United States and Europe—is of little importance in Japan. Murakami famously engaged this difference in cultures by installing a Louis Vuitton store in ©Murakami , his exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2007–8.

2. Takashi Murakami, letter to the author, November 10, 2024.

3. See Grace Glueck, “What Do You Call Art’s Newest Trend: ‘NeoGeo’ . . . Maybe,” New York Times , July 6, 1987.

4. Peter Halley, quoted in ibid.

5. Takashi Murakami, Instagram post, May 18, 2024. Available online at https://www.instagram.com/takashipom/p/ C7JAq2SLhE9/?img_index=1 (accessed November 24, 2024).

6. Several works from 1991 on display in ©Murakami were Murakami’s re-creations of his own originals, a condition that seems not to have been remarked on at the time.

7. Murakami, letter to the author.

8. Murakami, quoted in Carol Vogel, “The Warhol of Japan Pours Ritual Tea in a Zen Moment,” New York Times , May 7, 2007. Available online at www.nytimes.com/2007/05/07/arts/ design/07mura.html (accessed November 24, 2024).

9. Murakami and Nobuo Tsuji, Battle Royale! Japanese Art History (Tokyo: Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd., 2017).

10. Murakami, in ibid., 285.

11. See Anne Nishimura Morse, “Negotiating the Global, Engaging with the Local,” in Morse, Takashi Murakami: Lineage of Eccentrics. A Collaboration with Nobuo Tsuji and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston: MFA Boston Publications, 2018), 36.

12. See Byung-Chul Han, “The Copy Is the Original,” Aeon , March 8, 2018. Available online at https://aeon.co/essays/why-inchina-and-japan-a-copy-is-just-as-good-as-an-original (accessed November 26, 2024).

13. Murakami, letter to the author.

14. Ibid.

Ho Tzu Nyen Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Questionnaire

In this ongoing series, the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has devised a set of thirty-seven questions that invite artists, authors, musicians, and other visionaries to address key elements of their lives and creative practices. Respondents select from the larger questionnaire and reply in as many or as few words as they desire. For the first installment of 2025, we are honored to present the artist and filmmaker Ho Tzu Nyen.

Ho Tzu Nyen

5. What is your most recent work?

A: T for Time—a work about time.

7. What role does chance play?

A: An opening to the outside. . . .

9. What keeps you coming back to the studio?

A: Ritual: repetition in search of difference.

32. What is your favorite book?

A: At the moment, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus (both 1923). Like receiving gifts . . . of great intensities. Expanded me. Thank you.

31. What music are you listening to?

A: At the moment:

—Nancy Mounir’s Nozhet El Nofous (2022)

—Anthony Braxton’s Five Pieces (1975)

—Chris Corsano and Bill Orcutt’s Made out of Sound (2021)

—Spiritualized’s Lazer Guided Melodies (1992)

—Perc’s The Cut Off (2024)

—The Clientele’s I Am Not There Anymore (2023)

—Rhodri Davies’s DWA DNI (2022)

—Fatima Al Qadiri’s Medieval Femme (2021)

—Om’s Conference of the Birds (2006)

—Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda (1971)

—Tony Conrad and Faust’s Outside the Dream Syndicate (1973)

22. Do you have rituals?

A: Going to the studio.

23. What is time?

A: Some notes from T for Time:

Ti —to stretch— tied to time span and duration

Ti

Tide and temps tied to seasonal and atmospheric rhythms —like tempest and temperature

Ti tied to: tidy, tidiness and good tidings

35. What is your favorite movie?

A: At the moment, a toss-up: Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988 to 1998)—the end of and a new beginning for cinema. And King Hu’s A Touch of Zen (1971)—the greatest martial-arts film ever made (yet?). And Sergei Parajanov’s The Color of Pomegranates (1969)—unsurpassable beauty.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Celebrated chef and restaurateur Masayoshi Takayama speaks with Gagosian Quarterly ’s Alison McDonald about the evolutions and continuities in his approach to food, design, and cigars on the recent anniversaries of his two New York establishments: Masa and Kappo Masa.

CHEF MASA TAKAYAMA

ALISON MCDONALD 2024 was an important year for you—the twentieth anniversary of Masa, your highly acclaimed restaurant on Columbus Circle, and the tenth anniversary of Kappo Masa, your restaurant on the Upper East Side that is a collaboration with Larry Gagosian. Do these anniversaries prompt you to reflect on how you started?

MASA TAKAYAMA Very much, but it’s also been very busy, so it doesn’t feel as though twenty years have passed, or even ten years for Kappo already. It all feels like it happened yesterday, although I have certainly learned a lot. At this point we’ve served generations. In the beginning, we had seven-year-old kids coming in with their parents, and now they are twenty-seven years old and still coming.

AM How have you and your restaurants evolved over time?

MT In this business, you notice people’s tastes changing every year, and you need to adapt to those trends on some level. That challenges us to innovate with the menu. Lately, people tend to eat lighter— fewer carbohydrates, less gluten, more protein, those are the trends—so for one of our menu items, for instance, I created fish pasta.

AM Yes, I love that dish! Noodles made entirely from fish, no wheat. It’s unique.

MT Nobody else makes that kind of stuff.

AM You travel quite a bit. You must learn a lot about regional cuisines during your travels.

MT Yes, definitely. One time, in Thailand, I noticed that of course there were a lot of spicy dishes, but sometimes they just threw some fresh herbs onto the plate, which makes a nice aroma, flavor, and texture. After that trip I started using cilantro. Japanese food never uses it, but now it’s part of one of our most popular dishes—cilantro and a little spicy chili, scallops, octopus, and asparagus. It’s very popular; it will not be changing [laughter ].

AM How did you first meet Larry Gagosian? You started Kappo Masa together ten years after you opened Masa.

MT I first met Larry many years ago in Los Angeles, when I had a very small restaurant—it only seated a few people for dinner at a time—and [the Canadian musician] Robbie Robertson brought him in for dinner. As for opening Kappo Masa together, I’m always interested in new projects, and Larry has such a good business sense, not only for art, but also for food and restaurants. Although when we first started talking about it, he took me to see two floors at 976 Madison Avenue: the ground floor and the basement level. He asked which I preferred, and I replied the basement. Larry said no [laughter ]. He did not think a basement-level restaurant would be successful. But I insisted.

AM And today that’s part of what makes it so appealing. You almost feel transported to a different place, away from the bustle of Madison Avenue.

MT Exactly, it’s more of a neighborhood club. We used to say that celebrities go to other spaces to be seen, but they come to Kappo Masa to just be themselves. When I designed the staircase and the lounge area, I put big flat walls in, so as to create more of an impression of hiddenness.

AM What about the Japanese stone on the walls? It has a beautiful texture, and you use it in both Masa and Kappo Masa. Does that reduce the noise levels?

MT The stone is like a sponge for sound—and for smell. Like a filter. At the very beginning I did not realize that; I just put it on both sides of the bar because it’s my country’s stone. Normally, when you step into a Japanese restaurant, you can smell the soy sauce right away.

AM You have long been interested in designing objects. In fact, you create many of the dishes and platters used to serve the food in your restaurants. You consider that part of the holistic experience.

MT The dishes and platters serve as frames for the food, which really is the main event. As when you frame a painting—it should look more beautiful in the frame. Likewise the way you serve food should complement and contribute to the experience.

AM Often the design objects serve a function as well. For instance they might retain cold or heat.

MT Yes, absolutely. That has to be planned. When I first opened Masa in 2004, I had an idea that we could make sake cups out of wood. But I wanted them to be one-time use. In Japan, we have a proverb, ichi-go ichi-e , “once in a lifetime, never happen again.” It means this moment right now, this moment that comes once in a lifetime. I designed paper-thin wood sake cups. The first one was of cedar. When you have a very thin slice of cedar, you can see the light pass softly through it. And when you poured the sake in, it slowly absorbed through the wood. And a nice sugi —we call it sugi , the cedar—will add flavor to the sake. It is so good. But in the end you cannot keep the cup; you have to throw it away.

AM That’s delightful! Do you still use those in your restaurants?

MT We don’t, but after that we used hinoki wood, which is Japanese cypress. My counter is also made of hinoki

AM Were you likewise able to taste the hinoki flavor when using that cup?

MT More. Totally different flavor—hinoki flavor is stronger. Those cups were still very thin, but after that I made thicker cups, easier for people to drink from. Then in wintertime I started making bamboo cups, we call it madake . Bamboo naturally grows as an empty cylinder. In Japan the winters can get very cold, so I got the idea to freeze the bamboo cups until just before pouring the sake in. Plus, bamboo has a beautiful color.

AM What prompted you to make the design objects available for purchase?

MT Guests started asking if they could buy things off the table.

AM Ha! I thought you were going to say that you caught guests stealing items.

MT That too! At this point, a majority of the menu is served on Masa Designs objects.

AM Art Basel Miami Beach is coming up, so I want to ask you a couple of questions about tropical climates. You know a lot about how ingredients come to be, because I would imagine the origin of the ingredient—the salinity of the environment where something is grown, the specific temperature of the water, those kinds of details—must make a big difference in terms of what makes something taste a certain way or have a certain texture.

MT Typically, I prefer to work with fresh local ingredients. In Miami they have stone crabs, but it is a short season. In Turks and Caicos, which has almost the same climate as Miami, they have a shellfish called conch, which I’ve used to make ceviche. Very sweet, simple ingredients—lime juice and salt. People loved it.

AM And those climates are obviously also good for citrus fruits.

MT One time I served guests in Punta Mita, Mexico—we were supposed to bring all the ingredients there, but we did not bring anything. Instead, we went to the fish market when we arrived and bought local lobsters and clams. I made ceviche with sliced serrano pepper—very finely sliced—then added lime juice and orange juice squeezed together with a little olive oil. It was very good. I love to create something new and different with local food.

AM There is a large Cuban population in Miami, which must inspire very interesting food. And I know you appreciate cigars.

MT Not everybody likes cigars.

AM When do you usually smoke a cigar? After a meal? At the end of the day?

MT In the morning.

AM Really! With a cup of coffee?

MT Coffee, chocolate-chip cookie, cigar. Every morning.

AM Do you have a favorite region or type of cigar?

MT I like a lot of different ones. My favorite is Cuban, but it has to be the real Cuban—today there are a lot of fakes. Nicaraguan cigars are very good too. They are harvesting the tobacco leaves over there and the leaf is getting better; they age it better.

AM What makes a cigar special?

MT Of course the flavor, the taste. Fake ones often have no taste, like paper, but the real stuff tastes good. The aroma and taste is like a soil, the flavor is like a mulch.

AM Have you gone to Cuba?

MT No, not yet.

AM Have you ever traveled to study tobacco leaves in Nicaragua?

MT I have been there a few times when they are making cigars.

AM Do you have a collection?

MT I buy them all the time.

AM They don’t stay around long enough to be collected?

MT No. Some people collect cigars, for aging. One of my friends who lives in Switzerland collects tons of cigars. Each time he visits, he gives me boxes that are aged, vintage.

AM So, what’s next?

MT We’ve been working on many exciting projects. I’m proud to share that one of my most popular dishes will be available soon at home; my goal is for families across the world to be able to enjoy my food in their own kitchens.

AM Wow, have you done anything like that before?

MT No.

AM That must be challenging, especially transitioning from intimate and singular dining experiences to maintaining consistent quality across a wide audience who will prepare the food themselves. It must be a totally different, more scientific way of thinking about food.

MT Yes, it is completely different. We’ve been planning it for a long time, and we want to get it right.

AM So I will be able to cook dishes from the Masa menu at home. That’s amazing. That feels like the future.

Photos: Dacia Pierson

Filmmaker and author Lisa Immordino Vreeland has created a new documentary on the life and art of Jean Cocteau. Narrated by Josh O’Connor, the film makes the case for the enduring relevance and prophetic poetry of Cocteau’s singular life and art. Here, Josh Zajdman reflects on the urgent necessity of engaging with the poet, filmmaker, artist, playwright, and novelist’s uncategorizable existence.

It would be fair to say that the author and documentarian Lisa Immordino Vreeland has a thing for visionaries. For over a decade she has turned her lens and pen to people who have helped us see the world anew. First came Diana Vreeland (grandmother of Lisa’s husband), then Peggy Guggenheim, followed by the inimitable Cecil Beaton. Each of them challenged notions of taste, beauty, and style. An Immordino Vreeland documentary always promises a feast for the senses and her latest doesn’t waver from that promise: in Jean Cocteau, she has landed on the worthiest of subjects, and the result is a rich and informative look at an artist who defies categorization. Though each film preceding it has been eye-opening and lusciously crafted, something about this one feels different. It seems like we need a new way of seeing, and who better than Cocteau to guide us? When we aren’t actually watching Cocteau, our Virgil is voiced by the chameleonically talented actor Josh O’Connor. This dual perspective entices the viewer with a look not just at a life but at how to live.

Immordino Vreeland’s film is a vastly overdue opportunity to introduce Cocteau to a generation grappling with many of the same things he did (not in order of priority): in art, rigid classification of mediums, and in the world beyond, fascism, homophobia, mortal dread, existential crises. While “Cocteau” is a name many know or have heard of, few, paradoxically, can say why he is important. He’s often shoehorned with various Dadaists or Surrealists as if he were interchangeable with any character from Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011), but that is not the case.

He published as widely as many of his contemporaries, and biographies of him have been written as well, but he’s harder to pin down. A condition of which he was well aware: “I have been accused of jumping from branch to branch. Well, I have—but always in the same tree.”

In an attempt to be a literary arborist and to ensnare what he could of Cocteau’s essence, the scholar, biographer, and translator Frances Steegmuller wrote, “Of all the titles to which he had a claim, he consented to use only one—poet—and that he insisted upon. He was the most self-proclaimed of poets, to

the extent that he rigorously classified all his great variety of work, his poems, novels, plays, essays, drawings, and films, under the headings of ‘poésie, poésie de roman, poésie de théâtre, poésie critique, poésie graphique and poésie cinématographique.’” Although Steegmuller’s biography is foundational, today it comes across as stuffy and occasionally judgmental, and it puts the wild and wide-ranging Cocteau on a short leash. Ours is an age of hyperclassification and excessive scrutiny, dependent on naming something so we know exactly where it goes and how to use it. But what if we took a page out of Cocteau’s book of life and advocated living in a more exploratory and less taxonomical way?

Toward the end of Immordino Vreeland’s documentary, Cocteau admits that this is no simple gesture. “To shape oneself is not easy. I forced the lock and twisted my key in every direction. In the end, everything is resolved except for the difficulty of being, which is never resolved.” A call to arms. What if we were willing to reshape ourselves?

What if you could create a foundation or through line for your way of seeing the world, and accordingly could see it through a wider lens, or without blinders on? This revolutionary perspective is just one of the things you can learn from Cocteau.

Cocteau was the king of maxims, one of which—“Time does not exist, it’s a phenomenon of perspective”—can help explain why his approach to life and art continues to resonate through the decades since his death. Shifting perspective and avoiding distraction allow the work to be the focal point, and for Cocteau, the work was paramount. Its success of course was various, but the making and breaking were what guided him over the years, sustaining him and keeping the darkness (mostly) at bay. “Work, believe and pretend the future does not present a frightening enigma.” Can you think of a maxim more applicable to today’s world? I can’t.

Cocteau’s life and work unfolded against the vital and violent twentieth century. Born in 1889, the same year as Charlie Chaplin, Martin Heidegger, and Adolf Hitler, he lived through world wars, depressions, and revolts, and died, finally, one month before JFK was assassinated. Yet, to paraphrase The Sound of Music

(1965)—which he almost certainly would have hated—the question asked during his lifetime and certainly after was, How do you solve a problem like Cocteau?

Well, first, don’t look at him the way so many have. He was not a dabbler or a dilettante, nor was he merely a member of a movement who never broke away from his peers. The biggest crime against Cocteau remains the belief that he couldn’t commit, couldn’t find enough success in a single art form, so he flitted from one to another and over to the next. Immordino Vreeland helps us to understand with another glance into Cocteau’s thinking. “I had that strange privilege of being that most invisible of artists and the most visible of men. As a consequence, the man draws fire but the artist is never hit.”

What so many viewed as a negative was actually one of Cocteau’s greatest strengths. His freedom of movement had a porous quality, which reflected across the variety of work he produced and the modes in which he did it. It was his willingness to stay open to inspiration but not beholden to it that spurred his creativity to incredible heights. In his 1934 play La Machine infernale (The Infernal Machine) he riffs on Oedipus and Hamlet, resulting in a howlingly funny and beautifully rendered take on Sophocles. Twelve years later came the landmark film Beauty and the Beast, adapted from the fairy tale but seeing it through Cocteau’s eyes. He was clearly comfortable with adapting, presenting something fresh even if the source was familiar.

Was he all talent and charm? No. Along with his affinity for Hitler, he had various not-sosavory attributes. The list of people who danced between affection and aggrievement was gilded. He was a Zelig of the Left Bank. Had he lived in the age of Venmo, you’d see names like Apollinaire, Bakst, Bernhardt, Breton, Daudet, Diaghilev, Gide, Hahn, Nijinsky, Piaf, Picasso, Proust, Satie, and Stravinsky in his transaction history. A potpourri composed entirely of the coterie. This simultaneity, this outright sense of juxtaposition, marked Cocteau in both his interests and his relationships. Whether it was art, sex, or society, he’d have what he wanted and the way he wanted it. This certainty propelled him through life’s uncertainties. Only

Opening spread: Jean Cocteau, 1929

© Estate Germaine Krull, Museum Folkwang, Essen

Stills from Jean Cocteau (2024), directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland.

Artwork by Jean Cocteau, courtesy Comité Jean Cocteau © 2024, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photos: Serge Lido, SIPA/Sipa USA; courtesy Le Fonds Cocteau de Montpellier, Bibliothèque Atrium, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier. Archival materials: courtesy Le Fonds Cocteau de Montpellier, Atrium, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier

Jean Cocteau, 1934

© Boris Lipnitzki; Roger–Viollet

such a man could say: “Everything one achieves in life, even love, occurs on an express train racing toward[s] death.”

He’s not wrong.

It’s often assumed that the narrator in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time has the most famous literary epiphany. That may be, but if you too were unaware of that which Cocteau underwent one cold spring evening, hold on. This is a moment covered in both Steegmuller’s biography and Immordino Vreeland’s documentary:

One night in 1912, I see us in the Place de la Concorde. Diaghilev is walking home after a performance, his thick underlip sagging, his eyes bleary as Portuguese oysters, his tiny hat perched on his enormous head. Ahead, Nijinsky is sulking, his evening clothes bulging over his muscles. I was at the absurd age when one thinks oneself a poet, and I sensed in Diaghilev a polite resistance. I questioned him about this, and he answered, “Astound me! I’ll wait for you to astound me.”…From that moment I decided to die and be born again. The labor was long and agonizing.

It goes without saying that Diaghilev was used to astounding but was rarely astounded. As a result, such a directive was not taken lightly or accomplished quickly. In fact, it wouldn’t be until 1917 that Cocteau was able to achieve the feat. In May of that year, a one-act ballet entitled Parade premiered in Paris. The scenario was written by Cocteau, the music composed by Erik Satie, and the sets and costumes by a Spanish artist whom Cocteau had become quite close with, one Pablo Picasso. The same charitable collaborator who later said, “I am the comet, Cocteau is merely a spark in my tail.”

Some of the reactions to Parade skewed toward feral. Whether apocryphal or not, Cocteau said that women who were coming toward him with hat pins at the ready for blinding (it was always Oedipus with Mr. C), were stalled only when they saw Guillaume Apollinaire’s head wrapped in a bandage, having returned recently from the Front. It was Apollinaire who, in a review, wrote that Parade “had a surrealism about it,” which introduced

The great gift of Immordino Vreeland’s film is its ability to maintain the tension of all that Cocteau embodied. He didn’t merely write The Human Voice, he was a human voice.

the word into modern parlance. Proust wrote to Cocteau that he was “delighted by the considerable stir made by your ballet.” Though he was astounded, Diaghilev was also displeased by the public response and pulled the ballet from the Ballets Russes repertoire. Three years later, it was remounted thanks to a young, new costume designer who also helped fund it. Money talks. Her name was Gabrielle, Coco to her friends, Chanel.

Thomas Wolfe, a contemporary of Cocteau’s, may have been right. You can’t go home again. At some point, Cocteau’s home on rue de Montpensier became too much. Eventually, Cocteau and his then partner, Jean Marais, who had played that famed Beast, looked outside of the city for a p(a)lace to call their own. They found it roughly fifty miles outside of Paris in a small town called Milly-la-Forêt. It became more than just a way to escape, however. Today, it’s a house retaining the furniture, designs, and touchstones of Cocteau, with his body buried in a nearby chapel. Both the house and the chapel are centuries old.

Somehow, though, the man is not in the least bit old. To understand Cocteau is to understand art, love, history, familial strife, loss, hope, addiction, and possibility. In the winter of 1949, after spending nearly three weeks in New York City, Cocteau began an essay on the plane ride home. Entitled Letter to the Americans, reading it today reminds you that possibility can cut both ways. Although he doesn’t call it a warning, per se, his penchant for prophecy remains as piercing seventy-five years later:

Americans, I’m going to try to sleep and to dream. I love to live my dreams and forget them upon waking. For there I inhabit a world where control doesn’t yet exist. It will exist if you keep going down the same direction. Dreams will be controlled—and not by psychiatrists, but by the police. Dreams will be controlled and they will be punished. They will punish the act of dreaming.

Good night.

The great gift of Immordino Vreeland’s film is its ability to maintain the tension of all that Cocteau embodied. He didn’t merely write The Human Voice, he was a human voice. Whether in plays, poetry, drawing, film, or literature, he destabilized what we knew and took for granted, resulting in something unexpected and sublime. A seer and sage born barely a decade after the telephone was invented, he died the year The Birds, Cleopatra, Charade, and The Leopard were released in theaters.

It was a heart attack at his chateau in Millyla-Forêt. He died alone on the same day that he found out that his longtime friend, Edith Piaf, had died. Apocrypha says that he died of a broken heart.

