Ugo Rondinone

by Renata Mosci Sanfourche

*this interview was originally published in the SS2026 issue of ICON.

It is both difficult to imagine and impossible to ignore that Ugo Rondinone’s Harlem home was once a working church. Today, the space stands as a living expression of his practice—a harmonious interior born out of the contrasts of the world outside. Yet it is precisely within this threshold, between the profane and the sacred, the dark and the light, the inner and the outer, that his home comes to life. “The space becomes a place where these opposites are allowed to coexist, reflecting the complexity of being alive,” he said. Throughout the 20,000-square-foot building, Rondinone juxtaposes an immaculate collection of artworks. Pieces by Sarah Lucas, Valentin Carron, Hans Schärer, Alan Shields, Latifa Echakhch, Peter Halley, Urs Fischer and Cady Noland, among others, form a meditative symphony on the human condition, a score that resounds throughout Rondinone’s practice.

You’re driving through Harlem when you spot a Romanesque church with a for-sale sign. What goes through your head? What seduces you?

It was a rainy Sunday in April 2011. My lat e husband, John Giorno, and I were driving from upstate New York into the city. We had made this drive nearly every weekend for years, but that day we took an unusual route—through Harlem instead of the FDR—to reach downtown. That’s when we saw the sign. We stopped and took a photo of the contact number. The next day, I called the agent and requested a site visit. The church was in poor condition—abandoned for five years and recently foreclosed. A week later, I returned with an architect to assess what it would take to bring the building back to life. The numbers made sense, as did the price. I sold my downtown loft and used the proceeds to purchase the church. We renovated for two years, and I moved in March 2013.

In 2012, you built a live-and-work house in a forest clearing near Zurich, Switzerland. You referred to it as a gesamtkunstwerk, meaning a total work of art. At what point does a house also become an artwork?

A house becomes an artwork at the moment it stops being only a container for life and starts actively shaping that life. For me, it happens when architecture, light, time, objects, rituals, and the surrounding landscape are composed with the same intentionality as a sculpture or an installation. It is a gesamtkunstwerk because nothing in it is neutral: the proportions, the materials, the silence, the forest outside, the rhythm of days and seasons. Living there is not separate from making art; it is part of the work. The house holds memory, labor, solitude, repetition, and care. It asks you to slow down, to be present, to listen. At that point, the house is no longer just functional—it becomes a lived sculpture, activated by time and by the body moving through it.

When you decided to invest in this church—renovate and curate its spaces—did you view it as a challenge, or is inhabiting and transforming places a natural process?

Building and renovating have always felt natural to me, almost instinctive. My father was a stonemason, and as a young teenager I spent Saturdays helping him hand-shape stones for river-stone dry walls. Each stone had to be lifted, examined, and gently altered with a few deliberate hammer strikes until it found its place within the larger structure. That early experience taught me that transforming a space is not about force or domination, but about listening, understanding what already exists and guiding it toward balance and cohesion.

How does your approach change between architecture projects and art installations for museums and institutional spaces?

I do not experience a clear separation between architecture and art installations. For me, both are practices of holding space. They are ways of framing emptiness, light, and time so something can unfold within them. Whether a space is inhabited daily or encountered briefly, my concern is the same: how it receives the body, how it shapes attention, how it allows silence, vulnerability, and reflection to exist. Architecture extends the encounter over a lifetime; an installation condenses it into a moment. But both are ultimately about creating conditions for presence. On your website, we can filter your work between ‘day’ and ‘night’. These contrasts are important in your world where we’re often juggling the perception of the inner versus the outer, the natural versus the man-made, the sacred and the profane, and so on.

Was it important for you to create this type of contrast in the Harlem space?

That contrast continues naturally in the way I organize artworks by other artists within the living space. I am drawn to polarity as a way of creating awareness to overcome the common value system of good and bad. In the Harlem house, one wall holds darker, more sinister works, while the opposite wall gathers pieces that are luminous, open, and bright. The two are not in conflict; they exist in dialogue. Living between these poles heightens perception, it mirrors the oscillation between inner and outer states, between vulnerability and affirmation. The space becomes a place where these opposites are allowed to coexist, reflecting the complexity of being alive.