Cocteau’s legacy is manifold, but especially evident in the willingness to go for it that you see across all forms of art in today’s world. He would love A24 as much as he would Rachel Cusk and Taylor Mac. His perspective, his way of thinking, and his way of living matter now more than ever. He seemed to exist everywhere, with everything, and all at once. There was the opium, and Orpheus, those lovable Holy Terrors, and much more. How to grapple with him and his contributions to not just art, but life?

Well, as he would have it, let’s give him the last word:

I congratulate myself that you are more familiar with my name than with my works, because knowledge of my works would lead you down the path of sleepwalkers, giving you vertigo, for which you’d never forgive me.

All we can do is hope. How dangerous.

The Shrouds, a new film by David Cronenberg, coproduced by Prospero Pictures, Saint Laurent Productions, and SBS Productions, made its debut at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. Following the US premiere at the New York Film Festival in the fall, film writer and programmer Miriam Bale met with the auteur to discuss grieving, documentation, and the film’s cast.

The newest David Cronenberg film might be his most personal. Made in response to the death of his wife of forty-three years, it investigates and envisions mourning. In the film, Karsh (Vincent Cassel) is an entrepreneur who invents a new technology that allows its users to watch the body of a loved one decompose. This enterprise is Karsh’s reaction to the loss of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), whom he discusses with Becca’s dog-groomer sister, Terry (also Kruger), and with Terry’s exhusband, Maury (Guy Pearce). Terry and Maury then entangle Karsh in various conspiracies involving his company, GraveTech, seemingly as a way to deal with the shock and anger of loss.

After Karsh’s dentist tells him that grief is rotting his teeth, he goes on several dates, eventually starting a relationship with a beautiful woman (Sandrine Holt), the wife (and soon the widow) of a potential Hungarian client. Karsh also hops into bed with his own sister-in-law, perhaps as another way for both to fill the void left by Becca. Despite these heavy and sexy themes, The Shrouds is a comedy, like most of Cronenberg’s films. The audience at the New York Film Festival premiere laughed throughout, rhythmically, almost as music to accompany the mournful score by Howard Shore. The day after that NYFF screening, I had the pleasure of talking about the film with Cronenberg.

miriam bale I don’t know if you sat through the screening, but the audience was laughing throughout. It was very different from the Cannes audiences, where I think they were hesitant to laugh because of the subject matter.

david cronenberg People just didn’t get it [in Cannes]. It’s language and culture and who knows what else. I think it’s also, as you said, with the topic, people don’t want to laugh at something so tender.

mb Absolutely, they feel it would be disrespectful.

dc They didn’t get it. But of course in Toronto they got it. If they weren’t going to get it in Toronto, then they weren’t going to get it anywhere. And then I was quite certain that they would get it here [in New York] too.

mb So the last time I interviewed you was for A Dangerous Method [2011]. That’s a very Jewish film, with themes of the body versus the soul, and here we are again with The Shrouds, which is very Jewish—it has matzo ball soup, and this very Jewish approach to the afterlife. And again it has the body versus the soul, with the body obviously the winner. I wonder if you find it a very Jewish film?

dc Oh yes. I mean, I’ve never denied my Jewishness, but it was never the subject; it’s not

like Philip Roth or Saul Bellow. I grew up in a very secular household, very Jewish but very secular, and full of art and music. My father was a writer, my mother was a musician. So, classic assimilated, secular Jewish. But because of the subject matter, once you get into burial, you’re immediately trespassing on religious territory: burial practices, questions of the soul and the body, and all that. So you can’t really avoid it and it becomes a discussion.

mb There’s that wonderful line about how the soul loves this body and has only seen through the eyes of this body, and so is kind of holding on.

dc It’s a beautiful metaphorical thing, which is part of the Jewish religion and not something people talk about much, but when I did my research, I found that and thought, “Well, I really like that.” And I saw that soul as I created it in the first scene. It looks a little bit like a cicada, I think, like an insect, floating around her body.

mb Oh, that’s amazing. I wanted to talk to you about that illustration in the beginning.

dc Yes, well, that’s in Karsh’s dream. He’s seeing that soul fluttering around her body and being reluctant to leave it. And it’s in the shape of some kind of insect, a winged insect that’s kind of glowing.

mb There have been a lot of discussions about how Karsh, as portrayed by Vincent Cassel, is very similar to you physically.

dc Yes, but I didn’t cast him for his hair, it’s really happenstance. I mean, certainly because Karsh is the bereaved widower, he’s playing me to a certain extent, or that character is me to that very limited extent. But Vincent wasn’t the only one we thought of casting. I knew that if Vincent was doing the role, he would still have a bit of an accent. So there are a lot of considerations. I’d worked with him twice before, and I just love the actor. I really don’t think he looks like me, actually. But the hair is slightly similar. He did decide that he was modeling himself on me. So one of the things he did was, the way he moves in the film is not the way Vincent normally moves. It’s a subtle thing. Also the way he speaks—accent aside—is much more relaxed than he normally is, he’s normally very quick, very staccato, very French-tough-guy, and we both knew that wasn’t the right rhythm for this character. I did say, Model your accent on me. I said that to Guy Pearce and to Diane Kruger as well. Because this is a very Toronto movie as well as a very Jewish one.

mb The character of Karsh: he’s an entrepreneur, but he has a background as an industrial film producer, so he’s also a filmmaker. I don’t know if I’ve seen that in your movies before.

dc No, usually I don’t directly address the whole filmmaking thing, I leave that to others

who want to do it. [Federico] Fellini did it very well in 8 ½ [1963], and others have done it, but I haven’t really addressed it directly. Obviously, in some ways, the Shrouds are cinema. They’re creating the cinema of the cemetery.

mb Exactly. I mean, Karsh talks about the high-res zoom. I’d love to talk more about the ShroudCam as this new kind of cinema.

dc Well, that’s exactly it. For him, it’s more shooting documentary than fiction or drama, but it’s a legitimate extension of his work as a documentarian. This is something that most people have never wanted to document, which is the decomposition of the human body in a grave. So it fits that it’s part of his work as a filmmaker.

mb I watched the film a couple of times and there are so many routes you can focus on—creating a new cinema, detective-plot mechanisms—but I feel like on some level this is simply a film about a widower learning to date again while he’s still fused with his past, with his wife.

dc Yes, that’s true. I mean that’s the last scene in the movie. Basically he’s understanding that he’s never going to be able to make love to a woman without his wife being involved somehow, and that his experience of her for so many years will color any experience he has with another woman, primarily erotically but also every other way. And in my experience that’s true. So I made it physical, the fusion of his new girlfriend and his dead wife. But metaphorically I think it’s quite accurate. mb Yeah, and it’s emotionally deep and resonant to see it as well as to feel it in the film. You talked about Karsh’s new girlfriend, but I’m especially interested in Terry, too, because Terry is in some ways also a fusion. She has, let’s say, Karsh’s most negative qualities, these grief roads he could go down, such as giving up on life. She’s given up surgery to focus on the surfaces of animals, she’s going into these conspiracy theories, but she has the body of his wife, so in some way she’s a fusion. Is that a correct read?

dc Yeah, it’s absolutely correct. The difference is that unlike the Hungarian’s wife, Terry knows this. She knows that part of her attraction to Karsh is that she’s like his wife, like her sister. And yet, in another way, she’s in competition with that sister for Karsh’s affection and attention. And she questions it, and there’s that long sex scene, which to me is actually a dialogue scene, where they’re talking about that, talking about Maury, her ex, and all of that, and she’s saying, “How do I feel compared to Becca, how do you feel?” But she’s really saying, “Do you think you could love me the way you love Becca, or is that impossible? Is it impossible because I’m her sister and

I’m too close to her, and that’s going to be too frustrating? Or does it make me more attractive and more likely to be loved by you?”

I also didn’t wanna do the sort of classic grief-movie flashback, you know, lots of scenes of the happy times they had together on the beach, that time they went to Cuba together, or whatever. I wanted his love for Becca to be delivered by him, primarily verbally, and then in those scenes that aren’t happy scenes at all, the horrible times when she’s being dismantled surgically. He’s having dreams of that.

mb Why was that? You didn’t want it to be nostalgic?

dc Because I think it’s so easy. Why pinpoint those happy moments? Because when I think of my past, it’s not always the happy moments I’m thinking about, and sometimes it’s not even any significant moments: it’s sometimes the totally insignificant moments that are so very painful, just some words that were spoken, and that only you two have ever spoken to each other. Things

like that.

I also wanted to be forward-looking, with him saying, “I want to be with her body in the future, as it decomposes.” I’m not thinking about looking at Polaroids of sex we had, or something like that; I want to continue to have a relationship with this body, and for it to be a real relationship, it has to go into the future. If it’s just the past, it’s not a relationship, it’s just a remembrance. So he’s willing to go that far. It’s basically, How dark do you want to go? He’s willing to go all the way to that darkness, that particular darkness.

mb So the fusion is temporal as well as physical? That’s beautiful. Last night at the screening, when you were talking about your wife, you were interrupted by a walkie-talkie.

dc I wondered what that was. I thought it was somebody making a comment.

mb It was such an eerie moment, though, and it made me want to ask if you’d ever do

a ghost movie. I feel like the answer might be no.

dc Absolutely no.

mb Tell me why.

dc Because a ghost movie is a religious movie, and it completely subverts the reality that we are going to disappear as if we never existed. And that’s the existential problem, you know? It’s very difficult for a living creature, especially a human, to imagine that and to accept that it’s actually going to happen. Kids are pretty shocked when they discover that not only are they going to die, but their mommies and daddies are going to die. This is a difficult moment for any kid to get over. You don’t read about it much but every kid has to come to that awareness. And to me the cop-out is to say, No, but we’ll be in heaven, we’ll be somewhere really nice together. I think Christopher Hitchens said that religion is made by death. Religion is created by death. And I think it’s true. I think every religion is an avoidant way

I want to continue to have a relationship with this body, and for it to be a real relationship, it has to go into the future. If it’s just the past, it’s not a relationship, it’s just a remembrance.

—David Cronenberg

of avoiding the reality of death. So a ghost story is just another religion—you’ll still be alive, you’ll be a ghost but you’ll still be hanging around and still interfering in human affairs.

mb And you’re not interested in that fantasy when the reality is so interesting in itself?

dc Well, it doesn’t mean that a ghost story like Hamlet can’t have great resonance and metaphorical significance, and be powerful and beautiful, but to me it would feel like a cop-out. It’s just not part of what I want to do in my art.

mb You mentioned earlier that you considered that long sex scene between Karsh and Terry to be more of a dialogue scene than a sex scene. Could you tell me more about what that means in how you framed it and shot it?

dc I just meant that they talk all the way through the scene, and what they say is more important than the kind of sex they’re having. So, not a traditional kind of sex scene. I framed it very simply so that you can see both of them speaking at all times to emphasize this, so no cutaways to close-ups of body parts and so on.

mb I want to ask one more question about Maury, such a wonderful character, and such a wonderful performance by Guy Pearce. There’s that line “brothers in sorrow” about Maury and Karsh. I feel like Maury contrasts the divorce separation from the widowed separation. Could you talk a little bit about that relationship between Karsh and Maury?

dc Well, they’re similar: they’re both men who have been married to sisters and can’t let go of them, even when the sisters are gone in one way or another—in one case because she’s had it with him, and in the other case because she’s dead. So there is that parallel. And that’s part of why Maury is so adept at conspiracy, because that’s his way of somehow still connecting with Terry. But as she said, she got rid of Maury because he’s a schmuck, and that was the end for her with Maury. But yeah, they’re parallel relationships.

mb Ultimately they’re similar. But Karsh is just not a schmuck.

dc No, he’s not. Thank you.

mb [wide-eyed puzzlement]

dc I took that personally.

mb You should.

Previous spread: David Cronenberg, 2024. Photo: Caitlin Cronenberg

This spread: Stills from The Shrouds (2024), directed by David Cronenberg

Dan Fox travels through the matrix of cyberpunk.

Imagine you are Rick Deckard. You live in the vast, polluted megacity of Los Angeles. You are a bounty hunter—a “blade runner”—tasked to hunt replicants, androids bioengineered to be indistinguishable from humans and to believe they are themselves human, possessing real memories and emotions. Four replicants have gone rogue in Los Angeles and your job is . . . Hang on. If these replicants don’t know they are replicants, then how do you, Deckard, know that you are not . . . Never mind.

Imagine you are Rick Deckard’s intern. You live in the vast, polluted megacity of Los Angeles, a city shrouded in permanent night and smog. As your hovercar zooms high above the urban sprawl, you wish you owned a pair of mirrorshades. It’s an easy get-the-look for this sort of job, though honestly, LA is so dark these days you’d only end up bumping into things.

Deckard is taking you to the HQ of the Tyrell Corporation, which manufactures the replicants, to meet its CEO, Eldon Tyrell. The corporation is housed in a monumental citadel of money and power, a 700-story ziggurat that looks like a space station designed by the ancient Maya. Its pinprick lights and navigation beacons pierce the dirty rain-slicked gloom. Orange flames belch from nearby oil-processing plants. Animated billboards and neon signs illuminate the crowded street markets far below, where Japanese, not English, is the lingua franca. You look over at Deckard and wish you owned a beautifully worn-in trench coat like his. You wonder where the tough guys like him shop.

You are shown to a large penthouse office. It is designed in the latest “Establishment Gothic” style: Egyptian-style columns, black marble floor, black marble conference table, antique furniture mixed with modern. An abstract frieze echoes the pyramid design of the building. Bands of light reflecting off the surface of a carp pond ripple across the walls. Onyx plinths face each other on opposite sides of the room. An owl flies back and forth between them. There is something uncanny in its repeated actions. It reminds you of something—a dimly

remembered piece of film, something you once saw in a museum.

Eldon and Rachael Tyrell arrive. Their clothes are chic, luxurious, reminiscent of the 1940s and somehow of the future too. Rachael could be a femme fatale from an old noir movie. Deckard suspects she is one of the latest replicants, engineered to experience an existential doubt that reinforces her sense of being human.

You now have the strange feeling that you’ve been in this situation before. The office decor feels familiar. It plays an allusive game of if-youknow-you-know. The Tyrells’ outfits signal money, an education in semiotic power, while Deckard’s rugged look suggests a relationship to physical labor, a studied disinterest in aesthetics that is somehow also thoroughly studied. And you realize: he looks like a sculptor negotiating with his dealers. The owl reminds you of a video by Bill Viola. You are in an art gallery.

Imagine you are a pair of chrome Aviator-style mirrorshades. You and your pals—Leather Trench Coat and Dirty Engineer Boots—you’re the clothes that say: I’m ready for the end of the world, hasta la vista, take the blue pill, long live the new flesh! You’ve been in all the cult movies. You’ve seen things people would not believe: attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, moments lost in time like tears in rain, the full nine yards.

They once named a collection of sciencefiction short stories after you: Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. It was 1986. What a decade that was for you and the gang: Escape from New York (1981), The Terminator (1984), RoboCop (1987), Akira (1988). Classics. But who were They? A ruthless futuristic omnicorp exploiting the Earth’s resources? The pitiless rulers of a dystopian metaverse? No. They were a bunch of sci-fi writers. The author Bruce Sterling praised your work in the anthology’s preface: “By hiding the eyes, mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sunstaring visionary,

the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws. Mirrorshades—preferably in chrome and matte black, the Movement’s totem colors—appeared in story after story, as a kind of literary badge.”

The “Movement” was cyberpunk. Sterling described its themes: “implanted circuity, cosmetic surgery, genetic alteration . . . artificial intelligence, neurochemistry—techniques radically redefining the nature of humanity.”

The ’80s saw the first Walkman, the first mobile phones, fitness trackers. Tech that touched the skin. Computer technology was becoming increasingly decentralized. Software was being written in California garages, not in the labs of IBM and the Rand Corporation. Pop musicians were using it; so were MTV directors, video-game designers, and visual artists. Mirrorshades writers were concerned with interzones and global interconnectedness. They were seeking, as Sterling put it, “an integration of technology and the Eighties counterculture. An unholy alliance of the technical world and the world of organized dissent—the underground world of pop culture, visionary fluidity and street-level anarchy.”

Contenders for the Movement’s name included: Neuromantics, Outlaw Technologists, Radical Hard SF, Mirrorshades Group. But what stuck? Cyberpunk. The ends of your arms curl when you hear it. Sounds like “Internet café” or “surfing the web”: a no longer neo neologism. You know anytime “punk” gets plugged in as a suffix it’s not going to be for anything punk.

Bruce Bethke coined the term “cyberpunk” for the title of a short story in 1983. It would have sounded hard-edged then, a new way to show how futurism is chased by alienation. Sterling said it captured “a new kind of integration. The overlapping of worlds that were formerly separate: the realm of high tech, and the modern pop underground.” Fine, but c’mon, it could’ve been Mirrorshades . . .

Imagine you are the Salaryman. You live in a run-down sector of present-day Tokyo. Your

Previous spread: Still from Johnny Mnemonic (1995), directed by Robert Longo. Photo: TriStar/ Getty Images

This page: Still from Akira (1988), directed by Katsuhiro Otomo. Photo: Moviestore Collection Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo

Opposite: Still from The Matrix (1999), directed by Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski. Photo: AJ Pics/Alamy Stock Photo © Warner Bros.

world looks as if cobbled together by a lowbudget filmmaker. Your morning is not going well. You have accidentally hit someone with your car. He is the Metal Fetishist. He enjoys inserting shards of steel into his body. And you have run from the scene of the accident. Big mistake. Slowly over the coming days, you notice your own body beginning to sprout metal. Scrap-iron scales appear on your skin. Your penis turns into a drill. Your muscle and bone become aluminum and titanium. Wires grow from your scalp. The fetishist begins to communicate with you telepathically. He wants you to join him in a “new world of metal.” And we are back to sculpture.

Imagine you are J. G. Ballard, acclaimed science fiction writer. It is late morning and you’re sitting in your living room in the quiet London suburb of Shepperton. Actually you are in the afterlife but you specified on the intake forms that you wanted eternal rest to resemble Shepperton. There was a time when

you’d be at the typewriter and on the Scotch by now, but these days a mug of instant coffee is as strong as your drinks get.

You have spent the past hour watching Shinya Tsukamoto’s mind-bending 1989 body-horror film Tetsuo: The Iron Man. A grisly and disturbingly intimate story about the interface of flesh with technology. The postman has dropped off a package postmarked Los Angeles. Don’t ask how the postman found you; God moves in mysterious ways. The package contains an exhibition catalogue titled Cyberpunk: Envisioning Possible Futures through Cinema. You wince at the grammar. You wonder if it was written by an AI that had been fed nothing but data from exhibition catalogues. You make a note of that idea for a future story.

The catalogue accompanies an exhibition at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles in 2024. It attempts to define a history of cyberpunk films from Westworld in 1973 to Night Raiders in 2021. Look, there’s Tetsuo:

The Iron Man. The book tells you that to save time and money the movie’s actors would take the subway to their locations in full prosthetic makeup, weighed down with metal and glue. Nowadays it’s unremarkable to see people on the bus to work with wires coming out of their ears. You notice your name is mentioned in one of the essays and you reward yourself by dipping a chocolate digestive into your coffee. Mmm. You always liked LA. You once told an interviewer that you wished you’d moved there. The city spoke to you: the car culture, the concrete sprawl, Hollywood, the promise of transfiguration through fame, the disturbingly perfect weather—always sunny and seventy, with a chance of earthquake, wildfire, and rioting at rush hour. On your first visit, in 1987, you drove past a billboard and were shocked when you saw your name emblazoned on it. The place was so . . . well, Ballardian.

You find a photograph in the book of Rachael Tyrell in Blade Runner (1982). She looks as if she’s stood in the lobby of a museum. Clever thinkers in art magazines liked to argue that art had given up imagining the future at some point in the late twentieth century. They said it had become exhausted before modernism’s revolutionary promise could be realized. They castigated it for retreating into the same labyrinths of historical reference they lived in, for playing the same conceptual games many of them had encouraged. Various reasons were given: postmodern architecture, capitalist erosion of the welfare state, a fragmented media ecology, the invention of the smartphone, the first episode of such-and-such TV show. But, you wonder, what if art had been describing the future all along, the future as it would look in the executive suite of the Tyrell Corporation?

You once wanted to make an art show, a multimedia play re-creating the aftermath of a bloody road accident. Eduardo Paolozzi was to design the sets and the psychologist and computer scientist Christopher Evans would deliver the narrative. It never came together, but in 1969 you put three mangled vehicles, obtained from a local scrapyard, in the New Arts Lab gallery in London. You surrounded them with a closed-circuit television system that filmed visitors and broadcast their images back to them. At the opening the audience got extremely drunk. They attacked the cars, broke parts off, smashed wineglasses across the metalwork, pissed on the interior upholstery. A woman was assaulted. The technology watched as the id consumed the art. It was horrifying, it was atavistic, it was futuristic.

The Cyberpunk book pays homage to Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Philip K. Dick, and other initialed authors of note. William Gibson, Joanna Russ, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling too. These, they say, were the first dreamers of the cyberpunk dream. Before them, mid-century science fiction promised a future that would be efficient, minimalist. Totalitarian, perhaps, but everyone would wear sexy uniforms, travel to distant stars. Cyberpunk described a broken and rusted future. Computers there could be hacked, rewired, hybridized, subverted. Spacecraft were dirty industrial hulks in need of repair. Earth

was choked with toxic waste. Democracies had been steamrollered by powerful corporations who dictated everything from the food you could eat to the version of reality you experienced. Enshittification avant la lettre.

You don’t feel cyberpunk, not in your tweed sports blazer and cravat. Cyberpunk films all seemed to imagine that the clothing of the future would be designed to protect its wearers from harsh environments. Trench coats, engineer boots, gauntlets, goggles, wearable tech, grubby and worn, military industrial. Hairstyles would be practical or wildly punk. People would dress like Mad Max, or like the New Age travelers who used to travel around England in the 1980s in convoys of old buses and vans. You recall a passage from the writer Michael Bracewell’s memoir Souvenir (2021) in which he describes the financial district of 1980s London: “Armani meets Alien . . . exposed service ducts, insides on the outside, glass that looks blast-proof, remnants of the past, hints of the future—romantic sci-fi brutalism, precincts as though in the service area depths of some vast spacecraft.” Tomorrow, as usual, was already here.

Your brand of science fiction was a declension from existing facts, its stories set one click to the left or right of everyday life. It lived around the corner, it lurked within the television and on the asphalt of the motorway. It sent DMs from deep inside the mind. You wrote about men stranded on traffic islands. (Always men, always architects,

doctors, research scientists.) You envisioned class warfare in high-rise apartment blocks. Systems of social control and persuasion turned haywire. The automobile accident as sexual fetish. The aftermath of ecological catastrophe: floods, droughts, Promethean experiments gone wrong. Your ideal art show was titled The Atrocity Exhibition. Its exhibits included political assassinations, war crimes in Vietnam, pornographic films, plastic surgery ops, nuclear tests, violent psychology experiments, weapons silos, car crashes, the London Hilton, works by Max Ernst and Raymond Roussel.

None of this could ever match the things you witnessed as a child in wartime Shanghai. Drained pools and abandoned country clubs. A sports stadium filled with furniture and luxury cars. Gardens of dead bodies. Starving adults in your internment camp miming their destroyed colonial lifestyles in order to survive. Your life was cyberpunk.

Imagine you are a coltan miner in a near-future Burundi. Your name is Matalusa, and together with your brother Tekno, your job is to excavate this rare earth metal on behalf of a violent plutocracy that sells it to foreign companies who use it to make electronic devices for people who prefer not to see the resources they depend on. Actually, scratch “near future.” It arrived some time ago.

Tekno dies on the job and you escape to join an underground hacker collective. Its cri de guerre: “Unanimous Goldmine!” Its

members wear fluorescent body paint and clothing customized with junked computer parts. Through them you meet Neptune, an intersex runaway. You fall in love and set about taking revenge on the system that uses you for its hovercars, replicant owls, smartphones, and cryptocurrencies.

Imagine you are Candy. You live in Ethiopia in the aftermath of a war that once threatened to consume the planet but merely petered out. Earth’s population has declined and children are a rarity. Uneasy peace reigns. Nature thrives: the woods are filled with birdsong. There are no computers, no electricity. Your life is make-do-and-mend. You live with your love, Birdy, in a large abandoned house in a mountain forest. High above, a vast, dormant spacecraft hangs in low, lopsided orbit. Days are spent scavenging for useful items in the desert wastes beyond the forest. You look for materials for Birdy’s sculptures and for her garden. People barter with plastic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figures, toy laser guns, and other talismans of the past. Crumbs from dead empires.

One day, the electricity in the house blinks on for a few seconds. Neither of you know how this is possible. Birdy’s dreams become feverish. At night she mutters mysterious names: Einstein IV, Stephen Hawking III, San Pablo Picasso, Justin Bieber VI, Paul McCartney XI . . . Birdy believes the spacecraft above may be returning to life. Armed with a plastic toy sword bestowed on you by your love (“made by Carrefour,” she says, “the last total artist”), you embark on a quest to find the answer. You bring with you your copy of Michael Jackson’s Dangerous album (1991). It is valuable and would be enough to pay for your wedding to Birdy, but out there, on your adventure beyond the forest, you may depend on it.

“You wanna know about Crumbs, that Miguel Llansó movie from the early twenty-first century? Postapocalypse setting, DIY scavenger society, pop-culture exchange economy. Too gentle for your regular cyberpunk crowd; spectrum analysis suggests trace elements of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) in there too, but sure, it fits the genre . . . And that one about the Burundi hackers? Neptune Frost by Anisia Uzeyman and Saul Williams (2021). That weren’t cyberpunk. That was real life.”

Imagine you are a stock character in a science fiction movie. A hacker accessing historical data from an ancient computer mainframe. Your eyes dart across stacks of mismatched computer monitors. Wires spill everywhere. Exposed circuitry sparks. Occasionally you have to hit one of your machines to get it working again and you mutter something obscene but technical, “fuckin’ piece-of-shit neurotron visualizers . . . ” A blue-and-pink glow fills the room from neon signs on the rainy street outside. You eat noodles from a steel mess tin.

You must provide the movie’s hero with an info dump that makes them question the world they are in. You are unsure whether the hero is listening to you. They wear chrome

Left: Still from Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott. Photo: Stanley Bielecki Movie Collection/Getty Images

Opposite: Still from Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott. Photo: Warner Bros./Archive Photos/ Getty Images

mirrorshades and their leather trench coat collar is buttoned up despite the fact that it’s dark and the heating is on. You continue with your awkward expository dialogue.

“The Cyberpunk Maintenance Authority wants us to believe this whole thing starts with Blade Runner, runs through Akira and Johnny Mnemonic (1995), and peaks with The Matrix (1999). Occasionally, to maintain the illusion that we are allowed to think freely, they might let us debate whether Strange Days (1995) or Ex Machina (2014) are cyberpunk. Throw us a body horror like Tetsuo or Videodrome (1983). So long as we stay safely post-1970, they let us claim a few deep cuts: Eraserhead (1977), Jubilee (1978), Liquid Sky (1982), Born in Flames (1983), Brazil (1985), Max Headroom (1985), Delicatessen (1991), Dark City (1998), the whole midnight movie canon . . . ”

“Get to the point,” growls the hero.

“See these little glitches?” You point to complicated lines of code on screen. “These are time wormholes. Mostly outlier examples from movies and TV. But this one here represents visual art. See that? That’s the kinetic-art movement. And that line of code there is Eduardo Paolozzi, the large figurative sculptures, the ones that look almost like cyborgs, and his screenprints depicting the human form within a network of technology and pop-culture references. Here we’ve got fighting robots made by Survival Research Laboratories, and look, there’s Stelarc—you know he grafted onto his arm an ear that was grown in a petri dish? Now we’re getting deeper. Nam June Paik, who coined the phrase “electronic superhighway.”

You must provide the movie’s hero with an info dump that makes them question the world they are in. You are unsure whether the hero is listening to you. They wear chrome mirrorshades and their leather trench coat collar is buttoned up despite the fact that it’s dark and the heating is on.

got your Futurists, your Vorticists. There’s Otto Dix’s War Cripples (1920), there’s Jacob Epstein’s Rock Drill (c. 1913–15). In all of these the body meets technology in ways that look suspiciously cyberpunk to me . . . ”

“OK Gombrich, go on.”

“This timeline is music. Kraftwerk, The Man-Machine (1978). Detroit techno in the 1980s: people said the city looked like something straight out of a cyberpunk story. Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Black Ark studio—recording technology warping the reality of time and space. Throbbing Gristle: DIY-built synthesizers, military-style clothing, songs about biowarfare and covert psyops . . . ”

“Jesus.”

“Now look at this. This is the literature subnetwork. Dystopian novels, check, Afrofuturism, check, the 2000 AD comics, hardboiled noir, Franz Kafka, got it, but if we keep tracking back we reach . . . ”

The hero gasps. “My god, this goes all the way to the top.”

“ . . . Frankenstein.”

Next to him, Lynn Hershman Leeson: she made chatbots, shot confessional video diaries, created a parallel identity for herself before we were even a twinkle in a blade runner’s eye. This line here takes us to Francis Bacon paintings: the tormented figures tearing themselves apart, unable to escape the paradigm of their frightening red isolation chambers. That little one there, that’s more primitive, an Elisabeth Frink gogglehead, but it’s a clear representation of mirrorshades if ever I saw one. Then you

“There never was any other kind of science fiction.”

“And that means . . . ” Rachael Tyrell enters the room. She is wearing an extravagant floor-length coat patterned with interlocking waves and concentric bands of fur. On her shoulder is perched a replicant owl. She smiles. “And that means the entire history of art and literature is an implanted memory . . . ”

Mike Stinavage meets with the film director Apichatpong Weerasethakul to discuss death and the artistic process.

On that Monday evening, the weather in Pamplona, Spain, teetered between dull, overcast skies and unexpected downpours. In a pause between showers, I walked up the stairs of the Hotel Tres Reyes to meet the Thai filmmaker and visual artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who had come to town to speak at the public conversation series Los Encuentros de Pamplona the night before. There, he and the Hungarian director Béla Tarr had talked together about filmmaking and the qualities that unite them, qualities both cinematic and personal. The title of their conversation was “La vida, la muerte y todo lo del medio” (Life, death, and everything in between).

Weerasethakul is perhaps best-known for his feature film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which took home the Palme d’Or at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. More recently he made Memoria (2021), a collaboration with Tilda Swinton, in which a woman living in Colombia seeks to understand a bizarre noise that only she can hear. This film won at the Cannes Film Festival too—this time the Jury Prize. Last fall a retrospective of Weerasethakul’s work was on view at the Centre Pompidou’s Atelier Brancusi.

During our conversation on that rainy evening, we revisited topics discussed the evening prior as well as Weerasethakul’s artistic process.

mike stinavage Yesterday I spoke with a friend about your conversation with Béla Tarr. We landed on a question: What have you learned about death through filming, and through your work in film? apichatpong weerasethakul It’s hard to separate filming and living because they’re very integrated. As Béla Tarr said, he has a close relationship with his actors and crew. For me that may be even more pronounced, because friends do the camerawork, set design, costumes, etc. We are like family. The line between living and working is sometimes very blurred.

As you get older, sickness and suffering become more obvious. Film is especially about memory, and about trying to preserve memory and a certain innocence. Over these years of working and living, the idea of transformation has become more prevalent, especially thinking about the covid pandemic.

Anyway, does that relate to death? It’s about acceptance maybe.

ms Thinking about preservation, what exactly do you hope to preserve? aw Certain memories, for sure. And the beauty of awareness. It’s like when you encounter something beautiful, like love— there’s an addiction and a hunger to keep it. Sometimes filmmaking is like that. It’s blending into that addiction and it becomes its own addiction of trying to preserve something through cinema.

ms Have you found that addiction fruitful?

aw I don’t know. I think maybe it’s the only thing I’m capable of. I’m really comfortable with the medium—more than with people, let’s say [laughs]. Filmmaking keeps me excited and keeps me in a zone of innocence. Every

time I touch the camera, I’m thinking of what I’ll express within that frame.

In Thailand there are many layers that we have to hide. We have to censor ourselves. But for me, film is an open space where I can’t censor my thinking. Legally, you know, as a Thai person, you can’t say many things. But within the world of cinema there’s a hint of freedom. Is that fruitful? I don’t know. I’ve been asking myself why I make film.

ms Last night, it made me a bit sad when you questioned your motive for filmmaking. I suppose, though, that moments of reflection on why we dedicate our lives to certain activities happen for all of us. Could you talk more about why you make films, and how has this changed since you made, for example, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives?

aw That movie opened a lot of doors and allowed me to see so many connections. It’s incredible how cinema can find people and go

can do is be transparent and honor the medium of film. That’s all.

But the ultimate goal is probably to do nothing—to just be.

ms Thinking about Uncle Boonmee and Tropical Malady [2004], in a poetic way you’re preserving stories and storytelling from remote areas. There’s something honest and tender about seeing that place and people as they existed while you were filming.

aw I have a really big conflict within myself, but maybe it keeps me going to find inspiration. A friend works for Netflix and runs a postproduction house. For Netflix, when they come to the post-screening, they have this graph of what the percentage of drama or action should be in so many minutes. It’s all very precise. It’s really research through humans, and how to dictate or influence human psychology. It’s efficient, let’s say, but I don’t know if it’s better, or if it makes

to remote places. Because of that film, many people say, “Oh, the Palme d’Or!” But it has allowed me to experiment more with the arts. Yet I still don’t know what the purpose of filmmaking is. For you it’s really clear: environmental work is such a useful, important, and, let’s say, urgent matter. But what about film? Especially when you make film, you can’t not feel guilty about it. Like, what am I doing? For what?

And then there’s this question coming up about social responsibility. Yesterday Béla said that as humans, we have social responsibility, and not only for filmmaking. I personally don’t have social responsibility in making films. For me it’s most important to be honest to the film; when you create film in order to change something, that’s already not right for me. When you tell someone, “Hey, you should do this. You should do that,” you become a dictator. You’re part of that. I can’t tell people what they should do or how to change. What I

for a very nice way of living. But at the same time, I’m fascinated by technology and media consumption.

ms With Memoria you did the exact opposite. If I understand correctly, the film was screened in the United States city by city.

aw We chose to do that in the United States because we could. It’s such a big country. And you have more independence. Actually, staggered screenings were a suggestion by [the film production and distribution company] Neon, and I think it was a really brave decision, but, sadly, many people were kind of upset because they wanted it at that moment. For me, Memoria is like a concert. When you see the film, you see that it’s a kind of concert for cinema. It was created as a collective listening experience.

ms Was Memoria the first movie you’ve made outside Thailand, or outside Southeast Asia?

aw I’ve made some installations outside Asia, but yes, this was my first feature film. It was made by coincidence: I had a chance to go to Colombia and stay there with friends. So really it was an eye-opening experience that led me to realize that I can make movies anywhere. After Memoria, this thing clicked in my mind that I have a fear of going somewhere that I don’t know, but that’s groundless. It’s okay to not know, and to be blind creating movies.

ms And do you enjoy that? A blind process?

aw Yes, yes. So many friendships happened from that experience. Last night Béla talked about relationships, that you have to love the people you work with. Automatically, when we were filming in Colombia, I couldn’t feel otherwise. We had a very good bonding experience in Colombia. For the next project there’ll be some Colombian and Thai crew working together as a bigger family.

ms How did the collaboration with Tilda Swinton come about?

aw We’ve known each other for a long time. Many years ago we created a film festival in Thailand. We just met through the years, but not that many times. But there was always a mood to work together. Memoria is a very nice first letter, let’s say, that we composed together.

ms Finding the story with someone requires a very special collaboration. How much of the story do you know before you start shooting?

aw I know quite a lot. I mean, the idea for the movie is always there because we need funding. In my case the script helps the funding

process. It’s one of the layers that are necessary to create a solid blueprint of the project.

So I start with the script, but afterward it’s always changing. The key is to be very aware of what’s happening. Even though the story is there, deep down I sometimes don’t know what’s happening. We always shoot chronologically to go through it with open eyes, with awareness of the film’s development. Gradually the film just tells me what it is.

ms When and where do you start writing a film?

aw All the material comes from my little notebooks. I write things about location, things about heartbreak, losing someone. Everything is combined into feelings and then certain

things I can’t express. I always say that it has to do with physical feeling, especially through the spine. I don’t know how to explain. Like when you shoot something and it arrives at a certain location in your body, it works.

ms When you started reading Memoria, for example, did you know it took place in Colombia?

aw Yes, and I had the same symptom [hearing an unexplained sound] as the character. I kept moving through Colombia, going to hospitals and then to quiet places, to parks, etc. Then, along the way, the movie began to form.

Are you making movies?

ms No, not currently. Right now I’m writing a novel and short stories. So your

Previous spread, left: Still from Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Photo: Nontawat Numbenchapol, courtesy Kick the Machine Films

Previous spread, right: Behind the scenes of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Photo: courtesy Strand Releasing

Left, top: Installation view, Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Lights and Shadows, Centre Pompidou, Paris, October 2, 2024–January 6, 2025. Photo: Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Left, bottom: Still from Memoria (2021), directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Photo: © Kick the Machine Films, Burning, Anna Sanders Films, Match Factory Productions, ZDF-Arte and Piano, courtesy Neon

Right: Still from Tropical Malady (2004), directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Photo: courtesy Strand Releasing

process and creation of stories is something that hits close to home.

aw But can you make a film like you’re writing a book?

ms From a story that I’ve written?

aw From that or from the drive itself. Writing a short story, for example, is a really solitary activity. But if you move that to filmmaking— ms It’s not out of the question! Maybe one day. I have a film project in mind that pulls inspiration from the Italian filmmaker Nanni Moretti and the Japanese film Tampopo [1985]. But it’s a project for down the line.

aw A movie can take many forms and be many things. If you aim for Nanni Moretti or Tampopo, it’s really hard to make works. But if you think about Jean-Luc Godard or Agnès Varda. . . .

ms Admittedly, I tend toward narrative work. I appreciate a storyline. While in your work you don’t always cling to the story—there are digressions and explorations—I still feel narrative development.

aw But movies are more than storylines. The Frenchwoman who wrote Hiroshima mon amour [1959], Marguerite Duras—her work really opened my mind. Sometimes it’s just a person reading a movie.

ms And are you able to explain the sounds that you heard in Colombia?

aw Yes, it’s probably stress. That’s what the doctors said. It’s not the same sound as in Memoria. It’s not a kind of bang. It’s like what they tried to explain in the mixing-room scene toward the beginning of the film: it’s internal. It’s not a sound, it’s inside. But it’s not jumpy.

The sound would come in the morning—a really curious sound. You become part of it. You create it. And it’s like an accumulation of certain things, and you know that it’s coming. It’s like a wave. It was really interesting when I went to festivals: some people said that they experience the same thing.

ms As someone with tinnitus, I hear what you mean.

aw So when you’re less stressed, you feel better?

ms Usually that’s the case.

aw Can you forget it or live without being aware of it?

ms Not always. Since I’ve had it for a few years now, I’ve had time to accept it. Do you put any restrictions on yourself as a filmmaker based on your style and process?

aw Not really. I’m lucky because I have a beautiful team of producers who give me a lot of liberty. It’s almost the opposite—I wish they gave me some rules! For me, a limitation is the medium itself. Maybe this is because I also work in visual art.

ms Returning to the topic of death, have you ever encountered a ghost?

aw When I was at architectural school, I was drafting on the second floor in my hometown at around 2 to 3 am. Being very hot in Thailand, there’s air conditioning. Because of the air conditioning, the curtains and the windows are locked. At one point, I heard dogs barking from the neighbors’ house farther away. Then a draft of wind passed by my face with the smell of incense. After a moment my dogs downstairs started howling. I can’t explain this.

alex is ael

Sam Wasson brings his deep knowledge of cinema, Hollywood, and film noir to Alex Israel’s new paintings of Los Angeles.

An LA artist who doesn’t reckon with noir is a flickering bulb that lures no moths, and maybe is no bulb at all. So I was glad to hear that Alex Israel, who was born and grew up here, who lives and works and belongs here, was doing the native reckoning where else but Warner Bros., or what’s left of it, where John Huston and Humphrey Bogart (and Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet) made The Maltese Falcon for six summer weeks in 1941. If anyone called it the first noir, I wouldn’t fight them.

As for the last noir, that’s trickier. What makes this reckoning—Alex’s, mine, maybe yours—so tricky is that very few of us agree on a definition of film noir. Some say it’s a genre, to which I would argue, there are noir musicals; others have said,

with better evidence, that noir is a style, but it takes more than shadowed light through venetian blinds to do the dirty deed. I’ve heard it said that noir is a mood: doom, but Titanic (1997) is no Criss Cross (1949).

Part of the problem is that no filmmaker in the 1940s or ’50s set out to make a noir. Writers and directors of comedy knew they had to be funny, and John Ford and Anthony Mann, when they embarked on their Westerns, knew they had to deliver the West, but film noir—a phrase coined by French critic Nino Frank in 1946 and popularized by critics Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton in 1955—was named later, a tendency identified in retrospect, as if by detectives trailing a serial killer. Like the filmmakers before him, Israel is defining that tendency in his own way, through images. These are painted streetscapes. They began, though, as photos and sketches, visual ideas that Israel enhanced with reference material—the purplish-blue gradients he wanted for the night sky, for instance, or specific Mexican fan palm silhouettes to dot their horizons—in order to create blueprints for what would at first become digital renderings and then ultimately finished paintings.

Beginning in 2021, these blueprints went back and forth between Israel and a pair of animators. Years of additions and subtractions produced renderings that were then painted in acrylic on canvas by an artist in the Sign & Scenic Art department at Warner Bros.

Which is where I first saw them. Though Israel had told me in advance that the subject was noir, my first reaction upon stepping into them—for these paintings are to me more like spaces than images—was delight. Their DNA shared anime and a noir touchstone for our—Israel’s and my— generation, Robert Zemeckis’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit. For those of us who saw it on the big screen in 1988, the film’s alluring blurring of worlds real and animated would never be upended in our imaginations, so naturally did the toons and the city coexist. Virgins to noir at the time, we will always have Roger Rabbit , which owes so much to Chinatown (1974), one of our city’s noir myths, as an unconscious reference point. Though at the time we may not have coded the film as marking a loss of innocence, part of its enduring power, I think, is that it did—the moment cartoons, in other words, went bad.

None of this, for me, was conscious yet. Stepping into Israel’s paintings, all I knew, at first, was that I felt nothing but swirled in the safe and good. The Troubadour, the Cadillac dealership in the Valley, the Bruin Theater in Westwood . . . I was home. The combination of their CinemaScope proportions and my memory—our memory, if you’re one of ours—put me there in the virtual reality of a beloved present/past. Or is it “past/present”? The locations Israel picked for his pictures are undeniably of their time—the 1940s car dealership, the ’50s diner, the ’60s gas station, the ’70s lingerie shop, the ’80s yogurt spot—but still a part of the present. When you add to that your own memories, the temporal effect on the brain is kaleidoscopic. Not where am I, but when am I?

I got lost. I looked for signs. I looked up at the billboards. They were blank—save for two, Apple iPod and Angelyne, an anachronistic impossibility, outside the Chateau Marmont.

Outside the Bruin, I looked at the movie posters behind the box office. They were generic, out of time. These spaces seemed suddenly less honest than I had originally thought, and felt, when I walked into their immersive and embracing detail;

Previous spread: Alex Israel, Trashy Lingerie, 2024 (detail), acrylic on canvas, 48 × 89 ¼ inches (121.9 × 226.7 cm)

Above: Alex Israel, Movie Theaters , 2024, acrylic on canvas, 54 × 139 ½ inches (137.2 × 354.3 cm)

stepping in closer or stepping back, I could see that certain perspectives were not as they were in real life, or at least not as I remembered them. Wherever and whenever I was, I was not where I was first delighted to be.

Nor was I delighted, not anymore.

The streets were impossibly empty. The apartments, despite the occasional light, gave no sign of life. There were no cars on the streets.