What do windows represent in your work? Is there any relationship between them and the stained-glass windows we see on the church’s facade, or the Urs Fischer glass in the bathroom? Was your recent exhibition “The Rainbow Body” at Sadie Coles HQ in any way inspired by this Harlem property?

The window has always functioned as a metaphor for both revealing and obscuring. This idea goes back to my very first exhibition, where I presented four large ink landscapes while the gallery windows were boarded up. Visitors were deliberately cut off from outside reality so they could fully enter the artificial, constructed world of the exhibition.

Like in Romanticism, my window sculptures operate as vehicles of longing and desire, thresholds through which emotions, memories, and projections are cast into an unknown future. They frame absence as much as presence. In that sense, the stained-glass windows on the church facade and the Urs Fischer glass in the bathroom are not decorative elements, but extensions of this ongoing inquiry into light, distance, and interiority.

“The Rainbow Body” continues this investigation, not as a literal response to the Harlem property, but as part of the same sensibility: a sustained reflection on perception, transformation, and the fragile boundary between inner experience and the world beyond.

You’re one of the first to collect Franz West’s furniture and they’re prominent pieces in the church. What caught your attention in them and how do they make you feel?

My relationship with Franz West began in the late 1980s, when I was studying in Vienna. What started as an artistic connection slowly grew into a friendship rooted in shared conversations about art, life, and vulnerability. In the 1990s, we began exchanging works, which felt less like collecting and more like an ongoing dialogue between our practices.

His furniture always resonated with me because it refuses hierarchy. It is neither purely sculpture nor purely functional object, but something in between—awkward, intimate, human. Living with these pieces, they activate the space in a very physical and emotional way. They invite the body to participate, to rest, to linger, while also carrying the presence of Franz himself. They make me feel accompanied, grounded, and gently unsettled, reminding me that art can be humorous, fragile, and deeply alive all at once.

How did this Harlem home evolve with you over the years?

A room, an apartment, a house grows alongside you, almost imperceptibly. It begins to carry your breath, your routines, your solitude. The Harlem home has changed as I have changed—it has held moments of joy and grief, periods of intense work and quiet withdrawal. Over time, it became less a place I shaped and more a place that shaped me in return. It stands as a private testimony to a life lived from within, marked not by events, but by presence.

Many years ago one could say it’s unexpected to find a Swiss-born living in Harlem. It may still be something unexpected. What do you like about Harlem and how do you interact with the neighborhood?

Harlem has always been a place of transformation. Since its founding, it has continually reinvented itself—shaped by successive waves of inhabitants and cultures. Once a predominantly white Protestant neighborhood, it later was home to large Italian and Jewish communities before emerging as a center of black cultural life during the Harlem Renaissance, and continuing to evolve into the diverse, multiethnic neighborhood it is today, with Hispanic, Black, and white residents living side by side.

This constant change is not an exception, but part of Manhattan’s deeper character. Its neighborhoods are never static; they shift, adapt, and renew themselves. I find that vitality deeply compelling. Living in Harlem means inhabiting a place where history is layered rather than erased, where cultural memory coexists with everyday life. My relationship to the neighborhood is grounded in that awareness—being present, attentive, and respectful of the rhythms and histories that continue to shape it.

Chronicle

The Black Scarab

Once, I turned a black scarab beetle upside down. Then gently, I flicked him and watched him spin in circles. I could’ve gone into my mother’s pantry, found a jar and kept him in my room, but I wanted him to be able to go. I flicked him again. This time I left it to chance to bring him back to his feet, but it didn’t happen and I decided to leave him like this on the balcony. The next day after school I visited him, he was still there and I lamented his condition. The day after too, and then he died.

That Saturday, my grandmother came over to babysit me. We were on the balcony working on her crochet napkins when the phone rang. We put down our yarn and needles and hurried inside. It was her sister Rosa. Their eldest sister had been murdered at the train station, she was stabbed more than 19 times on her back. My grandmother fell to the floor. I called my father. I remember nothing of the next few days.