I could not say it was a nightmare but it certainly was turning out to be a dream, or one of those video games where the player wakes up somewhere strange and has to figure out how he got there—a player whose “crime” is unknown and whose mystery is his past. This feeling is essential to the thing we call “noir,” the haunting that crept into Hollywood with World War II, its visual and psychological disorientations of time and space the cinematic analogues to a world suddenly without trust. This mood belongs most to Angelenos and predates the movies. Sold to the rest of the country as the city of citrus, sun, and opportunity, Los Angeles began its life as a promise. As no city before it—and maybe no city since—ours in the early decades of the twentieth century was so

professionally and effectively commodified as the cure to all American ills that those who came and were not cured, prosperous, or saved as advertised could easily scapegoat Los Angeles as the city with no soul and run back home to the old religions and traditions of the East. But how many did?

Trapped —a noir title from 1949—is what they were. They were also Caught —a title from the same year— and at the last stop on the continent, right Where the Sidewalk Ends , a title from the year after.

If Israel’s pictures are seductive, they should be. Femmes wouldn’t be fatales if they weren’t. Their rich, pulpy candy colors and nostalgic lure, their slick, sensual surfaces that say come hither . . . these are not the girls next door. Something of this duplicity, the uncanny appeal of each building’s facade, is, as I had discovered, conscientiously layered into Israel’s process. The photographs and references of Israel’s blueprints are not retouched but redrawn, and in this redrawing they are heightened by local myth and redescribed through the lens of Israel’s memory in dramatic, theatrical lighting and exaggerated perspective. These places only seem natural. They are to be loved, but not trusted.

Above:

Alex Israel, Pann’s , 2024, acrylic on canvas, 54 × 96 inches (137.2 × 243.8 cm)

And I remember: Israel has written to me about the “post-truth, augmented, AI-enhanced, blockchain-coded reality we now call home.”

Even before blockchain, this is, of course, how much of the world sees us in Los Angeles. Stepping into Israel’s un/real places, I thought immediately of him as a production designer charged with building “Los Angeles Street” on a studio backlot. Of course, no studio ever needed to build a Los Angeles Street, but they did build their “Main Street” and their “New York Street,” which were— as Israel’s places are—often more perfect than their originals. As Ernst Lubitsch famously put it, “I’ve been to Paris France and I’ve been to Paris Paramount. Paris Paramount is better.”

Is it any wonder (I wondered, looking at this work for the first time) that Israel was working where I was standing, at Warner Bros., a noir locale now that the studio of Huston and Bogart has, save for David Zaslav and a few TV shows, all but emptied? I know Israel wants to evoke the Hollywood past; he told me so and I felt it in the work. That’s partly why I am so comfortable here inside these paintings. He and I agree: we know—as the World War II noir filmmakers did—that the better world

is gone. And there are those of us who remember, who keep flashing back, keep finding ourselves seduced, disoriented, lost, caught, trapped out of the past. But what a past. “How could I have known,” asks Walter Neff, flashing back, in Double Indemnity (1944), “that murder could sometimes smell like honeysuckle?”

Being with Israel’s work, I am reminded that too often in our contemporary reckonings of noir, we lose that smell of honeysuckle. But we shouldn’t. If the breakdowns of the noir tradition still devastate, still force us to ask ourselves if we are still sane, it’s because, burnished by the most romantic years of the twentieth century, when lovers were torn apart by a war worth fighting (or was it?), they began with the romance, with the beauty and the yearning, of the dream come true.

By definition, those of us who love Los Angeles share Israel’s and my view that our city can be beautified by illusions and dying dreams. We know that “Hollywood Liquor”—to borrow from a cheery, brightly lit sign on Israel’s Hollywood Boulevard— is better than no liquor at all, and that those who don’t dream don’t know they’re already dead. Look at Israel’s skies: it’s night, yes, but what a night.

Above: Alex Israel, Hollywood Liquor, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 54 × 96 inches (137.2 × 243.8 cm)

Artwork © Alex Israel

Photos: Josh White

Painting

betweenJohnSzwedidentifiesthecross-rhythms throughoutpaintersandjazzmusicians thetwentiethcentury.

Nothing is more comparable than the intensity of jazz. It is jazz which has really contradicted the impressionists in painting. It is jazz and the Rite of Spring . It has played the same role as the fauve painters.

—Jean Cocteau 1

There is a century-long history of attempts to turn sound and music into something visible. In 1925, theosophists Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater thought that words, colors, and sounds could all emerge from thoughts and spiritual states in a form of synesthesia. Vasily Kandinsky, in 1926, said that geometric forms could be used to paint visual representations of music as complicated as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (1804–08). Not much came from these and other speculations, and they are now mostly forgotten. But there is another concept that reckons there is an affinity between jazz and painting. It’s less known to the public, but has long been embraced by painters and musicians.

I came upon this subject a few years back when some art museums were announcing they would be presenting jazz events. There were those who saw this as just another effort to attract new demographics and money into the building, like today’s stagings of weddings, fashion shows, overnighters, and yoga. Some jazz fans grumbled that this trend of jazz in museums was a sign of the music’s death. But in fact, several major art museums had been interested in jazz for over eighty years. As early as 1940, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, began to present jazz concerts carefully structured to introduce jazz to the museum’s public, and the San Francisco Museum of Art was scheduling concerts and lectures on jazz in 1943. These art institutions were clearly registering the shock of this particular form of the new, and assaying its implications. The seriousness with which it was presented showed that they already saw jazz to be a form of high art.

Others saw a connection between the two arts even earlier. While the 1913 Armory Show was shaking up the art world, ragtime was becoming a national craze that unsettled nineteenth-century conceptions of music and dance. The artist Stuart Davis, whose work was in the Armory Show, later said, “My objective was to make paintings that could be looked at whilst listening to [a jazz] record at the same time, without incongruity of mood.” Having seen paintings by Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and Henri Matisse, Davis said there was “an objective order in these works which I felt was lacking in my own work. . . . It gave me the same kind of excitement I got from

the numerical precisions of the Negro piano players in the Negro saloons of Newark. I resolved that I would quite definitely have to become a ‘modern’ artist.” In that same year Davis had been making sketches in some of those saloons.

It was a time when all the arts were in flux, since jazz, motion pictures, modern dance, and modern art had all grown up together, and elements of these arts affected each other. It was not yet clear what jazz was, but whatever it was, it signaled modernity. Ragtime, the earliest form of jazz, was the subject of controversy, a dispute that helped bring about the increasing visibility and autonomy of Blacks in the cultural life of the nation and the world, introduced new forms of dance (and the clothing that those dances required), and helped to create a heightened sense of sexuality in the arts. F. Scott Fitzgerald declared that he was living in the Jazz Age.

Even the word “jazz” had the power and glamour of other trending words of the time—“cocktails,” “gramophone,” “skyscraper,” “sex appeal,” and “escalator.” In one of its earliest appearances in print, a 1913 San Francisco Bulletin piece titled “In Praise of ‘Jazz,’ a Futurist Word Which Has Just Joined the Language,” the anonymous author had some fun explaining that there were different ways of spelling the word and an endless number of meanings, “something like life, energy, effervescence of spirit, joy, pep, magnetism, verve, ebulliency, courage, happiness.” The word still has something of that ambiguity and force: it appears as a name for stores, food products, computer software, bands in Haiti and Africa (none of which actually play jazz), as well as

the names of rappers (Jay-Z was originally known as Jazzy, after the name of his mentor Jaz-O).

But beyond the fashionable, what was it about jazz that led to its particular impact on the visual arts? American painters had to notice that jazz was not an art coming from Europe, the beaux arts, or the so-called “pure” traditions of art, but was a home-grown product of the Black vernacular. Once they learned that the essence of jazz was improvisation—composing in the moment, amid the simultaneous collective improvisations of others—some artists resonated with the idea, and with what it might offer them in their own practice. The Surrealists, for example, with their interest in automatic writing and painting, where the subconscious was allowed control over the work, saw jazz as particularly attractive. Some even spoke of jazz musicians as performing under spirit possession.

Rhythm was the most notable feature of this new music, and was seen not just as something hidden behind the melody and the other musicians. The drum set itself, first created by Black drummers, was an art object: cymbals, gongs, and triangles from Turkey, tom-toms from China and Africa, snare drums from European military bands, cowbells and woodblocks from Africa, all clustered together in shimmering silver and gold, drums trimmed in pearl, the face of the bass drum painted with exotic scenes of palm trees, rivers, swirls of color, and bearing the initials of the drummer. Jean Cocteau, Francis Picabia, and the composer Darius Milhaud all took up jazz drumming, as did Man Ray, who had himself photographed as a one-man band.

The French were among the first to recognize the importance of jazz, and the possibilities of learning from it can be seen in “Il n’y a plus de perspective ” (No more perspective), a 1933 article in Le Cahier Bleu by the designer René Guilleré:

In jazz all elements are brought to the foreground. This is an important law that can be found in painting, in stage design, in films, and in poetry of this period. Conventional perspective, with its fixed focus and its gradual vanishing point, has abdicated. . . . [In jazz there] is not an accompaniment and song similar to a figure against a background. Everything works. There is not a solo instrument against the background orchestra, each instrument solos while participating in the whole . . . each man plays for himself in general ensemble. The same law applies to art: the background is itself a volume.

A decade later, Sergei Eisenstein, in his book Film Sense , summarized Guilleré’s article by noting that jazz had multiple perspectives instead of a single fixed one, and had erased the strict lines between foreground and background. He added, “We have only to glance at a group of Cubist paintings to convince ourselves that what takes place in these paintings has already been heard in jazz music.”

PAINTERS OF JAZZ

The connection between jazz and painting was in part a result of social forces. There were communities that

Previous spread (detail) and opposite: Stuart Davis, The Mellow Pad , 1945–51, oil on canvas, 26 ¼ × 42 1⁄8 inches (66.7 × 107 cm) © Estate of Stuart Davis/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: © Brooklyn Museum/Bequest of Edith and Milton Lowenthal/ Bridgeman Images

This page, above: Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942–43, oil on canvas, 50 × 50 inches (127 × 127 cm). Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York

This page,

didn’t necessarily belong to the same craft or profession, but learned or developed by encountering groups that shared some of their interests. This was certainly the case in the early years of jazz in New Orleans, where many artists’ and craftspersons’ business cards also listed them as musicians. Manhattan in the 1950s was a different scene, but painters and musicians gathered at the Five Spot, the Cedar Tavern, and Stanley’s in Greenwich Village, where they heard modern jazz on jukeboxes and sometimes live.

The first images of jazz and the blues were done by illustrators for covers of sheet music and as advertisements for records, and were often images of whatever they thought a song might be about. Photography soon followed, most often with posed pictures of stars. The increasing sale of records in the 1920s overlapped with the Harlem Renaissance, and painter Aaron Douglas created a few silhouetted archetypal musical figures, often in heroic, powerful poses (Play de Blues , 1926). A few years later, another Black painter, Archibald Motley, Jr., seemed to be responding to Davis when he did a series of realistic paintings that emphasized the closeness and musically heated atmosphere of nightclubs ( Blues , 1929).

The French painter Francis Picabia made several works inspired by an African-American singer he heard in a Harlem cabaret during a New York show of his paintings in 1913. Asked to explain the principles of abstraction to a reporter, Picabia replied, “Does the [musical composer] attempt a literal reproduction of the landscape scene, of its details

of form and color? No, he expresses it in sound waves. . . . And as there are themselves absolute sound waves, so there are absolute waves of color and form.” Picabia’s explanation seems akin to the nineteenth-century critic Walter Pater’s famous statement that “all art constantly aspires to the status of music”—that in music, form and content are the same, and that music points to nothing beyond itself. Music is just about music.

While Picabia was in New York, he met the young painter Arthur Dove. They discovered they were both using similar forms, similar colors, and repeated figures in their paintings to suggest rhythm. Dove was painting from recordings, daringly attempting to produce works that were the visual equivalent of the feelings and sensory qualities involved in the acts of playing and listening to a record. He saw the premiere performance of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue in 1924 and then bought the twosided 78 rpm abbreviated recording of it by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, with Gershwin at the piano. He made two paintings of what he heard, one for each side of the record, and spent days listening, then painting, turning the record over and over as he worked. The first of these paintings, Rhapsody in Blue, Part I (1927), was painted on aluminum and had an uncoiled metal spring hanging over it. Conjecture has it that the phonograph Dove was using had a handwound spring drive and he wanted

the viewer to know his sources; others have said it represents the long upward movement of the opening clarinet solo in Rhapsody. Dove said of this project, rather defensively, “It will make people see that the so-called ‘abstractions’ are not abstract at all. . . . It is illustration.”

Davis was indelibly an American painter and he declared it in his jazz paintings. Many of his pictures contained signposts pointing to the music, either by their titles or by words written across the canvas (Swing Landscape [1938] or The Mellow Pad [1945–51]). He knew some of the key jazz musicians of his time, and Duke Ellington, James P. Johnson, and Earl Hines were among his fans. In 1942, when Davis’s work was exhibited in Edith Halpert’s Downtown Gallery, on opening night John Hammond arranged something of an all-star jam session featuring Ellington, Red Norvo, W. C. Handy, Mildred Bailey, and others. Piet Mondrian was in the audience.

When jazz drummer George Wettling turned to painting, Davis took him on as a student, and even copainted with him when Wettling used one of his paintings on the record jacket of George Wettling’s Jazz Band (Columbia CL6189, 1951). Mondrian moved from London to New York in 1940. He had already heard and seen jazz played by Black American servicemen in Paris after World War I and had learned some of the new dances that accompanied

right: Rose Piper, Grievin’ Hearted , c. 1948, oil on canvas, 36 × 30 inches (91.4 × 76.2 cm) © Rose Piper Estate. Photo: courtesy Clark Atlanta University Art Museum

them. His 1927 essay “Jazz and NeoPlastic” spelled out his plans to paint in the purest form possible, with straight and horizontal lines, squares and rectangles, primary colors and no color. It’s fascinating that he conceived of this purest of arts when he was incited to paint in the spirit of what many Americans at the time still thought of as debased music, but “jazz,” Mondrian said, “now realizes an almost pure rhythm, thanks to its greater intensity of sound. Its rhythm gives the illusion of being open, unhampered by form. . . . Jazz above all creates the nightclub’s open rhythm. It annihilates form. It frees rhythm from form. Thus a haven is created in the nightclub for those who would be free of form.”

In New York Mondrian surrendered completely to jazz, spending nights dancing at Café Society with Lee Krasner and Peggy Guggenheim, the only two people who could adjust to his eccentric dancing, all angles, sharp edges, and complex footwork. Mondrian was most impressed by boogie-woogie, especially when played by the piano trio of Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis, and Pete Johnson. It was music that seemed to have no beginning, middle, or end and that rumbled rhythmically like a freight train in the night. Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43) has been seen by some as a map of the syncopations and overlapping rhythms of these three pianists. By the time

Mondrian painted Victory Boogie Woogie (1942–44), one of his last works, it’s said that he had discovered Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, an after-hours club where young musicians were nightly inventing bebop. Thelonious Monk was the house pianist there, and he and Mondrian became close enough that Monk began to talk about his music in the same terms that Mondrian used to describe his paintings.

Romare Bearden was a master of many art forms, but it was not until late in his career that he became a collagist, and some of his best collages were of jazz. He had been a Cubist for most of his life, but said he wanted to have a less predictable and static feeling in these late works. “When I did the jazz series I had to modify [Cubism] a bit. . . . I think my jazz work has the feeling of classic African sculpture, the Benin or Dan” ( Billie Holiday , 1973; Jazz with Armstrong , 1981). He thought of his mission as using the language and methods of jazz musicians and the consciousness of Black experience to redefine the human experience.

Bearden was certainly the most famous jazz collagist, but he was not the first. That honor goes to Louis Armstrong, who began collaging some years earlier for his own amusement and memories. With Scotch tape and cutouts, he collaged over 600 tape-recording boxes, and though some of them indicate who’s

recorded on that tape, most are more freely done, and some illustrate small stories with his own typing. Others are in every sense abstractions. It was a serious enterprise, highlighted when Armstrong decided to collage the walls of his den.

Rose Piper traveled the South in 1947 and did a series of semiabstract paintings of blues and folk singers that clearly called attention to the songs as measures of the inequities of race in America. When she showed them that year at the RoKo Gallery in New York, she received high praise from critics and from Bearden. That a Black woman could be presented by a New York gallery at that time (or for that matter at any time) was an act of bravery and great artistry (The Death of Bessie Smith , 1947; Grievin’ Hearted , c. 1948). The passion and intensity of Piper’s pictures seem echoed later in the work of David Stone Martin, who did paintings for hundreds of record covers for Verve Records in the 1950s.

BEBOP: THE ATOMIC AGE OF JAZZ

In New York in the early 1940s the new style of jazz was bebop, a music so aggressively different from swing, the pop music of the day, that it was widely detested. Created by a group of young Black music intellectuals largely from farm communities in North and South Carolina, it was played by small groups of musicians, rather than the popular big bands, was performed fast and relentlessly, and required close listening. Bop musicians sometimes dressed as stereotypical artistes or bohemi-

ans and spoke their own language of hip, naming their tunes with nondescriptive and off-putting titles such as “Anthropology,” “Epistrophy,” and “Ornithology.” There was no irony here: they were serious.

The melodies and rhythms of bop were asymmetrical and jagged, not floating smoothly like swing; its harmony was more complex than in any previous form of jazz. The players were clearly not bothered by breaking rules and were always in search of something new. Previously, jazz musicians had improvised solos on the melodies and harmonies of wellknown songs, but were always careful to play those original melodies at the beginning and end of each piece so that the audience would know the theme that they were varying. But beboppers composed entirely new melodies on the chord structure of older pop tunes without fully revealing their sources. “Sweet Georgia Brown” could be turned into Coleman Hawkins’s “Hollywood Stampede” or Thelonious Monk’s “Bright Mississippi,” with the old melody peeking subliminally through the new one. These compositions with their ghostly subsurfaces created a tension that opened up new possibilities for invention. Fans and music critics still tethered to swing and perplexed by bebop called it “Chinese” music, an ethnic dismissal that was also used against abstract painters in the same era.

Bebop inspired new art ways among the Beats on both coasts: the jazz poetry of Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Kenneth Patchen, and Bob Kaufman; singer/ poet King Pleasure’s words were put to the instrumental solos of famous

Opposite, bottom: Harry Smith, Manteca , c. 1948–49, 35mm color slide of lost original painting.

Photo: courtesy Harry Smith Archives/Estate of Jordan Belson

Opposite, top: Frank Stella, Hyena Stomp, 1962, oil on canvas, 77 × 77 inches (195.6 × 195.6 cm) © 2025 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: © Tate, London/ Art Resource, New York

This page: Franz Kline, King Oliver, 1958, oil on canvas, 99 × 77 ½ inches (251.4 × 196.8 cm) © 2025 The Franz Kline Estate/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Photo: Christie’s Images/ Bridgeman Images

musicians. Jack Kerouac called his experiments in music-influenced writing “spontaneous prose.” Ginsberg explained Kerouac’s writing by pointing out that on Dizzy Gillespie’s recording of “Salt Peanuts” the horns imitated the pitch and rhythm of those words; “Black musicians were imitating speech cadences and Kerouac was imitating the Black musicians’ breath cadences on their horns and brought it back to speech.”

The connection between jazz and Abstract Expressionist painting was daringly announced when the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery in New York launched the exhibition Homage to Jazz: A Colorful Tribute in Paint to a Great American Art in December of 1946. There were works by Bearden, William Baziotes (That Evening Sun Goes Down , a line from a blues song), Byron Browne, Adolph Gottlieb ( Black and Tan Fantasy and Mood Indigo , both named after Ellington compositions), Carl Holty, and Robert Motherwell. The show’s catalogue contained an essay by Barry Ulanov, the editor of Metronome magazine and one of the earliest advocates of bebop. In it he drew attention to the coincidence of jazz fans’ complaints about bop’s rethinking of the music and the rejection of abstraction by many in the art world: “It was like noise, they said, it was superficial and without perspective. Without perspective, two dimensional. Even as the painters had robbed parallel

lines of their converging point, even as they flattened houses and faces and guitars, jazzmen had reduced the values of notes, flattening them.” Ulanov concluded by noting that many painters had embraced the new jazz while the musicians had taken to the new art: “They have discovered each other, the painters and the jazzmen, and their mutual discoveries about the function of art, as they had to. For these are the pre-eminent arts of this era in this country, the provocative, the original arts.”

Jazz of that period was referred to in one way or another by painters such as Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Norman Lewis, and Frank Stella. The music, the musicians, and the bars they frequented were titled in their paintings and mentioned in interviews and conversation. Kline’s King Oliver (1958) celebrated Joe “King” Oliver, Armstrong’s musical mentor. Stella’s paintings’ titles called attention to jazz records such as Jelly Roll Morton’s “Hyena Stomp” (1927) and Glenn Miller’s “Tuxedo Junction” (1940). De Kooning’s Female Head (The Jazz Singer) (c. 1965) was drawn from one of the nightspots he frequented.

Anthropologist, filmmaker, and artist Harry Smith painted from bebop recordings, but unlike Dove, he wanted to produce a visual translation of the sound of a recording, what he called a transcription. Every note and chord would be represented by dots, brushstrokes, and other

actions on the canvas, with each transcription set in a different form— sometimes a mandala, sometimes a maze—a tedious project that often took him years to do. He was particularly interested in jazz recordings that mixed Latin and jazz rhythms, such as Gillespie’s 1947 “Manteca.” Once a painting was finished, he would “perform” it by playing the record before an audience of a few friends, using a pointer to help them follow the work’s visual correspondence with the sounds. Smith was not so much interested in accurate visual transcription as in animating paintings to see how improvisation would look, a practice similar to that of those jazz musicians who transcribe improvised solos from recordings to see how they work (Manteca , 1948; Dizzy Gillespie’s recording “Algo Bueno,” c. 1952). Smith carried this idea further when he did abstract jazz murals for Jimbo’s Bop City in a Black neighborhood of San Francisco, in 1950, or when he created soundtracks for the animated abstract films he made by painting directly on film stock. Smith influenced a number of West Coast art filmmakers who also used jazz: Jordan Belson, Hy Hirsh, Charles Eames, Patricia Marx, and others.

Jeff Schlanger, a painter who called himself “The Music Witness,” attempted to take into account the difference between a recording and a live jazz performance. He painted performances in real time, starting when the musicians began and stopping when they finished. Painting on large pieces of cardboard, he used colored pens, metallic confetti, and other effects to capture something of the look of the musicians in action, but also to produce an abstraction of what the music sounded like. The painting was done in one take. It was difficult to paint on his lap or on a small table, and he was sometimes thrown out of clubs as a distraction.

Most painters who reference jazz focus on musicians of their generation, usually running ahead of the public’s awareness of the music. But there are exceptions. When Kline was twenty-three, in 1933, he painted the rather cartoonish monochromatic Jazz Murals series for a roller-skating rink in Lehighton, Pennsylvania, and in 1940 he did Hot Jazz , some figurative murals in color for a Bleecker Street bar. Later, after he had totally converted to abstraction and had become involved with more modern musicians, he was still celebrating older figures such as “King” Oliver, in a 1958 painting. Jean-Michel Basquiat was another: though clearly a painter of his time in his use of social commentary, he drew on the bebop generation thirty years earlier. His works include celebrations of eminent bop musicians, particularly Charlie

Parker (Charles the First and CPRKR , both 1982), and Parker and Gillespie ( Horn Players , 1983). The paintings are coded with elliptical biographical and musical references—dates, titles, quotes. Some paintings show discographic lists and visual puns, the sort of work done by the most serious fans (Charlie Parker Freeboppers , 1986).

There is no way of knowing how many artists painted while listening to jazz, though some have made a point of making it known: Dove, Mondrian, Wadsworth Jarrell, Norman Lewis, Sam Middleton, Joe Overstreet, Robert Ryman, Bob Thompson, and Stanley Whitney, among others. Jackson Pollock is often thought of as playing jazz records while painting, but actually he only listened to them (“at full volume and by the hour,” Lee Krasner said) when he wasn’t painting.

MUSICIANS AS PAINTERS

Painters are not often asked about musical influences, and when they are, the interviewers seldom follow up. But when they do, the answers are usually very revealing. Pollock thought jazz was the only other creative thing that was happening in this country. Belson, when asked about his interest in bebop, said, “It was simply the most radical thing at the time. Dissonance, a curious take on pop music.” “Dissonance” is a word that often came up in discussions of bop—a clashing of notes or chords, something unpleasant to the ear, the dictionaries say, but Belson was celebrating it. Lewis spoke of “beauty in dissonance” in music and art. Monk named one of his compositions “Ugly Beauty.” Sun Ra urged his musicians to “do something right: make a mistake.” It was this willingness to experiment and take risks in the competitive spirit of bop that likely caught the attention of artists.

A surprising number of musicians have painted and had their work shown and sold, or at least got them on their own record covers. By my count, at least seventy-five. Some are surprising by the seeming gap between their music and their art—Pee Wee Russell, for one, a clarinetist whose career spanned almost the whole history of jazz in his lifetime, from Bix Beiderbecke to Monk, but whose paintings seem rooted in Davis’s early years. Or Bill Dixon, one of the first free-jazz players of the 1960s, who insisted that there was no necessary relation between his music and his painting. But then musician painters don’t often get asked about their painting by jazz interviewers, either.

Ryman was an artist who was occasionally asked about his musi-

cal background. He was an accomplished saxophonist before he took up painting, and had studied with Lennie Tristano, a pianist who developed his own system of bebopinspired improvisation. Tristano’s compositions were equivalents of the older forms of jazz that originated through interaction with other musicians in performance, rather than through the solo improvisation favored by bebop players. Ryman is noted for his all-white paintings, and his jazz influence is not easy to see on first glance. But he was always eager to explain what he thought about the relationship between his two vocations:

I wanted to compose; to compose with my instrument, to improvise, to find out all the things you

can do with the instrument. In that respect it’s related to painting. What’s important is the composition, the discoveries you make while working. Painting really resembles music in that way. You develop something and then you take the part that interests you. That’s how it happened.

Music is a medium that people are more attuned to, so to speak, than painting. Vocal music, which is more popular, I see as more like representational painting, because it conveys meanings outside the music itself. Instrumental music, which is rather less popular perhaps, is more abstract, but still projects feeling and emotion. I think painting can project the same kind of sense as music, it’s just a differ-

ent medium. I sometimes listen to music while I’m painting. Modern jazz mostly.

Asked about his one orange painting, Ryman said, “I don’t remember the process. There are probably all kinds of things going on there. It didn’t start off orange, I’m sure.” Pointing to the specks of green showing through and around the sides of the canvas, he said, “That’s important.” It was important because he had painted over an undercoat, intentionally leaving that small corner revealed. He made that point when he talked about what was being called the whiteness of his works: “They’re not white or monochromatic paintings because of the surfaces functioning as a second color in contrast to the white of the paint. It was a matter of making the

Opposite: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Horn Players , 1983, acrylic and oil stick on canvas mounted on wood supports, in 3 parts, overall: 96 × 75 inches (243.8 × 190.5 cm), The Broad Art Foundation © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Licensed by Artestar, New York. Photo: Rob McKeever

This page, bottom: Romare Bearden, Empress of the Blues , 1974, acrylic and pencil on paper and printed paper on paperboard, 36 × 48 inches (91.4 × 121.9 cm) © Romare Bearden Foundation/VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC/ Art Resource, New York

This page, top: Robert Ryman, Untitled (Background Music), c. 1962, New Masters vinyl polymer paint, oil, gesso, and graphite on stretched linen canvas, 69 ¼ × 69 ¼ × 2 inches (175.9 × 175.9 × 5.1 cm), The Greenwich Collection, New York, gift of the artist, 2008 © Robert Ryman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio © The Greenwich Collection, New York

surface very animated, giving it a lot of movement and activity. This was done not just with the brushwork and the use of quite heavy paint but with color which was subtly creeping up through the white.”

A few of Ryman’s paintings have the titles of Tristano recordings or of those of Tristano’s students. Untitled (Background Music) (c. 1962) is one such. It’s named after a record by the saxophonist Warne Marsh, itself a bebop creation of a new melody layered on an old one, in this case Billie Holiday’s “All of Me” (1941). The background of Ryman’s white painting was not white. There is no deception here, either in Marsh’s recording or in the painting. It’s possible to hear or see what has been done. Nor does appreciation of either the music or the painting depend on knowing what the process was. Such layering was a basic practice of bebop musicians.

RECORD COVERS AND MUSICIANS INSPIRED BY PAINTINGS

The development of twelve-inch LPs made possible a new way of selling and seeing music. These records were large enough to allow the sleeve to include information about the music and to display photos or paintings, all in a single package that could be hung on the wall of the record store as in an art gallery. Although the LP was initially intended for “long-playing” classical works—works the length of symphonies—by the 1950s it was standard for pop and jazz LPs. The early classical LPs often had cover art influenced by then-trendy Abstract Expressionism, though usually rather blandly executed. The larger record companies tried a variety of visuals with nonclassical recordings, often a model lounging on a couch listening to a record. Jazz records were a

bit more daring, with what were then called progressive jazz musicians such as Dave Brubeck asking to have well-known painters’ works on their covers. The smaller jazz record companies used local, largely unknown artists to create their covers cheaply. Some, like the self-taught painter Richard Slater Jennings (better known as Prophet Jennings), became famous among jazz musicians, if not among the public. The jackets of Eric Dolphy’s Outward Bound (1960) and Out There (1961) are typical of the surreal quality Jennings sought to describe what he heard in the music. Salvador Dalí was one of his favorites, and Dalí himself provided paintings for record covers by Stan Kenton and Jackie Gleason.

Coleman Hawkins, the man who brought the tenor saxophone into jazz, recorded two pieces that are noted as unaccompanied improvisations, something rare for a wind instrument at the time. They were titled Dali and Picasso , and were probably named by his producer, Norman Granz, also a famous collector of modern art.

Perhaps the best-known painting on a jazz record cover is Pollock’s White Light (1954), used as part of the cover design of Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation (1961). Pollock had no interest in modern jazz and did not live long enough to hear Coleman’s music, nor was this cover Coleman’s idea. Still, Coleman said that Pollock “was in the same state as I was in—doing what I was doing.” And in his notes to his 1959 recording Change of the Century , he wrote that there was “continuity of expression” between Pollock’s paintings and his music.

Many musicians have made music inspired by paintings or other artworks. Jane Ira Bloom’s Chasing Paint (2002) is music motivated by Pollock. On other recordings she drew on Marc Chagall and Joan Miró. Myra Melford talks about the influence of growing up in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, and also of the sculptures of Miró and the paintings of Cy Twombly; Bobby Previte recorded The 23 Constellations of Joan Miró (2001); Marty Ehrlich’s music and Oliver Jackson’s paintings were developed into a gallery exhibition and a recording in 2003 titled The Long View. Other examples are Branford Marsalis’s Romare Bearden Revealed (2003); Lisle Ellis’s Sucker Punch Requiem: An Homage to JeanMichel Basquiat (2008); the Matt Kendrick Unit’s Art/Jazz (1994), influenced by various artists; the Swiss Jazz Orchestra and Jim McNeely’s Paul Klee (2006); and Alain Kirili and Thomas Buckner’s Kirili et les Nymphéas: Hommage à Monet (2008). Ted Nash’s Portrait in Seven Shades (2010) was inspired by Chagall, Dalí, Matisse, Pollock, Van Gogh, Claude Monet, and Pablo Picasso. His most recent project is Rauschenberg in Jazz: Nine Details , released in 2023. There is more to be said about the origins and the nexus at which these different art forms meet, and if we included other forms such as the quilts made by Black women of Gee’s Bend in Alabama, we’d find improvisation, off-beat accents, shifting or staggered rhythm patterns, figureground manipulation, all of them coming from the same roots as jazz.

1. Jean Cocteau in Jack Hopper, “Jean Cocteau on Jazz,” DownBeat , January 14, 1964

TARYN SIMON KLEROTERION

Taryn Simon has imagined an election machine based on surviving archaeological fragments of a device known as a kleroterion, which was used at the beginnings of democracy in ancient Athens. To prevent corruption, all male citizens of the city had the opportunity to hold public office or sit on a jury through the unpredictable workings of a kleroterion, an instrument that used a lottery system to ensure randomized selection of a winner. The integrity of a transparent election process was preserved by placing the kleroterion in public areas where everyone could observe the proceedings.

Simon’s sculpture Kleroterion demonstrates how randomized outcomes can counteract authoritarian forces in groups ranging from a family through a community to a nation. What if questions such as “Who decides what’s for dinner?” and “Who decides if we go to war?” were determined by chance and the pull of a lever? The making of Kleroterion , and its installation at Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, New York, coincided with the presidential election season in the United States. Asking what might be lost or gained through a process of randomized resolution and inviting everyone to participate, the sculpture spotlights the ways in which decisions are made and the dynamics of both families and our political system.

Below is an excerpt from a panel discussion about Kleroterion at Storm King Art Center in November of last year. Along with the artist, the panelists were: Nora Lawrence, Executive Director, Storm King Art Center; Philip Lindsay, Democracy Innovations Program Manager, Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, Bard College; and Tomás González Olavarría, founder of Tribu, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing innovations and institutional reforms to modernize democracy. NORA LAWRENCE Taryn, what was the genesis of this work?

TARYN SIMON The piece started when I was in Athens researching ancient receipts, carved into stone, that preceded paper-and ink-records. I went to a museum holding ancient artifacts where I stumbled on a fragment of a kleroterion from the early days of democracy. There isn’t one preserved intact anywhere, so I started to imagine its forms.

NL And what was its purpose?

TS It was designed to randomize the process of selecting citizens for positions of power, including public office and juries. All citizens—in ancient Athens that excluded women—were invited to throw their hat into the ring. It was an attempt to build a transparent lottery system. I wanted to take the crumbs of that “election machine,” let’s call it, and build them into a game.

NL I think it’s critical that we placed Kleroterion in an open space. Can you talk about the logic behind that?

TS In early accounts of the kleroterion, it was always positioned in open space, sometimes on a hill, giving a 360-degree-view to all the participants or observers of the electoral proceedings. Circling the machine meant no hidden back door and less possibility for corruption.

NL Philip, you were familiar with this history before seeing Taryn’s work; could you talk about the origins of the kleroterion?

PHILIP LINDSAY I’ve worked on a few political campaigns, and the reality is that working on elections is exhausting: it’s pretty much a winner-take-all system, and in the US it’s run in an industrial way that often leaves organizers burned out and the populace divided. Starting in 2021, we at the Hannah Arendt Center started to host conferences and trainings on sortition, which is the use of random selection to choose representative bodies. It’s an alternative to election in which we could instead select large bodies of people to come together and speak to each other across geographic and ideological lines to reach a decision on a subject. It sounds crazy but in fact it’s the original meaning of the word “democracy” in ancient Greece. There, the term democracy or “rule by the people” referred

to the random selection of members of the political juries according to their demes, the Greek version of our counties. Your citizenship was tied to your deme.

This was a new system, invented around 400 to 500 bc . It was intended to break up the old clan- and wealth-based tribes in ancient Athens: the aim was to force people from the coast, from the mountains, from the inlands, to meet and talk and get to know each other, participate in art festivals together, travel together, fight wars together. It’s as if we in the modern US said, We’re going to break up the two-party system, we’re going to break up the urban/rural divide, we’re going to break up the old culture wars, and from now on, when you turn eighteen, you’re going to have to go on a service-based camping trip for a few months with someone from the other side of the aisle, the other side of the country.

TOMÁS GONZÁLEZ OLAVARRÍA Without a collective sense of identity among all members of a society—a shared “us”—democracy cannot truly function. This mutual recognition is essential for the social cohesion that underpins a stable society. In democratic innovations like sortition, modern societies—diverse in nature— have an opportunity to strengthen their social fabric and shared understanding.

The way we live together depends on culture, technology, and institutions. While cultures evolve and technologies advance rapidly, institutions often lag behind, creating a gap that leaves democracy struggling to keep pace with change. My work focuses on democratic innovations, aiming to remind us that the mechanisms implementing democratic ideals must evolve to stay true to their purpose. As the Chilean biologist and philosopher Humberto Maturana once said, “When we talk about change and innovation, the first thing we should ask ourselves is: what do we want to preserve?”

In a rapidly changing world, preserving the essence of what we are—and what we want to be—requires embracing change. Because institutions are resistant to change, we must make deliberate efforts to adapt them continuously. This will ensure that they uphold their core values, deliver tangible results to improve living standards, and foster a society where we remain willing to live together. Taryn Simon’s artistic interpretation of the kleroterion communicates the principles of sortition and democratic ideals as a foundation for living together, inspiring broader audiences to imagine democratic innovations.

NL And that’s a key thing that we’ve been seeing in visitor interactions with Taryn’s Kleroterion : it opens up the types of things that we’re interested in deciding on or thinking about. So, for instance, a few of us were out by the work and a young child came up to it. He decided that what it would decide was who, among all of us there, would get to jump around in a circle. And that was very important to him, so we all jumped around in a circle with him when he actually did win. It can be a big decision, it can be a small decision, but the people coming to it have their own idea of what that might be.

TS And what the world could look like—a place where we could decide to just jump around in circles all day. That sense of gaming, of strategy and play, is at the sculpture’s heart. I’ve wanted to make a game for a long time. I grew up in my grandfather’s and father’s arcades; both of them invented, manufactured, and distributed old-school arcade games, air hockey tables, pool tables. Games were like oxygen, always there. The arcade has been a huge part of my life and influences how I see systems and people operate. And there’s no bigger game than politics.

We designed the kleroterion to be the color of a cue ball and the chips are the color of pool balls. As in pool, the balls move through unpredictably, bouncing off each other, driven by the motion of one individual.

NL The machine has five chips, because you wanted

the number of chips to match the size of an average family. Can you speak to your interest in highlighting decision-making at different scales?

TS So much of the disruption, corruption, death drive, and folly we see on the big stage is found in a small group, in a family, even in an individual brain. The process of decision-making—what you’re going to eat for dinner, who gets to do what, who leads—operates through the same mathematics and chaos.

NL Tomás, could you speak a little bit about your work of putting a lottery-based system into practice in Chile?

TGO The organization I lead, Fundación Tribu, spearheaded a public deliberation process in partnership with the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University, led by James Fishkin, creator of a methodology that has been implemented over 100 times worldwide in the past thirty years. Our project—the first deliberative-democracy process to use a nationally representative civic lottery in Latin America—was formally endorsed by the Chilean senate and supported by organizations such as the US Embassy, CNN Chile, the Universidad de Chile, and the Asociación Chilena de Municipalidades. It involved 514 people from all regions of Chile, selected through a random lottery to ensure maximum independence and representativeness. The group was statistically representative of Chilean voters with a margin of error below 5 percent. The process focused on concrete proposals of reform to the pension and health care systems. All these proposals had been developed over the past decade by technical experts from across the political spectrum and were presented to participants in a balanced manner, including arguments for and against each one. The results make notable contributions to address disinformation, lower polarization, increase civic literacy, and build consensus around policy issues.

While not yet a formal system, this mechanism holds significant potential to complement democracy as we know it. That first process helped to showcase how a randomly selected body could work, and now we’re looking forward to developing a roadmap of research, capacity-building, and institutional development to address the challenges and open questions in order to institutionalize this mechanism. Randomly selected groups can strengthen democracy by incorporating diverse perspectives, both technical and experiential, into public deliberation. They also promote civic education by actively involving citizens and help to align incentives in public decision-making, as participants have no political ambitions tied to their involvement.

NL How does this piece function within the larger preoccupations or ideas in your practice as an artist, Taryn?

TS I keep making sculptures that people can be in or play with—things that can be touched and felt. Or sonic things that echo and crank. I guess after making so many two-dimensional objects that you observe—photographs, video—it became really important to make something that could be held.

NL Our conversation today reminds me of your earliest project, The Innocents [2000–03], where you were looking at criminal legal processes, jury selections, and even obliquely the history of sortition. The text about Kleroterion posits that the work “asks what might be lost or gained through a process of randomized resolution.” What do you see as benefits? How do you think about that statement?

TS The tricky thing is that randomization is basically impossible and ultimately patterned or rigged in some way. But true randomization I guess could be a way to escape prescribed choices—a way to let the possibility of unknown, unexpected, and unresolved realities peek in.

Previous spread and opposite: Taryn Simon, Kleroterion , 2024, installation view, Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York © Taryn Simon. Photos: Eli Baden-Lasar

COUP DE THÉÂTRE: ISABELLE HUPPERT AND ROBERT WILSON

For over three decades, avantgarde theater and opera director Robert Wilson and actor Isabelle Huppert have shared a forceful, profound collaboration. Their latest piece is Mary Said What She Said , an almost unbelievably demanding ninety-minute monologue by Huppert that is based on the life of Mary Queen of Scots. Opening first in Paris in 2019, and performed last spring at London’s Barbican Centre to critical acclaim, Mary Said What She Said will have its American premiere at NYU Skirball, New York, on February 27. Author William Middleton caught up with the actress and the director in Paris.

WILLIAM MIDDLETON So I have to say that I’ve never seen a performance that seemed so physically and emotionally demanding. In its review of Mary Said What She Said , Le Monde pointed to the movement you make late in the piece, moving back and forth on a diagonal, maniacally, and wondered how you were able to achieve it. Do you feel that this piece is demanding? What’s it like to perform?

ISABELLE HUPPERT Yes, it’s very, very demanding but also very, very rewarding. It’s a long journey. Even now, having done it I don’t know how many times, I always feel at the beginning that I have to climb a big mountain and I never know exactly how it’s going to process. But Bob has orchestrated so many devices all along the performance: the lights, the space, the movements, the sound—they’re all wonderful partners so I never feel lonely. But yes, it’s something to achieve, the movements and the speed of the voice, with a lot of nuances, because sometimes it goes very slow and sometimes it goes very fast. But every time I’ve done it, it’s still so exciting.

WM So tell us a little about the genesis of Mary Said What She Said : What attracted you both to the story?

ROBERT WILSON Well, I’d been thinking about doing it for a long time. At first I thought about maybe doing it as a larger production and then I decided to narrow it down to a single character. In the beginning, I’d thought to do it with Jeanne Moreau and made a video portrait of her as Mary Queen of Scots. As it turned out, I ultimately thought about Isabelle. The author Darryl Pinckney and I have worked together on six or seven productions, so we have a shorthand: he does his work and I do mine and then we see what it’s like together. That’s one thing I also like about working with Isabelle—we know each other, we trust each other, so we can work separately and then put our work together.

IH And we knew each other because Darryl had adapted [Virginia Woolf’s] Orlando [1928], which was my first encounter with Bob, the first time we worked together. That adaptation of Orlando was in 1992, over thirty years ago.

WM And what about the story of Mary Queen of Scots was interesting to you?

IH Well, who isn’t interested in Mary Stuart as a historical figure? But, with Bob, I never consider my work with him as involving the notion of characters. I never feel that I “play” Mary Stuart. I don’t believe in the notion of character, I don’t think it exists. In a work, you go through different layers or states: sorrow, joy, anger, this kind of thing. In this piece the audience gets the story of Mary Stuart— well, glimpses of the story. Even if Bob doesn’t have a classical narrative storyline, you get everything you need about a life like Mary Stuart’s: tragedy, adventure, multiple loves. The play is called Mary Said What She Said because Darryl Pinckney chose to focus the story through her relationship with her four lady’s maids, all of whom were named Mary: Mary Seton, Mary Livingston, Mary Beaton, and Mary Fleming. At the end, what’s most important is the sense of a destiny, a tragic destiny, of someone who happens to be a queen. With Bob’s genius you capture all of this without even being aware of what you capture.

RW And if you know something about the history, the piece is one thing, but if you don’t, it’s another. It’s not necessary to know the story of Mary Queen of Scots, but it adds something if you do. The work should be accessible on many levels, and one is that someone can just walk in from the street, not knowing anything, and experience something.

WM Tell me a little about the rehearsal process.

RW I tend to think abstractly, putting together a

work in an abstract form, and what’s unique about Isabelle is that she’s one of the few actresses I’ve worked with, in about sixty years of working in the theater, who can think abstractly. Sometimes I do the rehearsal myself. If I start at the back of the stage and I take twenty-five minutes to walk forward, can I hold the audience? No music, no text—how could I do that? Then I work with Isabelle. Often we first work without text. So forget about the text, forget about character, forget about interpretation. And in sixty years of working in the theater, I’ve never, ever once told an actor what to think.

IH [ Laughing ] Which is great, because I don’t think actors should think. I have two mantras: an actor shouldn’t have ideas and an actor shouldn’t think. What do you think, Bob?