At that time, I already had a dreamlike habit of extending stories in my head. I liked listening to music lying on my back on our living room carpet. I’d play the same song on repeat stopping to relisten to each line. Once I had converted the entire song—each line, each melody—into a seamless sequence of images, I’d let myself listen to the whole song uninterrupted. It was a constraint I adopted in my experience with reading. Until my fifth grade teacher taught me to check-out books from the library, the only book I read was the Bible; when I made my first library card I spent my school breaks reading Nancy Drew on a red leather bean bag in the hallway. I couldn’t rely on my parents for new stories: we rarely went to bookstores and we never went to a library. So I read the Bible, the only book on my nightstand, and when the stories became insufficient, I dreamed of Abel’s life had there been no Cain or of Noah’s ark sinking in the sea.

The week after my great aunt died, during one of these afternoons, I had a reflux sensation where something started gargling in my throat. I felt like I was choking and the only way out of it was to get what was choking me out. I ran to get paper. Lying on that carpet I spat out whatever it was that was sitting there, and it went something like this:

Pam, Pam, Pam, Pam (Beethoven’s 5th symphony)
a baby is born
Pam, Pam, Pam, Pam (hospital machinery)
a woman is dying

My mother chose my name because it means rebirth in Latin. She converted the year I was born. Her born-again experience took such proportions she decided to name me on its behalf. Her rebirth was my paralysis, when I was born she transformed into my child. Like the scarab under my hold, I existed only as far as the limitations of her existence. My nature had no power before her, and I too had no place to go.

There was a time when the Egyptians believed in many Gods, when they believed Khepri—the scarab-faced God—pushed the sun across the sky each morning, just like scarabs push dirt balls across the earth. Our mothers push us into the world. We are taught, shaped, structured, measured, our barbarian ways are paralyzed. My mother believed in one God, the one that was reborn today to save his children from their sins. Who I was before the world happened to me felt impossibly distant for many years, yet the truth was never far from my reach, I just needed to find the will to turn around and see it.

New Books

Why I’m Reading These Books

Reflections on Exile and Other Essays by Edward W. Said
Because as a child, Edward Said moved many times between Egypt and Palestine, only to settle outside of his home country in America. Having moved back and forth between America and Brazil, and only settling in France, I find solace in his experience and I’m curious to see the impact his upbringing had on his thinking.

The Natural Genesis by Gerald Massey
Because this work on the intersection of Christianity and Ancient Egypt was very controversial when it was published. I’m curious to see why and how Massey became such a polemical figure.

Felix Holt: The Radical by George Eliot
Because it’s said George Eliot’s Felix Holt was based on Gerald Massey.

The Intelligence of Flowers by Maurice Maeterlinck
Because I came across a quote in one of my old notebooks from when I first read this book and it left me wanting to read it again. It’s a short book, an easy read, and it always inspires me.: “it is the law that condemns it [the plant] to immobility from its birth to its death.”

The Egyptian Book of the Dead
Because it’s part of the research I’m doing on Egyptian mythology.

In The Hands of God by Johanna Bard Richlin
Because my experience moving to the United States with an evangelical mother determined my life experience. When a book with this kind of research comes out, I can’t resist it. It’s a strong reminder that I’m not alone.

Saint Augustine Confessions
Because I always wanted to read the Confessions, but I also always wanted to be guided through it. After reading some of the essays Garth Greenwell wrote last year while teaching this book, I felt like I could finally tap into it without feeling alone. I’m looking forward to reading it and listening to his master class Mysticism for Writers.

Translating Myself and Others by Jhumpa Lahiri
Because I admire Jhumpa Lahiri’s strength as a person. Ever since she moved to Italy and taught herself to write in Italian I have a newfound admiration for her. I’m very curious to see what she says about translation, particularly after having translated numerous Italian short stories. If you haven’t read this The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, it is a wonderful compilation she edited that includes Calvino, Buzzati, Svevo, Moravia, Lampedusa, Ginzburg, the list goes on.

The Visual Library

Ancient Egypt

Currently at Rue de Chabrol

Six Articles I Recommend This Week + One Short Story

1. For the Yale Review, Jhumpa Lahiri writes about rereading Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. Read

   For decades, I had looked to Hardy as a pillar of realism. On this rereading of Jude, the novel turned into a ghost story, an example of the fantastic.

2. Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s I Taught My Son Everything, Except How to Take a Vacation in the New York Times Magazine is a story about motherhood and a compelling critique on what it means to take a vacation today. Read

3. Tamara Sanderson writes about the psychological delusion that tormented many men in the 14th century, when they believed parts of their bodies were made of glass. Read

   The physicians André Du Laurens and Alfonso Ponce de Santa Cruz independently documented a nobleman who believed himself to be shaped specifically like a glass pitcher. Not merely made of glass, but also contained by it: he slept buried in straw, terrified that he might tip in the night and pour himself out across the floor.

4. The American poet Ange Mlinko reviews Under a Pannonian Sky, a new anthology of female Hungarian poets born between 1922 and 1972. When László Krasznahorkai won the Nobel Prize last year, I was ashamed to admit I had never read any works by Hungarian writers. Mlinko’s review in the NYRB is a great introduction. Read

5. You may have read Merve Emre’s essay The Critic as Friend in the Yale Review last year, or listened to her podcast The Critic and Her Publics, or come across one of several essays she’s written for the New Yorker on Goethe or Milton. If you’ve been following Emre’s work, you might enjoy this brief interview. Read

6. In The American Scholar, Bill Hayes writes about the notes his late partner Oliver Sacks wrote in the margins of books and essays. Read

   In Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), Oliver sounded almost comically exasperated as he responded to a rambling critique Kant makes of David Hume (whom Oliver revered): “Immanuel,” he wrote, as if speaking directly to the philosopher across the centuries, “you are totally confused!”

7. Will Hall’s short story Love Language in the Drift. Read

Six Essays I Recommend This Week

1. Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid by Virginia Woolf. Read

   Unless we can think peace into existence we—not this one body in this one bed but millions of bodies yet to be born—will lie in the same darkness and hear the same death rattle overhead.

2. Why Go Out? by Sheila Heti. Read

3. In Favor of Fear by Clarice Lispector. Read

4. Exile’s Poet by Mahmoud Darwish. Read

5. Good Readers and Good Writers by Vladimir Nabokov. Read

6. A History of Eternity by Jorge Luis Borges. Read

My Morning Read

The Story of Egypt by Joann Fletcher.

My Daughter’s Evening Read

We’re a bit stuck… Vita is reading less than before and I’m hoping it’s just another one of those phases, but being the intense and panicked mother that I am, I haven’t been able to take this lightly. I’ve been doing large amounts of research on finding the right books for her and having them sent from Amazon in America to France (please forgive me, but children’s English bookstores in France are not cutting it right now). Anyway, I think I found a way in, I noticed she’s into stories she can relate to… She loves Jabari Jumps, because it’s about overcoming your fears, and Julian is a Mermaid, a queer story about being whoever you want to be. She’s nearly five years old, and if you have any recommendations I would be so grateful.

What My Husband is Listening To

Jeune Morty Vol.1 by Jeune Morty

A Movie I’m Thinking About

Cave of Forgotten Dreams by Werner Herzog

A Poem

He would not stay for me, and who can wonder by A. E. Housman

He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?
He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand, and tore my heart in sunder,
And went with half my life about my ways.

I was sleeping under a mosquito net in Brazil for the last two weeks. We were in a region I never visited before, on the edge of a national reserve in the Northeastern end of Ceará. Think of South America’s Atlantic coast before Europeans arrived: wild donkeys grazing in green patches between the sea and the sand dunes, black vultures chewing on the remains of a sting ray washed onto the beach, salt water lakes glimmering after high tide, and mangroves covered in crabs and sea horses.

After two airplanes and half a day in the car we landed in a stilt house complex in front of the sea. During the last hour of our trip we crossed a narrow river on a jangada1 and nearly 15 kilometers of sand. We watched our driver contour the dunes to find dry paths where the car could pass without digging its wheels into wet sand. We saw tourists ride buggies2 to the top of golden hills to watch the sun set over the Atlantic.