RW Yes, exactly, ideas are for—

IH For you!

WM So, rehearsals are about movement?

RW Physicality. I give formal direction. Can this be quieter? Can this be louder? Can this be more interior? Can this be rougher? Can this be smoother? Can this be more exterior, then more interior, and can you change quickly? Or can you have a slow change, a slow dissolve? I give these formal directions and then it’s filled in, that’s up to Isabelle. On the one hand I’m giving very strict limits; on the other, I’m giving freedom. You can have 100 women dancing Giselle [1841], but why is there one that’s the most beautiful? They’re all doing the same steps choreographed in the nineteenth century, but it’s how you fill in the form. The form is only a frame to get you somewhere else. And that’s up to Isabelle.

IH Within this shape and these indications, you go through all these various states—rage, sorrow, joy—but you feel a total freedom. It’s very strange to experience. You have so much more freedom than if you had a psychological pattern and all these notions of a specific character. For me, character is always like a prison, because you feel obliged to resemble a predetermined person. And acting is all about being yourself. I never feel as free as when I’m in a work with Bob. Bob talks about abstraction and shapes and movements, and there’s a great sense of precision, but he never tells me to be a certain way. It’s very exciting and inspiring and reassuring because he’s taking care of the frame, of things that I don’t have to worry about, but within these limitations I’m completely free—I can be myself.

RW Sometimes I turn all the lights off and just run techs or listen to the sound, like a radio play. And if you’re listening to a radio, you have enormous freedom to imagine, “What does this room look like? What does the character look like?” And then sometimes I run it silent. If you see a silent movie, you have tremendous freedom to imagine the audio. Sometimes I work on them separately and then put them together and see what happens. My work is not like Merce Cunningham and John Cage, who worked on music scores separate from dance. Mine is not a collage. It’s structured so that what I see can reinforce what I hear without having to illustrate it, necessarily. But it’s not arbitrary either.

WM As Isabelle mentioned, you’ve worked together for over thirty years. I’d like to know a little about how you began and what each of you saw in the other.

IH We had a mutual friend, Alain Coblence, a lawyer. Alain wanted to take me to a concert at the Conservatoire in Paris. I was tired and didn’t want to go, but he insisted and said that we’d have dinner after with friends. So I went, and we had dinner with Pierre Bergé and Bob, just the four of us. At the time, Bob was doing Orlando in Berlin, with Jutta Lampe.

Previous spread, this spread, and following spread (right): Mary Said What She Said (2019), directed by Robert Wilson; performed by Isabelle Huppert, L’espace Cardin du Théâtre de la Ville, Paris, 2019. Text by Darryl Pinckney, music by Ludovico Einaudi, and costumes by Jacques Reynaud. Photo: © Lucie Jansch

Following spread, left: Orlando (French version: 1993), adapted by Darryl Pinckney and Robert Wilson from the novel by Virginia Woolf; performed by Isabelle Huppert, Théâtre VidyLausanne, Switzerland, 1993. Music by Hans Peter Kuhn. Photo: © Abisag Tüllmann

So we started talking about it and all of a sudden Bob looked at me and said, “Do you want to do it in Paris?” It was out of nowhere. I said, “Yeah, okay, why not?” Of course I knew who Bob Wilson was but I never knew if he really knew who I was. And we started the production at the Théâtre Vidy in Lausanne and then did it at the Odéon theater in Paris. If I hadn’t gone out that evening, maybe it would never have begun. I love the idea that one of the most important encounters in my life started completely by chance.

WM And Bob, what was it that attracted you to Isabelle and her work?

RW What’s interesting about Isabelle is just who she is as a person. I think that was the initial attraction and it still is. I was just fascinated by Isabelle, her mind, her presence—the multifaceted elements of her.

IH That may be what Bob found with me, the possibility to give access to this multiplicity of personas that you have in yourself, but that’s not only me—it’s anybody. Bob’s genius is to give me such a sense of possibility. I took it because I’m an actress and I’m almost voracious as an actress—I want to do as many things as possible. And he gave me this possibility because he has this idea that human beings are not any single definition. It’s like a life’s journey, going through all these different states—in the case of Mary Stuart, to death. You don’t focus on something narrow, on a story, you go much broader. And the stage gives you this possibility, this immensity, for exploring feelings.

WM I was hoping to talk a little about the two other pieces you did together, Orlando and Quartett [2006].

IH Orlando , again, was a really big journey because it was going from a little boy to a woman and through the centuries. It wasn’t only going to a certain point in your life—with Mary Stuart, to death; it was even more universal.

RW It’s curious, I did Orlando in Germany and I did it in Paris with Isabelle and we traveled all over with it. Isabelle was equally strong as a boy at the court of Elizabeth I as she was as a woman in the mid-nineteenth going on to the twentieth century. And I loved her transition, it was just so easy, she just walked behind a—

IH The tree, you remember.

RW She came back and she was changed.

IH The tree was in the middle of the stage and yes, there was a final transition, when I was putting on the dress. I always thought we should do it again—it might resonate even more now.

WM And Quartett , can you tell us about that?

RW Heiner Müller was the author, and Heiner said at the end of his life that I was his favorite director, the one whose direction of his work he preferred. Heiner can be very cruel, with texts that can be bloody. I render it another way, with a kind of beauty that can make the violence even more powerful. Also, what’s always important is what’s behind the words. Heiner is often played to be even more cruel, but there are moments that can be done very tender. It was a way of having Heaven and Hell be one world, not two—incorporating opposites. I say to Isabelle that if you’re standing on the stage, the space in back of you is as important, or more important, as the space in front of you. If you’re only aware of the space in front, with the public, it’s flat. It’s the same with text. When I did

The Black Rider [1990] with Tom Waits and William S. Burroughs, Burroughs said [in Burroughs’s voice ] “That’s how the cookie crumbles . . . that’s how the potato mashes.” It wasn’t [regular voice ] “That’s

how the potato mashes.” I heard it in Sweden a few years ago, and they said [regular voice ] “That’s how the cookie crumbles, that’s how the potato—” No [laughs ], it’s not the same! It’s the irony, the space in back. Tom Waits says [in Waits’s voice ] “Come along with the Black Rider, we’ll have a gay old time!” And “Take off your skin and dance around in your bones. I’m going to drink your blood like wine. We’ll have a gay old time.” It’s the irony, the space behind those texts, and that’s what’s brilliant about Isabelle too.

IH I was listening to Bob doing these little childish things, which is a very important dimension in his work. Of course there’s often a sense of the tragic, but there’s also something extremely childish, and it’s very important to have mental access to that dimension, otherwise you don’t get Bob’s work. There’s a sense of humor, yes, but more like something a child would do—make faces, or distort the text. I think you miss something as a spectator, and as an actor, if you don’t get this. It’s important to be in connection with this nonrational relationship to text and movement, an exploration of something dreamy, crazy, unconscious. Bob deals with all this in a way that has never really been done before and this is why, I think, he has been such an important director since he first arrived.

RW It helps if you imagine a child in the room. How do you do Medea [431 bc] with an audience of children? Maybe she’s an angel of death. Maybe it’s not [ growls ]. So how do you do that? How do you perform King Lear [1606]? If you laugh a little at Shakespeare’s great tragedy, it’ll be more tragic. Baudelaire said, “Genius is childhood recovered at will.”

WM Aesthetically, Bob, there seems to be a connection between your work and the Japanese theater, and with German Expressionism.

RW When I was quite young, I went to Japan on a Rockefeller Brothers Fund grant. I knew nothing about Japanese theater or the Japanese tradition, but I felt a very strong identity with what they were doing, the formality, especially with the Noh theater. I’d also studied architecture, and in my first week there, the great American architect Louis Kahn spoke and said, “Students, start with light.” One of the first things I do, not knowing anything yet about the production, is light the space. I think of people who were influenced by light—yes, the German Expressionists but I would also say Luchino Visconti, on stage and in film. I first did

A Letter for Queen Victoria [1974] in Spoleto and Visconti came to the opening. After, he came backstage and said, “Oh, Mr. Wilson, your lighting is masterful.” I had tears. The next morning I went to watch his rehearsal. He was in the opera house, directing Manon Lescaut [1893], sitting in the back of the theater: “Put a little more yellow there. Oh, too much. Now we need a little more violet. Now put a little more red in the violet.” He was painting with light, and from that day on I realized that one could do the same, paint with light. For Einstein on the Beach [1976] I did drawings of the light for Philip Glass. From the very beginning, I’ve drawn the light: a vertical bar of light for the first scene, a horizontal bar for the next scene, circles of light for later. From that book of drawings Phil wrote the music. So light is not an afterthought, it’s an active participant.

WM How do you see the difference, Isabelle, between being on stage and cinema?

IH There are a million differences and in some ways it’s no different. Of course cinema is nothing like the abstract proposal of theater, in terms of space, a stage, and a limited time of two or three hours. But as far as I’m concerned, as an actress, it’s no different. A long time ago, the main difference was the necessity of projecting the voice, of being heard. That makes you act unnaturally, in an exaggerated way, which is very different from the realistic way of acting that moviemaking allows. In a production with Bob, we have microphones, so you have access to a very intimate voice. He re-creates exactly what cinema provides, access to something very intimate that the camera allows you to express. Through the sound, Bob even re-creates the feeling of a close-up. He puts the spectator in the situation of watching theater but also almost watching a film. WM Are there other major projects that you both have this spring?

IH Major like Mary, no. I’m so happy and excited to be able to bring it to New York.

RW It has been over twenty years since I’ve had a new work in New York. I’m eighty-three. For my eightieth birthday I had five productions in Paris and an exhibition at the Louvre. But it’s been many, many years since I’ve had a production in New York.

IH We just did Mary in Korea, and today I learned that we’re going to be taking it to Japan in October. It’s great—I’m so happy. RW Me too.

SABINE MORITZ FROM GRAY TO COLOR

In 2024, Sabine Moritz debuted new paintings at Gagosian, Beverly Hills. This exhibition, her first on the West Coast, precedes an upcoming show at the Olivia Foundation, Mexico City (February 5–June 8, 2025). Here, novelist Francine Prose looks back to some of Moritz’s earlier graphite drawings, thinking through their relationship to the more recent explorations of color in oil paint.

The Past

Something about Sabine Moritz’s paintings reminds me of a late afternoon, more than a decade ago, watching the winter light fade in a publishing office in Prague. Two Czech friends spoke very softly—spoke as they hadn’t in years, they said—about life under Eastern Bloc communism. One recalled that as a young woman, she had been forced to give up her job in the film industry because she refused to “report” on her colleagues. The other had been followed by the secret police because she borrowed a copy of Moby-Dick from the American Library.

Both agreed, slightly surprised, that their memories of that era were remarkably monochromatic. The buildings were gray, the stairwells were gray, the meat (when you could get it) was gray, the neighbors’ faces, et cetera. Even the sunny summer days could barely manage a cold pastel. I thought of how, in the work of the photographer Loretta Lux, who grew up in the former East Germany, pallor turns the children’s skin translucent and their clothes look washed clean of whatever they were.

My Czech friends had reservations about the Disneyfication of Prague. So many houses had been painted green, pink, and yellow! But overall they were happy that color had entered their lives.

I mention this because Sabine Moritz, born in 1969, spent her childhood and early adolescence in East Germany. She and her family lived in a Sovietstyle concrete housing block in Lobeda, not far from the city of Jena. Her parents were chemists. Her father was seriously injured in a laboratory accident. They moved to Jena before emigrating to West Germany in 1985.

Published in 2010, Lobeda is an evocative, affecting collection of Moritz’s pencil drawings of the neighborhood, the city, and the area where she grew up. These works, which she began making in the 1990s, echo both the bleakness and the tenderness with which my friends summoned the past.

Memory

Moritz’s renderings of childhood memories recall the great works of Czech and Romanian New Wave cinema. We know that the places she draws were real, and may still exist, yet somehow they seem like the sets for black-and-white science fiction films: Alphaville (1965) with more subtle lighting and a somewhat less threatening atmosphere. These roadways, squares, interiors, and facades are dreamscapes: at once specific and unplaceable, mysterious and familiar.

Over time, people and a bit of color edge their way into the drawings: playground equipment, fragments of interiors, children dressed up for the first day of school. But somehow the children seem like overdressed, edgy tourists in a deserted city. In one drawing two little girls seem to be playing, until we realize that this is more likely a statue of two little girls playing—a halfhearted invitation, an unconvincing signal that this is where little girls play.

Aggressively plain and weirdly lovely, these unprepossessing domestic and industrial exteriors float up out of the pages of Moritz’s book Jena Düsseldorf (2011). In reality such places insist on their utilitarian solidity, their ideological refusal to be comfortable or pretty—to mimic a bourgeois aesthetic. But on the page they’re more tentative,

less sure, more melancholy, than in life. We’re reminded that they were someone’s home (in this case the artist’s). They seem to be waiting to come back to life, waiting for their long-lost residents to return.

Most of the scenes are rendered in that Soviet winter-landscape gray. As Moritz says in Jena Düsseldorf, “At that time everything was the same. . . . These new residential areas seem to me like the depiction of ‘the new socialist human being’ with channeled desires and controlled needs which have been transformed into an infrastructure.”

When color appears in the drawings, it’s a little muted; the red/orange vests worn by the schoolgirls aren’t clamoring for our attention. They speak of a world where the human desire to stand out was sensibly tempered by the need to keep one’s head down. And when something bright insists on itself—a red chair, a colorful bathroom wall—it’s isolated, singular.

Life and Art

I’m never entirely comfortable connecting an artist’s life to the art. How much can a purely abstract painting be autobiography in disguise? Possibly the past—childhood, history, experience—means everything and nothing. All these elements are aspects of the self, the prison of the self. If art is an escape from that self, that doesn’t mean that the walls and the bars of the cell no longer exist. Charles Dickens told no one but his wife and one friend that his father had been in the Marshalsea debtors’ prison, but actual or metaphorical jails appear in book after book after book.

I can’t help feeling that the headlong, joyous passion for color in Moritz’s paintings might be less available to an artist who hadn’t spent a cer-

tain amount of time amid a certain . . . grayness. Would an artist who had lived (as it were) in color since birth take the same delight in the freedom that color allows and inspires? Perhaps it seems like an odd association, but comparing the subdued tones of Moritz’s Lobeda drawings to the volcanic eruption of pigment in her paintings, I think of that moment in The Wizard of Oz (1939) when Dorothy, airlifted by a tornado, leaves black-andwhite Kansas and steps out into the Technicolorrainbow world of Oz. Of course, amid all that beauty, there’s a wicked witch to dispatch and a cohort of needy traveling companions—just as in Moritz’s paintings, hints of nightmare, or at least unease, occupy the spaces between the brushstrokes and the swirls of riotous color.

The Seasons

If we have lived with seasons, we can’t look at Moritz’s paintings without noting how deftly they observe and reflect the natural world: the ways nature’s palette changes over time. Moritz has noted that one of her interests in the seasons, and in weather more generally, is that they are constants while all aspects of humanity shift, have different imprints and experiences. One series of 2023 is entitled Ferragosto, the name of an annual Italian holiday, a word that conjures up the harvest before the harvest—the red of ripe tomatoes, the yellow/orange of zucchini flowers, the healthy green of basil. But it is also a time when cities empty out, when people flee the urban heat for the cooler air of the seashore and mountains. The hot, empty cities take on a deserted, interplanetary feel, which brings us full circle back to Lobeda These reds and yellows and oranges, the defiantly blue sky, those brave holdouts of green, evoke

the glories of the end of summer: they’re imprinted on our brains. Ferragosto, the 15th of August, is also the Feast of the Assumption, a celebration of the miraculous way in which the Virgin Mary was assumed bodily into heaven, to become eternal, immortal, but no longer on Earth. And Moritz’s brushstrokes often convey the fiery, upward trajectory we associate with ascension.

Other paintings of Moritz’s take their titles from “large” and “small” natural phenomena, from topography and geography, from the months of the year, the times of the day, aspects of the weather (one series is entitled Frost , 2024), and offer abstract renderings of how differently the ocean appears in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In an interview she speaks of art and of paintings as being answers (or attempted answers) to questions. Among the questions these paintings ask is: How does it look and feel to be at the edge of the Pacific in two such different places?

Images

Moritz has said that she wants people to spend “an enormous amount of time” in front of her work. And she gives us reason to do so.

We can’t help seeing shapes that remind us of things until they don’t. When we lose sight of them and come back, we can’t find them again. In one of her paintings I saw, in bright orange, a postage-stamp-sized version of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son (1820–23). But where did I see it? Elsewhere I caught a flash of Tiepolo, not the pink clouds and cherubim but the darker chaos of The Fall of the Rebel Angels (1724–29), with which he decorated the stairwell in Udine’s Palazzo Patriarcale. We may not think at once of Monet, but his final paintings—rougher and looser than

Opening spread, right:

Sabine Moritz, Conquistador, 2024, oil on canvas, 47 ¼ × 35 ½ inches (120 × 90 cm)

Previous spread, left:

Sabine Moritz, New World III , 2024, oil on canvas, 70 7 8 × 98 ½ inches (180 × 250 cm)

Previous spread, right:

Sabine Moritz, New World I , 2023–24, oil on canvas, 70 7 8 × 98 ½ inches (180 × 250 cm)

This spread:

Sabine Moritz, Arcadia , 2024, oil on canvas, 70 7 8 × 98 ½ inches (180 × 250 cm)

his better-known canvases—were done largely in reds, yellows, and greens, because his eyesight had weakened and those were the last colors he saw.

The figuration we may see in Moritz’s abstractions is as personal as it is fleeting: a private moment of communication with something that was—or more likely wasn’t—in the artist’s mind. It is a glimpse of something we have dredged up from our unconscious and pressed into the painting.

The Elephant in the Room

The elephant in the room for the modern German painter is modern German history. Obviously, every country has whole armies of skeletons in its closet, but twentieth-century Germany amassed an extraordinary number, separated from their bodies in especially horrific ways. Many artists— Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Christian Boltanski, Hans Hofmann, Anselm Kiefer, Felix Nussbaum, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, and countless others—have worked to acknowledge that era in ways that are powerful but unsentimental, fierce and original without tipping over into shock and exploitation.

In one series of Moritz’s drawings, the structure that rises out of the landscape could be any bell tower—except that it isn’t. The tower marks the site of the Buchenwald concentration camp. “It was visible from afar,” Moritz has said. “Starting from the bell tower, I tried to describe the place, this place with its shocking history of horror: in the Third

Reich it was a gruesome concentration camp; but before it was turned into a memorial site it was also a Soviet reeducation camp that was never mentioned during East German times.” Art history is littered with skulls, but the ones in Moritz’s work seem to have an added significance.

Words

Perhaps I don’t know enough painters to be able to make a statistically conclusive statement, but among the artists I do know, there is an unusually high concentration of serious readers with excellent taste in books—by which I mean they like the books I like.

Moritz appears to be a broad and discerning reader of poetry. Scattered among the reproductions in August (2023) are works by poets ranging from Dylan Thomas to Friedrich Hölderlin to Gottfried Benn. In yet another volume, Moritz’s drawing of a rose appears side by side with an exceptionally beautiful poem by the great Polish writer Adam Zagajewski. “The Green Windbreaker” begins with a description of the poet’s father strolling through Paris, visiting the Louvre to stand in front of the paintings of Corot. Its final lines speak eloquently of many of the subjects that seem to animate and inspire Moritz’s paintings: the power of memory and time and beauty, the ongoing war that occurs when the bright triumphs and hopes of art come up against the darker plans that history has for us all.

Opening spread, left:

Sabine Moritz, Lobeda 102 , 1991–92, crayon on paper, 22 7 8 × 16 ½ inches (58 × 42 cm)

Artwork © Sabine Moritz

Photos: Georgios Michaloudis, farbanalyse, Cologne

FOUR WAYS OF

Christian House reports from Norway, where he has been considering the predominance of ice, and the variety of modes for depicting it, in Nordic art and literature.

It’s like a doodle on a sheet of paper. A limb in ice.

Walking along the shoreline of the semifrozen Oslo Fjord, I notice a piece of driftwood emerging— creeping—out of the frost-slushed water. It rests, like the leg of a spider, on a cracked pane of ice. I take a phone snap and consider it more closely, this broken branch marooned in a collage of shards.

I’ve come to the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, a ten-minute drive from Oslo, to see a similarly abstracted composition of ice, this one painted by the Norwegian artist Anna-Eva Bergman. Isfjell (Iceberg , 1957) is a cold cubist composition in oils and silver leaf. In the mid-twentieth century, Bergman left Norway to paint in France, yet Norway never left her. Toward the end of her life, she noted that she still dreamed of her homeland: “It’s the light in the Norwegian landscape that inspires me,” she explained. “An unreal light.”

Ice is similarly uncanny. It’s both a material and a period in time, a transient state. Cultural figures from the Nordic countries relate to that interlude in a way quite unlike their counterparts from outside the region. So here I am in the far north, seeing how Nordic painters, photographers, writers, and conceptualists have grasped this slippery subject.

I. The Frozen Canvas

On a glacial day in 1944, shortly after the death of Edvard Munch, a wintery inventory was taken at Ekely, the Norwegian master’s atelier, hidden away in the forested fringes of Oslo. Behind the studio a

curator discovered a large ball of ice. Frozen inside were the stiff fragments of a painting, Arbeidere på byggeplassen (Workers on the Building Site), made in 1928, a composition, appropriately, showing men laboring in an icy landscape. The parts were thawed out, joined, and are now in the archive of the Munchmuseet in Oslo.

Munch was a particularly icy artist, not just in temperament but in practice: he would weather his pictures outside in the elements for entire winters. “No doubt there was ice forming on the art at some point during that time span,” says Mie Mustad, conservator at the Munchmuseet. “I’m stabilizing loose paint on a fragmented version of Snøskuffere på byggeplassen [Snow Shovellers on the Building

Site , 1931–33], a companion piece to the work found in the ice ball. The artwork is full of creases, folds, and paint losses. It is not unlikely that the painting underwent conditions of snow and ice exposure.”