If the way to heaven is apocalyptic, we were driving to the end of the world. Our journey revealed the most paradoxical nature; a land where grass sprouts from the sand, trees grow sideways, and fish swim between fresh water rivers and the sea. The dunes separate the village from the nearest bank and visitors are spared none of the quirks of this isolation; a possum visited our room each night to steal apples, and on one afternoon, a giant cave cockroach landed on my daughter’s face.

The village, built on sand, feels as lawless as the American frontier in an old Western. We can enter town through the beach by way of two main roads; a path on the northern end or a central street marked by a row of cocktail carts. Both are busy with restaurants, food vendors, and hippies selling jewelry. Every inch of real estate is accounted for here, including in the alleyways that connect the main streets to each other. There are no street lamps, people rely on the moonlight to see where they’re going, and when it rains, excess rainwater floods the sandy roads and disgorges onto the sea. Water cascades from the main streets and through the alleys at a speed so high it’s impossible to walk until the storm settles and the water drains completely. Several times, during the day and at night, we tried to follow the main road to the opposite end of town, but found ourselves walking into an abyss. It was the most uncanny sensation, and we decided to limit our circulation to the proposed network.

Here, time had either stopped a long time ago or was wildly ahead. Something had turned this community against the present. There were no newspapers, no magazines, no banks, no institutions, no post office. The main timekeepers were a lottery house and a very kind old man exchanging crossword puzzles for charity donations. I wanted to perceive this place as a modern hinterland where ordinary people live in a bewildering desert, a place of repose with unexpected quirks and phenomenons of nature, but everything we looked upon felt like a pastiche of different times. It was unsettling, as if we were vacationing inside a parallel, dystopic world where the order of things was being kept from us.

We couldn’t find any signs to reveal the way this reality was organized. The only remnants of history were an abandoned catholic church, dry boats anchored on the beach, and elderly women passing town with baskets full of fruit—we were told they once crossed town bearing fresh fish. We encountered zero policemen, yet it’s the safest I ever felt in Brazil. I wore jewelry, we carried all our money in our wallets and consistently forgot our documents tossed around our beds. It was nothing like taking my family to Rio. The community wanted us to trust them, to believe in their goodwill, yet there was nothing upholding their behavior and guaranteeing our safety. The moral systems that ensure ethical behavior elsewhere, aren’t the same as the ones sustaining this village. People are autonomous. They fend for themselves, raise families with their own codes of conduct. Some children go to school, others play at the beach, and several are already working. They have a different sense of duty, they act free from rules, yet there’s still some sort of social order in governance.

One of the only instances when I was able to break through to someone, go past this immediate need they have to portray goodwill, was with the manicurist in my room, and it was accidental. First she asked me if I was really Brazilian, I didn’t answer. I asked her to stop calling me patroa, which is Portuguese for a lady boss, and offered her a coffee. It was as if this short interaction was a silent agreement for her. What ensued were two hours of pure talking, she was a gossip magazine, my very own marker of time. She told me about Virginia’s affair with Vinny Jr., about the cast in Big Brother Brasil 26, about the commission the hotel charges on her pay, about the Brazilian women staying in this room during Carnaval. She asked me about television in France and if my husband was helpful with my child. Then she started going on about the helicopter that flew a man to Fortaleza after he broke his dick with a prostitute. I was in disbelief, not at the story but at the crude language, at the importance she gave this news and how normal it felt to her. I thought she was talking about the kind of gossip that comes from those distant relatives in another city. It was only when I realized it took place at the luxury hotel down the street from us that all lightness lost its humor. His escort was so embarrassed she flew back to São Paulo without her belongings, she laughed. And then she revealed more: there’s always something going on there, the owner was running for mayor but the feds came knocking and he dropped out of the race. After she left I looked at my nails and thought, there’s great fear in feeling too safe.