Ice also featured in Munch’s emotionally charged landscapes. He took an ice pick to the romantic approach of Norwegian and Danish Golden Age painters such as Johannes Flintoe and Johan Christian Dahl, artists who just loved to place a heroic figure on a snowy mountain. In Munch’s painting Vinter in Kragerø ( Winter in Kragerø, 1915, now in the collection of the Harvard Art Museums), Munch depicted ice as mutable and sickly. “I’ve been lucky to study a version close up in our studios,” says Mustad. “I love the powerful azure green part and how Munch managed to render what to me resembles the soft, wet, and grainy ice you can expect in the mild winters along the coast. You can almost smell the season and the rotting ice in its ever-changing states.”

But how do you capture a transitory condition with a paintbrush? “Light,” says the artist Ørnulf Opdahl. For some five decades, Opdahl has depicted icy scenes in the Arctic, the Antarctic, and Greenland, as well as along the jagged western seaboard and Sunnmøre mountains of his native Norway. Talking to me from his studio near the fjord town of Ålesund, Opdahl explains how “in these landscapes, light is scarce. A glacier can reflect light. Sometimes it looks as though the glacier contains the light as the darkness falls. It appears to have its own light, as a huge glowing mass in the darkness.”

Opdahl’s semiabstract compositions—of glaciers, drift ice, pack ice, and iced mountains—combine geometry and meteorology. Ice is “almost never white,” he explains, but rather it includes a sundry palette of reds, blues, and greens. And painting it plein air can be tricky. “With watercolor, when you add a brushstroke to paper, the water will sometimes freeze immediately, and create unexpected but sometimes very beautiful frost roses, like frozen flowers,” he says. “As if the ice, or the climate, wants to participate in the making of the painting.”

II. Through a Glass Darkly (and Lightly) Meanwhile, photographers shiver at the shutter. “Sometimes, photographing in cold conditions feels almost impossible. The stormy weather and extreme conditions make it very challenging,” says the Icelandic photographer Ragnar Axelsson. “The most striking and unforgettable sights are the mas-

LOOKING AT ICE

sive icebergs, either floating in the ocean or frozen into the sea ice. It’s always magical and never the same. Being there feels like standing in the greatest gallery on Earth.”

Axelsson’s work—images of receding glaciers, indigenous peoples hunting on the sea ice, sled dogs hunkering down in whiteouts—are in a tradition of social documentary as much as of landscape photography. “What interests me most is the people living in those conditions,” he tells me as he prepares for a retrospective at the Photographers’ Gallery in London. “Storms and blizzards are part of daily life, especially during the long dark winter,

with very short daylight hours. However, it can be rewarding, yielding photographs that depict the harsh reality of living on the edge where the cold dominates.” Axelsson’s photographs are tiny chapters in a cautionary tale. “The environment will change and a photograph taken today will become a memory of a past that will never return.”

Pentti Sammallahti and Jorma Puranen, professors at the Helsinki School, a photography program that emerged at Aalto University during the 1990s, have tackled ice in very different ways. In Sammallahti’s shots, icescapes are a comic theater for animals. In an early image from 1973, he pictures two ducks perched on a tiny patch of sea ice, pausing like passengers waiting for a bus. In a snap from 1992, a dog glances insouciantly at a poster of Lenin stuck to an icy billboard in Karelia.

In 2014, the British newspaper the Guardian asked Sammallahti to select his best shot. He chose a foggy snap, taken in 1992, of a man walking down a path early one morning in northern Russia. A dog can be seen down the lane, looking back at its master as if to say “Hurry up.” The photographer recalled that it was -20°C when he took the picture: “The fog you see is actually ice fog: lots of tiny ice particles suspended in the air. This happens when

it’s very cold but the sea has not frozen.” The night before he took the picture, Sammallahti stayed up late, playing chess and drinking vodka with a friend. He woke to an enchanting atmosphere. “I feel like I received this photograph,” he said, “I didn’t take it.”

Meanwhile, Puranen ponders the distortive qualities of ice. For his Jäisiä näkymiä series (Icy Prospects, 2005– ) he uses long exposures to capture landscapes as they are reflected in a wooden panel painted with black lacquer to create a fine glossy sheen. These Finnish vistas ripple somewhere between paintings and photography. We don’t get to directly admire the scenery but see it as if through streaked windows. The brushstrokes in the lacquer, the rain-dappled wooden panel, and views of trees, lakes, and coastline in dying daylight all combine to create an enigmatic icy effect. But it’s fake ice.

III. Cold Sentiments

In novels and short stories written outside the Nordic region, ice tends to be either a whimsical detail—the clink in the drink—or a perilous plot device (a fatal skid, a ship sunk, or, as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein [1818], a floating stage

Previous spread, left: The shoreline of the Oslo Fjord, Norway, 2024. Photo: Christian House

Previous spread, right: Edvard Munch, Utkast til “Menneskeberget,” Ekely (Draft for “The Human Mountain,” Ekely), 1927 (detail), silver gelatin print, 4 1⁄8 × 3 inches (10.5 × 7.6 cm). Photo: © Munchmuseet

Above: Pentti Sammallahti, Solovki, White Sea, Russia , 1992. Photo: courtesy the artist and print sales at The Photographers’ Gallery, United Kingdom

Below: Ragnar Axelsson, Melting Glaciers, Iceland , 2019. Photo: courtesy the artist and print sales at The Photographers’ Gallery, United Kingdom

Opposite, above: Tove Jansson, Packed Ice, 1961, oil on canvas, 26 × 31 ½ inches (66 × 82.5 cm)

© Tove Jansson Estate

Opposite, below: Jorma Puranen, Icy Prospects No. 68, 2008, pigment print, 39 × 31 inches (99.5 × 81 cm), edition of 3 © Jorma Puranen, courtesy Purdy Hicks Gallery

for a showdown). The language of ice is telling: “ice maiden,” “icy looks,” “frigid lovers,” “frozen assets.” It’s a lexicon of woe. But Nordic writers have been more nuanced, more deferential. Sure, the fashion for Nordic noir delivered a family-pack of frozen corpses, but for the region’s more literary authors ice has been an inscrutable muse, both a thing and an idea.

“Unn looked down into an enchanted world of small pinnacles, gables, frosted domes, soft curves and confused tracery,” wrote Tarjei Vesaas in Is-slottet (The Ice Palace , 1963), his classic novel about a girl who disappears inside the mazelike architecture of a frozen waterfall. Vesaas, arguably Norway’s greatest twentieth-century novelist, used ice as a psychological signifier for the turmoil of childhood chilling into adulthood. Vesaas is particularly good on the sound of ice, the thunderous booms as it shifts—not a thing you can capture on canvas.

Tove Jansson, the Finnish author celebrated for her children’s books about the Moomins—a charming family of hippo-shaped white trolls—was something of an ice polymath. Her Moominland characters go skating and ice-fishing. She also painted skewed pictures of ice floes—her Packed Ice (1961) is borderline abstract expressionist—and her adult short story “The Iceberg” is a gem of a tale in which a girl sneaks out at midnight to watch the titular mass slip slowly into the local bay. She sees a thing of wonder, a primordial leviathan.

Meanwhile, the ebb-flow lifespan of ice fluctuates through Ulla-Lena Lundberg’s novel Is (Ice , 2012). This Swedish-Finnish author’s story about a priest with an island parish details how such isolated communities become connected in winter as ice forms bridges across the archipelago. Conversely, in Anteckningar från en ö (Notes from an Island , 1993), Jansson’s memoir of seasons spent on Klovharu, her very own craggy rock in the Gulf of Finland, the author recalls watching the iced-up ocean break up in early spring, when a cacophonous, orgiastic “rearing up, thrusting down” of mountainous blocks of ice churned in the tide.

“Unbelievable tabernacles floated by,” she writes. Ice can be far from calm.

IV. The Time It Takes to Melt

That tumult has never seemed so urgent as it does in the present moment: ice has become a barometer of the climate crisis, and Nordic artists and curators are alive to the problem. In Kristiansand in

southern Norway, the recently opened Kunstsilo— the vast brutalist repository of the Tangen collection of Nordic modern art—holds works by the Finnish photographer Tiina Itkonen, who has chronicled the lives of Greenland’s Inughuit people, hunters who traverse the ice floes by dogsled, tracking seals and walrus. “This type of living, and hunting, is more dangerous now because the ice gets thinner,” notes Else-Brit Kroneberg, Kunstsilo’s head of collections, adding that modern and contemporary photographers often see the abstract beauty in what is disappearing.

In 2018, the Danish-Icelandic conceptual artist Olafur Eliasson took the issue of ice loss to London, setting blocks of glacial ice from Greenland in some of the capital’s public spaces. The installation was the latest in a project titled Ice Watch , a collaboration with the geologist Minik Rosing, previously produced in City Hall Square in Copenhagen (2014) and in the Place du Panthéon in Paris (2015). The London version saw thirty ice boulders placed outside the Tate Modern museum and the European headquarters of Bloomberg L.P. People cuddled, kissed, and listened to the boulders. The work delivered crowd-pleasing multisensory environmental education: “As the ice melts, the bubbles crack like popcorn,” Eliasson noted. “It’s like a little concert of bubbles.”

Few people are as well qualified to compare the aesthetics and the reality of ice as the Norwegian polar explorer and art collector Erling Kagge. Talking to me in a café by Oslo harbor on a mistbound afternoon, he has a disarmingly bouncy, snow hare quality. Disappointingly, he’s not wearing all-weather gear. I suppose Oslo in December is rather balmy to Kagge.

Can art ever really capture what polar ice is like? “Not really, because you don’t have the wind,” says Kagge, who is the first person to have reached the North Pole, the South Pole, and the summit of Everest on foot. “And then in the Arctic the ice is moving because it’s resting on an ocean. It’s breaking apart. And maybe you’re scared a polar bear

will turn up. So, no, you really can’t get it.” In art history, icescapes have been treated consistently strangely and unrealistically, says Kagge: there is often an object in the foreground set against a “wide, icy, mountainous background.” But photographs in his new book After the North Pole: A Story of Survival, Mythmaking, and Melting Ice show Kagge dragging his sled across flat expanses of white haze. Its only feature is its nothingness. His book also highlights the historical importance of polar mapping—of ice as cartographic boundary and border in geopolitical matters. I ask him how he researched a topic as expansive as the North Pole. “It’s an advantage to have walked there,” he says.

Epilogue

Back at Henie Onstad, I stand before Bergman’s Isfjell . It’s a melancholy painting, a picture of ice as a silvery specimen on a slab. In contrast, the ice outside the museum is a source of joy, emphasizing a distinctly Nordic, pragmatic, and profoundly human view. The museum’s director, Anne Hilde Neset, captures it perfectly when she explains that her staff take lunch breaks on the iced-up fjord. “Once the waters have frozen and the local council has checked it’s safe, it opens to people who use it for skating, or just walking or even skiing if there’s a lot of snow,” she says. “I have ice skates in my office during winter.”

HARMONY HOLIDAY: THE RIGHT MYTHS

Harmony Holiday, writer, dancer, and experimental filmmaker, meets with Alexander Provan, author and editor of Triple Canopy, to discuss her 2024 exhibition Black Backstage , at The Kitchen, New York, as well as her upcoming publications: Life of the Party (Semiotext(e), 2025), the memoir Love Is War for Miles , and a biography of the jazz vocalist and songwriter Abbey Lincoln.

ALEXANDER PROVAN Your recent show at the Kitchen, Black Backstage , was a kind of essay on how we’re trained to see Black performers and what we fail to see as a result—or what we’re prevented from seeing, what seems unworthy of attention and what seems to require protection. How’d the show come together? And why’d you choose to work out these ideas through an exhibition rather than writing?

HARMONY HOLIDAY I see one form as an extension of the other, so this was a way to turn the world of a book—or a handful of books—that I’m writing into a performance and collective improvisation. Writing alone, especially on these topics, can be didactic unless you put yourself in the position of the subject. So when I’m writing I let my love of sound, music, and improvisation flood the page, and sometimes force the writing off the page and into video, sound, and archival materials. That’s something I’ve always been drawn to: enabling language to be choreographed and experienced like dance or performance, with the words becoming a score for embodied gestures and movements.

AP Your series of sculptures, videos, sounds, and archival materials related to Black musicians— Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Tina Turner—struck me as the inverse of performance documentation: a landscape rather than a portrait, a constellation of private, ceremonial objects to be navigated rather than an assembly of personas to

be adored and consumed. I think that’s hard to pull off in writing, at least in criticism, which tends to focus on pointing to (and negating) bad objects, and not so much on conjuring whatever such representations conceal.

HH I’ve been thinking about the pendulum that sways between body and language since I started writing—and before that, too, through dance and close listening, especially to Black improvised music. Obviously I’m interested in music as a means of disrupting the standard modes of representation, breaking up and negating stagnant ideas with frequencies and not only language. So I’m meticulous about how I bring sound to the page. What can I capture or translate, and what can I only point to or get at through innuendo?

I love the idea of the talking book, which Stevie Wonder brought into the popular imagination, and the relay between speech, oral history, writing, and documentation that characterizes Black literature and music. Much of my work is an effort to inscribe that sense of an interior dialogue—to make it audible or public—by describing and deploying archival sounds, gathering and remixing the ruins left by violent displacement, genocide, and other catastrophes. For Black Backstage I wanted to annotate the gestures and movements that populate the archive, the ruined or discarded narratives of Black performance, and give them a new form, a sense of dignity beyond the commodity.

AP In your book-length epic poem on the history—or mythology—of enslavement, Maafa [2022], the final section is called “Paradise of Ruins.” You depict the ruins as a site of revelation, rebirth, and joy, as well as of trauma and reckoning. Basically it’s the present, right?

HH Yeah, I was thinking about how Black music transforms rubble into rage and song—and how there’s no epic poem about this. I was trying to get at a form of restorative justice that turns the forces bent on destroying, undermining, or diminishing us into our greatest assets. In Maafa I reimagine subjection, for instance, as emancipatory sound, reverence, transcendence, and in Black Backstage

I set out to conjure the realm where those transformations occur. I tried to create a place where the private lives of Black performers who’ve been misappropriated are protected from the scrutiny and surveillance that reduce them to parts of the show. I wanted to exhibit the jewels of Black social life— the opposite of exhibitionism. I wanted to complicate the reputations of performers who’ve been fixed as idols by fanatics and detractors alike.

AP In your most recent essay for Triple Canopy, “Love Is War for Miles,” you write about coming to terms with the violence and anger of your father, who was born in poverty in the South, became an accomplished singer and songwriter in Los Angeles, and then was diagnosed with a mental illness and institutionalized when you were a child. You compare him to musicians like James Brown and Kanye West, who’ve been defined by the dichotomy between their public personas and their private lives, their exquisite performances and their inner turmoil. Why is this burden—the incredible pressure to perform while struggling to be understood as an actual person, not a persona— so rarely recognized?

HH Well, we tend to treat performers like voodoo dolls, pinning our desires onto them and expecting their reactions to materialize as entertainment, which helps us dissociate from the longing and wishing that come with having desires at all. We turn performers into gods who transcend the mire of human emotion, allowing spectators to be boring, deranged, entitled, and erratic. But we expect Black entertainers in particular to falter in private or not at all, and we expect access to those episodes; after all, we’ve made them rich and famous, so they owe us their secrets and their suffering. It doesn’t matter that so many performers have earned fame and leverage through impossibly hard work, indomitable will, and the generosity required to let admiring (and derisive) fans push pins into your body and extract blood.

Given what I saw with my own father, I couldn’t help but develop a love for the antiheroes who undermine the attempts to commodify and co-opt

them with authentic refusal. I often quote Amiri Baraka’s response to the commercial success of his 1964 play Dutchman : “If you’re trying to make me famous, you’re gonna have to pay for it.” He knew he was trading his talent for never-ending subjection to the white liberal gaze.

AP To quote you on your father: what we’re going to pay for is the violence of insisting on “the standard story of a formidable-yet-doting man cornered into reactionary violence by his own demons, knowing not what he did.” And we’re going to make an additional payment for insisting that someone like you act as “a vessel for propaganda about the trappings of Blackness, the redundant spectacle of lost men and traumatized daughters.”

HH In the Triple Canopy essay I’m asking where my father’s violence came from, and admitting that I relate to his need to defend himself (and his family). I often think about how listening for what we want to hear is as deep as most listening goes—a bias that’s especially conspicuous in the context of Black music and performance. The essay is about listening to what I never wanted to hear or remember, and finding solace in that—in my personal, very private ruins. The quickness to define ourselves in terms of trauma alone emerges from what we do to ourselves as much as from what others almost automatically project onto us. It stunts our growth and invites self-parody. And that ends up being more alienating than just giving up the ghost and letting joy and pain mingle.

AP You’ve mentioned Joan Didion’s essay “On Keeping a Notebook” [1966], which describes her own notebook as “something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker.” The point isn’t to give the reader a “factual” record, or a manipulation of events so artful as to be interpreted as fact. “Remember what it was to be me : that is always the point,” she writes. I wonder how you think about the relationship between private and public records, acts of self-construction and self-presentation, as you’re

This spread: Installation view, Harmony Holiday: Black Backstage, The Kitchen at Westbeth, New York, March 21–May 25, 2024. Photos: Kyle Knodell

writing, especially since you so often call on your own experiences in order to access the lives of others.

HH I think of diaries, notes, and the fragments that populate archives as giving me a sense of how someone else’s mind works, which has to do with the relationship between the memories that are intentionally preserved and the ones that are forgotten or misremembered, redacted. I write like a Method actor, so I’m not usually separating myself from a subject; I’m trying to inhabit or possess the figures that already possess me. Some, like Monk, appear in the show: the centerpiece is Abide with Me [2024], a film I made about Monk’s teenage years, with Fred Moten—a close friend who inflects my work—reciting an essay I wrote. I become Monk by way of my father, a musician I’ve written about from many vantages. “If you aren’t writing poems about your family, you aren’t writing poetry,” Kamau Brathwaite correctly asserts. I think the same is true of all writing: if you’re only documenting projections and not interiority, nothing is at stake, and the language fatigues and collapses from its weightlessness. Abide with Me follows Monk on a tour he went on with an evangelist through the Deep South in 1934, the year my father was born. There’s a relay between their lives that starts to seem like a quantum entanglement; I insert myself by imagining Monk’s experience on that tour, which is mostly undocumented and unexamined aside from one line in a 600-page biography.

AP I didn’t realize the extent to which Monk had been turned into a caricature until I saw Alain Gomis’s 2022 documentary Rewind & Play, which focuses on a French television host’s interview with the musician in 1969. The interviewer essentially demands that Monk conform to the ridiculous image of him as an eccentric genius or idiot savant.

HH Yeah, the interviewer is like, Be weird! Talk about setting up your piano in your kitchen! And Monk gives him the silent treatment, basically.

Figures like Monk are central to my work because of their multiplicity and defiance. One day they refuse to speak, the next they’re effusive; one day they’re in distress, the next they’re overcome with delight and inspiration. If the contradictions within each personality weren’t so brutally policed, I think performers and audiences would be more candid—and they’d understand each other in terms of reflections, not transactions. But the situation isn’t set up to allow us to address the deepest recesses of the psyche on stage or on the record. So the off-the-recordness of a secret tour becomes the safest imaginative territory, while the intentional documentation becomes a record of abuse, character assassination, and confinement of the artist’s spirit.

AP In response, Abide with Me situates Monk backstage, and considers the aspects of the person that escape representation and resist performance, at least on French TV.

HH That’s why the film is central to the show, the steadying force in the room. The backstage of the film is mirrored in a reconstruction of Monk’s dressing room, but also in materials that bring in figures like Kanye, Billie Holiday, Billy Strayhorn, Michael Jackson, Lonnie Holley, Baraka, Henry Dumas, and Nellie Monk. I was profiling Lonnie, an artist and musician from Alabama, last summer, as I was working on the Kitchen exhibition. He said that I needed to make a stage for him that’s a field of cotton, so I created Industry Plant , a circular stage made of mirrored vinyl strewn with ruins in the form of ephemera from music magazines, and I dedicated the work to him. The exhibition puts Lonnie in conversation with all of the Black performers who have to embed retreat into showmanship in order to have any privacy. This manifests as a walking-off gesture that audiences tend to mistake for neglect, but is actually a return from exile

AP You often write about the relationship between sustaining an inner life and assuming a

persona, which enables a distinction between the person and the performance, providing a mask or a form of camouflage. But the constant calibration is burdensome, destructive, and often misunderstood as a form of suffering—the suffering that audiences imagine to be at the heart of Black music.

HH I have to quote Miles Davis replying to an interviewer who claimed that the blues comes from suffering: “Listen, my father’s rich, my momma’s good-looking, and I can play the blues. I’ve never suffered and don’t intend to suffer.”

But performative empathy can be the opposite of love. I think we see and learn more when we don’t lead with feeling sorry for our subjects or ourselves.

AP But you can be seen and sell more if you’re offering relatable stories of subjection and grief, right? And if you’re pitching art as a means of overcoming your traumas and recovering your humanity?

HH True, but I really believe we can make our art personal and real without fetishizing our pain. And that makes it harder for others to steal our souls—or steal the soul of the work for parts. I don’t really worry about the personal stories that I uncover being cannibalized, because so many people are allergic to anything short of spectacle and clout; they miss the subtle epiphanies that occur between home and the studio or stage. I’m elaborating on this in a book for Semiotext(e) related to the Kitchen show, which I’m working on with the curators, as well as a memoir that began as “Love Is War for Miles.”

AP There’s a difference between serving up conflicts, traumas, breakdowns, etc., and seeking to understand a subject without knowing what you’ll find—without wanting to arrive at a sense of certainty, right? Both rely on intimacy, though. I’m thinking of Hollywood biopics that use markers of authenticity and access to distract from the conversion of life into archetypal characters and plot

This spread: Installation view, Harmony Holiday: Black Backstage, The Kitchen at Westbeth, New York, March 21–May 25, 2024. Photo (this page): Kyle Knodell. Photo (opposite page): Walter Wlodarczyk

When I’m writing about Black performers who’ve had difficult lives and been objectified, I try to do what’s most gratifying: learn about them and engage with the details of their lives, rather than turn them into great American tragedies.

lines: genius versus brokenness, love versus violence, and so on.

HH Yeah, and those stories raise the question: what happens when Black musicians are just living , and not pandering to the desire for sensationalism? What happens when they’re minding their own business, rehearsing, falling in love, studying, recording, resting? Are they still interesting when they aren’t seducing—or being packaged for the seduction of—a white audience? Do the performers who turn away from the stage or spectacle have as much value as those who work themselves to death? And why are these the options: extreme secrecy and obtuse maneuvers or total, self-abnegating spectacle, with the attendant surveillance and scrutiny? Maybe if we reimagine the formats for representing ourselves—albums, books, and performances—the options for Black social and spiritual life will proliferate. What if we decide that being seen is less important than being felt and understood, recognized?

AP What would that look like?

HH We’d get past the choice between the happy slave on stage telling a sad story and the composer who refuses to do a stadium tour, or sign to a corporate label, and instead works in the studio, without an audience. We need new archetypes, and I’m trying to identify or even invent them. I’m trying to find them in the poetics of relation between, for example, Monk and Ye, who in conversation become a third person. How would we accommodate the musician they birth? Fred thinks about this in his work: rejecting the notion of the single being, he describes the commons as a ruin that we navigate by sharing, to paraphrase a poem that might have been a muse for The Undercommons , his 2013 book with Stefano Harney That’s why Fred’s voice belongs in Abide with Me .

When I’m writing about Black performers who’ve had difficult lives and been objectified, I try to do what’s most gratifying: learn about them and engage with the details of their lives, rather

than turn them into great American tragedies. Those details often express enough pleasure and glory to undermine the impulse for exploitation, for focusing on despair. The problem is that we’ve been trained to imagine our own stories in terms of suffering, and to see catastrophe as a currency or commodity; we monetize suffering even as it’s ongoing, as in the current wars, in order to break through the attention economy.

AP You’re working on a biography of Abbey Lincoln, who died in 2010. You’ve been making use of the archive of her materials at the Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University Libraries, which includes her autobiographical notebooks. How are you approaching her story in terms of the tension between how such figures see themselves, how they’re seen by audiences, and how the two feed into each other?

HH I’m thinking of the book as a call-and-response between Lincoln’s writing in her notebooks and my research, including accounts of her music and my own feelings, which means that anything false is debunked at the root and the right myths can surface in a written form that’s almost musical. The book will feel like Lincoln being alive somewhere in our cosmology, not just like a book about her—that’s the intention.

AP “The Right Myths”—sounds like a Didion essay! She wrote about how we delude ourselves in our own record-keeping, or keep records in order to delude ourselves, for better or worse. And we’ve talked about how Lincoln reformulated herself in the movement between her songs, notebooks, and performances, which has to do with seeing herself through men’s eyes. To me, that sense of feedback between representation and reinvention—between records and delusions—is the animating force of her music.

HH My favorite artists are always looking for the version of their interior monologue. My least favorite are always discouraging that sense of interiority until the work dissipates into the mono -

lithic I . In Lincoln’s case—in so many cases—the writing is like armor against conventional forms of self-representation. To me, the eye-for-an-eye self is more interesting because the impossibility of resolution holds the ego in check. Which is to say that the subjects I address are the ones I contain within myself, and figures like Monk are central because of their multiplicity and defiance. But so are Hélène Cixous, Gwendolyn Brooks (in Maud Martha of 1953), Henry Dumas (in his stories about the South and Black music), Vivian Gornick, Margo Jefferson (in her stunning memoirs), Baraka (in works like The System of Dante’s Hell [1965]), and James Baldwin, in essays like “Notes of a Native Son” [1955], which is about the evening of his father’s funeral and birthday party. He gets at his identity outgrowing his reputation, tantruming to self-soothe, and adjusting to this sublimated escapism.

AP What you said about the value of multiplicity and defiance goes back to the difference between a record of a life and an account of how a subject sees (or wants to see) herself. And that points to the power of the performer to shape the audience, given the will—and, I suppose, a degree of receptiveness.

HH I think we can change the audience as we change ourselves if we defy the singularity of identity, the blunt, often inaccurate impulse to privilege linearity and not pattern, rhythm, mysticism, thematics, in our stories. Why not consider the audience as a version of the self that one is working to realize, the self that is—and must be—in flux, in need of articulation? That self can become the audience within—and as powerful as the one beyond the body or stage.

In other words, what if we don’t care what the public thinks? What if we stake out a territory where it’s safe not to care? What if all of the tragic-triumphant celebrities come to haunt the audience with versions of themselves that can’t be reconciled or resolved or killed off?

Philosopher and political theorist Jane Bennett corresponds with Ross Simonini about the development of her thought, the nature of material, and why she looks to literature and doodles for new perspectives on the liveliness of things.

Materialists are compelled by the things of the world. Usually such things are understood to be luxuries—cars, clothing, jewelry—objects they accumulate for the sake of worldly status. In artistic circles and leftist political ideologies, these sorts of materialists are often derided as the shallow kind of people you should avoid at all costs.

The philosopher Jane Bennett provides a more generous concept of materialism. For her, matter is everything—electricity, feelings, ideas—and each of these things is an embodiment of a “profoundly generic” vital force. This is not a mystical source of energy, like God, but the fundamental animating substance of the world. There is no intrinsic hierarchy: gold hums with the same vitality as carrion.

happenings and some aspects of things rather than others. A philosophy is in that way a sensibility, a style of seeing and feeling and thinking, of selective sympathy. Sensibilities evolve or dissolve on their own, as time passes and different atmospheres are inhaled. But a particular style of encounter can also be induced by more conscious practices or habits. My growing sense of the liveliness of things was cultivated by a habit of reading nineteenth-century nature writing, twenty-first-century ecological poetry and plant science, and Renaissance herbalists, and by a tendency to doodle (more on that later) and to walk along Baltimore’s alleys and patches of woods and trash-strewn streams.

Lately, the reading also includes Paul Klee’s notebooks (“there is a non-optical way of intimate physical contact . . . that reaches the eye . . . through the cosmic bond that descends from above”); Cicero on divination (frogs have “some faculty of premonition, clear enough of itself, but too dark for human comprehension”); Zhuangzi (on orienting toward the hinge of the Dao, “a state in which ‘this’ and ‘that’ no longer find their opposites”); Roger Caillois (“I felt myself beginning to resemble, not to resemble anything but just to resemble”); the poets Inger Christensen (“I always thought reality was something you became when you grew up”), Lia Purpura (“the despoiled and radiant now”), and Forrest Gander (“How to sustain attentiveness? How to keep the mind from dropping its needle into the worn grooves of association?”). These and other literary/literal exercises help to reveal how bodies and forces exceed their role as useful/harmful objects. They show nonhuman or non-exclusively-human things to be participants living alongside and inside human endeavoring; they direct attention to how things ingress into and alter us.

JANE BENNETT

From this perspective, a materialist connects to the force through things, whether natural or artificial. Hoarders and artists are two examples of people who are so sensitive to things that they dedicate their lives to the power of thingness. Such people are not acquiring things for wealth, but because they find the truth of reality within the living presence of matter.

Neovitalists, new materialists, object-oriented ontologists—Bennett is part of a movement of philosophers rethinking our relationship to things. The implications of their ideas are vast, radically shifting the way we engage with the natural world.

Bennett is a professor of political theory at Johns Hopkins and is the author of The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2009), and Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman (2020). We corresponded by email in fall 2024 to produce the following exchange.

—Ross Simonini

ROSS SIMONINI As you’ve developed your own philosophy over the years, how has it changed the way you experience the world?

JANE BENNETT A philosophy of vibrant matter is, among other things, a filter for perception. It directs attention toward—marks as notable—some

RS Do you often think through other people’s quotations?

JB Yes, for sure. When I come across a good one, I write it down on one of the index cards I keep in my bag.

RS Joseph Beuys said, “Only the human ability to think is able to bring new causes into the world.” What do you think about this? To you, is it anthropocentric? Absurd?

JB Anthropocentric, yes, but not absurd. Because there are surely occasions when the ethical need is to prioritize people over other forms of being—even as I also affirm an expansive, multispecied understanding of what it is to be human, and even as I also affirm that there are many other-than-human agencies involved in “creativity.” I am here drawn toward Henri Bergson’s notion of “creative evolution,” i.e., the claim that the universe as such, and not only its human elements, is capable of a more-thanmechanical repetition that produces novelty, or that which is more than the sum of preexisting parts.

RS You mentioned Renaissance herbalists. What have you learned from them?

JB I’ll talk about the strange and wonderful Paracelsus (1493–1541): herbalist, alchemist, experimental scientist, pagan/Christian. He teaches me to look closely at the physical shapes of things, and to better discern how the past gets inscribed in the lines of a body. Paracelsus was good at the patient, curious, nonjudgmental practice of what Walt Whitman called “doting.” He doted on plants

in order to divine the divine signs he believed were implanted in them—hints from God concerning their potential uses to retain or restore human health. The Satyrion plant, for example, a kind of orchid, has roots resembling testicles, a resemblance that for Paracelsus indicated its medicinal use for men seeking virility. I don’t share his faith in a cosmos of divine hints or “signatures,” but I try to imitate his exquisite, sensuous attention to the lines and shapes of things.

Paracelsus also teaches about the value of focusing attention not only on already-formed shapes but also, and this is more difficult, on the energetic processes from which they emerge. Keep on the alert, in particular, to those very subtle moments inside a process when a vague potential is about to (maybe) become something more actual—when the seed is just about to sprout, or the democratic culture is on the cusp of transitioning to fascism. Paracelsus describes this as happening at the “hem” of the “matrix” of nature: the edge of the matrix folds over on itself to form the consistency needed for a “thing.”

RS Is your definition of vitality entirely about a thing’s capacity to produce effects in the world?

JB Yes, more or less. I think there are vitalities and intensities that are not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by the meanings they offer us.

RS I know your definition is not a kind of animism or pantheism, where there’s a nonmaterial presence behind the substance. Do you believe that everything is a kind of material?

JB Yes, I do, but materiality in the sense not only of formed bodies but also of their protean potential precursors, such as effervescent energies and restless movements, some subtle in the extreme, which is why I am now trying to catch the drift of the Daoism of Zhuangzi.

RS Erich Fromm talks about two modes of existing in the world: being and having. Our relationship to things in the world is usually having-based, but you also believe that people who are sensitive to objects can relate to things in a kind of being mode. Is that right?

JB Yes, in a being mode, and also in a mode of sympathizing or trying to form productive alliances across always-porous bodies. Even stones can absorb new colors or microorganisms.

RS Are some things more alive than others? Are some artworks?

JB Everything has the potential to enliven and reveal its liveliness. In general I think it’s foolish, and falsifying, to offer a definite rank ordering, despite the fact that some such ranking seems endemic to human perception and to some extent survival. The force of one thing as received by another (including us) varies with every occasion, with every encounter—the elements composing that force are always multiple and in transit.

RS What art expresses your philosophy?

JB One powerful such expression is Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Dada heads (1920) and her marionettes and stage set for King Stag (1918). Puppets deploy anthropomorphism to nonanthropocentric effect.

RS What film does?

JB I am infected by Len Lye’s Free Radicals (1958–79; more on that later). I also can’t get over Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987).

RS As a political philosopher, do you care about the fruit of action being grown from your philosophy?

JB I do care. I’m hoping to add an oomph of endeavor to more ecological ways of sensing and acting—with the hope that such a sensibility becomes a slightly more powerful lure within a nightmarish culture of endless growth, consumption, exploitation, extraction, waste, profit, etc. etc. A philosophy sensibility can’t yield “fruit” in the reliable way that trees (sometimes) do, but it can still be a subtle force vying and allying with billions of other influences.

It’s also a good idea to be somewhat skeptical about the dominant model of action that’s usually assumed within the question of a philosophy’s effectiveness. That model tends to imagine actors as standing outside the field of happenings, and entering into it by way of a decisive act, an assertive intervention whose effects will be obvious and macro level. Motivated in part by a longing for one fell swoop, that model associates what is most effective with what is most direct or overtly disruptive. Sometimes that works, but that image of efficacy tends to occlude other, less heroic models of acting. There are feminist, Daoist, and many other kinds of practice oriented instead to becoming attuned to the natural, political, economic, aesthetic ecologies in which we live, in order to foster a capacity to discern their potential turning points or nascent shifts in direction. The idea is to enact small but potent tweaks or amendments that inflect, from the inside out, the tenor, propensity, or trajectory of a process. And to do so in a way that’s unlikely to prompt an immediate counterreaction.

RS Have other philosophers ever changed your experience of the world in a way you wish they had not? Have they opened Pandora’s box for you? Or has the understanding of philosophy always been helpful?

JB Interesting question. I was a nice Italian American Catholic girl until I stumbled upon [Friedrich] Nietzsche, who opened a Pandora’s box of disquieting affects—new anxieties about violence, and more generally about mortal creatures’ prospects for happiness once god is dead. Do I regret that? No. That encounter opened the way for what came next, which was the course of my life. (Nietzsche is onto something with amor fati.) More generally, if I encounter a philosophy that doesn’t stick, or bores me, or is ethically or aesthetically repellent ([Jacques] Lacan? Ayn Rand?), I tend to just move on.

RS I’ve heard you describe doodling as an expression of the nonhuman. For you, does this relate to the way automatic drawing attempts to express the unconscious?

edge that there’s so much that happens to us, with us, around us, about which we are ignorant or only very dimly aware. Another way to nod to that point is to appreciate that we live on many planes at once—the conceptual and the spatial, the shaped and the vague, the static and the vibratory, the geological and the biographical, the everyday and the cosmic. Each plane intersects with or shades off into others; existence is an overrich mix of impressions, tempos, feelings, and moods. Life, as they say, is complicated. Or, as Klee puts it, “It is not easy to orient yourself in a whole that is made up of parts belonging to different dimensions.”

Doodles, as lines and shapes on their way to elsewhere (Klee speaks of lines “out for a walk”), mark and express the dim, unspoken, vibratory, or cosmic planes of human existence. There’s a peculiar experience of myself that comes to the fore while doodling—an “I” that is carried along by a creative process of influx and efflux that would not be the same without me and yet seems to carry on whether or not I am present. That’s a theme I find in and explore by way of Whitman’s poems, as in this passage from “Song of Myself”:

Sea of stretch’d ground-swells, Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths, Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell’d yet always-ready graves,

Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea,

I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases.

Partaker of influx and efflux I.

The nondeliberate aspect of doodles suggested to the Surrealists that doodles express an obscure region of the human psyche called the unconscious—what Carl Jung called the “unfathomable dark recesses of the conscious mind,” with its “wealth of subliminal perception.” The Surrealist Max Morise described doodles as “spontaneous images” prompted by “imperceptible undulations of the flux of thought.” Surrealist games of automatic drawing, such as the “exquisite corpse,” aim to unearth the secrets of this psychic substratum and to render more perceptible the undulations of human thought.

is an automatic process or a creative human act, but such an either/or insinuates that artistry is an exclusively human power, an idea fostered by a binary grammar of active subjects and (relatively) passive objects. And if, instead, bodies and forces of many different sorts are capable of the effort of impress-operations, then other questions concerning doodling come to the fore: How do doodles bear witness to outside forces that have seeped in, and to a distributive, conjoint quality of action?

A messy swarm of outdoor elements activates a drawing process, which leans into the momentum of the strolling line, which taps the shoulder of the human doodler, who lends her arm to the pencil, which gives the nod to emergent shapes (with vice versas all around).

RS I know you’ve been writing about the newly published doodles of Franz Kafka. Why are these of particular interest?

JB Lye’s four-minute experimental film Free Radicals , created by scratching lines directly on celluloid with a pointy stick, consists of mesmerizing, vibrating, wiggling lines that appear and disappear on a dark background. They dance to the music of the Bagirmi people of the southern Sahara. The film, says Lye, is a “vicarious evocation” of inexact energies already among us, energies that include but also exceed those emanating from human artists or audiences. The energies exposed are atmospheric, generic, cosmic, and usually unsensed. But the film dotes on them and pulls them within our radar of detection, even as they remain not fully defined or determinate. I think some of Kafka’s drawings do the same. I don’t mean his better-known stick figures or abstract depictions of human postures and moods. But rather the ones that are more like scribbles of apersonal lines and vectors—vital forces. These doodles express the apersonal movements or vitalities of our more-than-human world. They are apersonal, sparse line-vectors that are irreducible to their anthropocentric entanglements with Kafka’s individual/cultural biography. Through them comes through the generic vitality of matter. RS In your mind, can writing ever be a form of doodling? Or does language prevent us from doodling?

JB The unconscious is but one way to acknowl-

There’s no doubt that the figure of an inner unconscious realm has much explanatory and therapeutic power. But a Freudian model of it does not capture well the doodler’s sense of the presencing of a flux that exceeds intrapsyche and interpsyche relations, a vibrant matter that overflows the frame of human thought/ mind and operates more broadly. The anthropocentrism of Surrealism makes it difficult to detect ahuman prompts from flora, breezes, atmospheres, fauna, etc. A psyche-centric account of doodling raises the question of whether doodling

JB The first Kafka doodle I came across was made from words—it was Odradek, the protagonist of Kafka’s three-paragraph story “The Cares of a Family Man.” Odradek is a small (mousesized?), spool-shaped, wooden, thread-tangled animate (non)creature, able to speak and laugh but mostly mute, scurrying but also lurking in the bourgeois household. Kafka’s impossible or absurdist description of Odradek goads the reader into trying to imagine its specific shape. It prompted me to try to draw it on paper. Because there’s a lack of fit between Odradek and the Euclidean space required for normal things to exist, you have to kind of just “let go” of that world, relax any strongly agentic effort, and go with the flow of the emergent process. Just doodle it.

PARTAKER OF & EFFLUX INFLUX

A Rose Is

Cy Twombly. The Rose III, 2008 . Acrylic on plywood, 99 3/16 x 291 5/16 inches (251.9 x 739.9 cm). © Cy Twombly Foundation Photography by Mike Bruce. Courtesy Gagosian

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A twenty-five-year veteran of the field—and Gagosian’s in-house rare books expert since 2016— Douglas has significant experience in developing and maintaining library collections. He boasts unparalleled know-how in sourcing scarce and important publications, from catalogues raisonnés and museum exhibition catalogues to monographs and artist’s books, including rare and out-of-print titles as well as newer releases. Focusing on a broad range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists and movements—from Picasso through Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, and Minimalism, to the full spectrum of contemporary practices—Douglas can also locate design and architecture books on such subjects as Art Deco, the Bauhaus, and Modernism.

Please contact Douglas Flamm for more information at dflamm@gagosian.com or +1 212 744 2313.

Family room designed by Nicole Hollis, featuring library curated by Douglas Flamm. Artwork: Doug Aitken, I’ll be right back. . . Aperture Series , 2019 © Doug Aitken. Photo: Douglas Friedman/Trunk Archive

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to MOCA Los Angeles on behalf of a client of Gagosian Art Advisory

Hayley Barker

Valentine Path, Crescent Moon , 2024 oil on linen

100 × 82 inches (254 × 208.3 cm)

Gift

GAME CHANGER FRANK AUERBACH

Curator Richard Calvocoressi remembers the extraordinary talent of Frank Auerbach.

London after World War II was home to an exceptional group of figurative painters, including Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, Michael Andrews, Frank Auerbach, and R. B. Kitaj. Of an older generation, Bacon was their unacknowledged leader and inspiration, having burst onto the London gallery scene in 1945 with his savage triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion . Half a century later, in 1995, I curated an exhibition in Edinburgh of all six of the abovenamed artists. Bacon had died three years earlier but the other five were alive and at the peak of their creative powers when I started

working on the show, although Andrews, sadly, died of cancer a few days before the opening.

The show was entitled From London , after a painting by Kitaj from 1975, and the catalogue featured as its frontispiece John Deakin’s famous photograph of four of the artists—Bacon, Freud, Andrews, and Auerbach—at a table in the Soho restaurant Wheeler’s in 1963. This was the spur for an exhibition I curated at Gagosian, London, in the autumn of 2022, Friends and Relations , consisting of forty-three paintings by all four artists, from a 1941 portrait by Freud of his patron Peter Watson to a 2021 self-portrait by Auerbach. Deakin’s

photo included a fifth man, Timothy Behrens, who was represented in the show by one of Freud’s portraits of him. Younger than the others (Bacon was nearly thirty years older), Behrens had only recently graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art and was painted by Andrews as well as Freud.

When I interviewed Auerbach in the summer of 2022—he was then the only one of the four still alive— he told me he had been painting self-portraits because he had had to cancel his sitters during the covid crisis. In their liberties with color and form, and their poignant evocation of old age combined with irrepressible life, these portraits

were perhaps the most personal and radical things he had ever painted. In 1995, in an exhibition called Working after the Masters at the National Gallery in London, he showed paintings and drawings inspired by works in that museum’s collection. In a note in the catalogue, his close friend Lucian Freud wrote,

It is the architecture that gives his paintings such authority. They dominate their given space: the space always the size of the idea, while the composition is as right as walking down the street. The mastery of these compositions is such that in spite of their often precarious balance, like a waiter pretending to slip while carrying a huge pile of plates, the structure never falters. It is the viewer who has to hold tight.

The weather changes, so does the light. The times of day and night are recorded, the mood is one of high-spirited drama. In fact his work is brimming with information conveyed with an underlying delicacy and humour that puts me in mind of the last days of Socrates. 1

Auerbach’s commitment to art— to his family of regular sitters, and to the endlessly changing north London landscape—was absolute. Yet he was generous with his time to those who had questions about his painting, or who just wanted to hear him reminisce, in the precise, articulate, and witty manner that he had, about the follies of life in the Soho of the 1950s and ’60s. Tall, good-looking, with lively eyes, a commanding voice, and a winning smile, he was easy to imagine onstage, as he had been in his youth. London has lost an illustrious inhabitant and the world an exceptional artist.

1. Lucian Freud, “Frank Auerbach’s Paintings,” in Colin Wiggins, Frank Auerbach and the National Gallery: Working after the Masters , exh. cat. (London: National Gallery Publications, 1995), 5.

Opposite: Frank

This

Auerbach, London, c. 2000. Photo: Eamonn McCabe/Popperfoto via Getty Images

page: Frank Auerbach, Self Portrait III , 2021, acrylic on board, 23 ¾ × 21 inches (60.3 × 53.3 cm) © Frank Auerbach, courtesy Geoffrey Parton.

Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.