Brazilians have grown used to life under the shadow of an unjust government incapable of providing hope. The teenagers gathered by the cocktail carts each night didn’t frighten me. I discarded any threatening thoughts as inherited paranoia and continued to live with my guard down. Even when one of the teenage boys walked past us with his leg covered and stained with blood, I didn’t question our safety. I only decided to poke around the day we saw three teenagers sprint up the main road in tantalizing speed with panic in their eyes. Not because of them, but because when it happened everyone around us carried on with their business, acted as if it didn’t happen. Had my husband not seen it too, I would’ve thought I fabricated this sprint. People around us looked like zombies, they looked possessed, they were paralyzed. It was so strange, were we the only ones not under this spell?

The hippies, the business owners, the women selling lace tablecloths and dresses, they all brushed off my roundabout questions. I knew then that something was at play, they had closed the curtains but forgot to cover the gap. We could step into their reality now, into the dimension where order was operating. After the alarm cleared, and a sense of normalcy returned to the minds of the people, I started poking around again. Finally someone agreed to answer by discreetly guiding my eyes to the “CV” initials painted in red on the wall. When we were walking back to our room we noticed them everywhere, they stand for Comando Vermelho or in English, Red Command. And then it hit me: we were vacationing in the den of one of Brazil’s largest factions.

If once Brazilians associated criminal factions with urban city centers, the Red Command with Rio de Janeiro, now we were starting to do so with small coastal towns. What was once a fisherman village ruled by nature is now governed by the Red Command, the nation’s largest drug cartel. The Red Command isn’t just at war against the police, it’s at war for expansion. The Northeast’s proximity to the United States makes drug transportation by sea easier and quicker. To the townspeople, living here means that even petty crimes fall under the delegation of this faction. Robberies aren’t solved by the police force but by kids responsible for maintaining order in the affiliate. If you rob once you’re warned, twice you’re disciplined, three times, you’re dead. Only three weeks ago a local addict was murdered in the dunes. There’s only one system governing this society’s behavior, it’s the death penalty.

Between lunch and dinner tourists usually have coffee and a snack at the dessert shop in one of the alleys. They brew the best coffee in town and their desserts are delicious. My daughter’s mouth watered for the different brigadeiros3 displayed on their glass vitrine. The hubbub inside often encourages strangers to interact. I had my Brazilian identity questioned there almost every day. At times people told me point blank after I ordered that they’d never imagine I was from Brazil. On one instance a teenager pointed out to her father that we were French, and when they made a kind remark about my daughter and I replied gratefully in Portuguese, they were in complete disbelief—jaws dropped to the ground. So it was in this environment, in this crowded shop that we saw Brazilians, Americans, Germans, and French tourists come together. It was also the first place where we heard people speak Hebrew.

As our trip carried on, we noticed more and more people speaking Hebrew and concluded it was a popular holiday spot for Israelis too. When we ate lunch at the sandwich shop in the north part of town, there were several Israeli kids in their twenties sitting at the table smoking weed, eating sandwiches and açai bowls around us, and although the menu on the counter was written in Portuguese, there was a white board propped up on the corner with a tiny drawing of the Israeli flag, followed by something written in Hebrew. Before I could point it out to my husband, a local woman with a small child asked me to purchase a bracelet so she could buy a slice of cake at the shop for her daughter. As I reached for the change I made at the counter, shuffling the coins to make sure I had enough for a slice, I asked the man what the sign read. It offered a ten percent discount to Israeli customers.

As if this village had not already portrayed to us a condensed image of Brazilian narco-politics, it was also bringing center stage questions about global political alliances.

Later, when we were driving to the airport, I asked our driver about the man who owns the sandwich shop. As it turns out, when young Israeli soldiers finish military service, the Israeli government offers them paid holidays in this village. They pay for their flights and lodging, the kids are responsible only for what they eat.

The day we visited the sandwich shop was February 29, the day after Israel and the U.S. attacked Iran. I’m still left trying to discern why America’s greatest ally, with the most advanced intelligence agency in the world, is sending soldiers on R & R to this village. I think we can all stipulate the same answer to this question.

Something about leaving this place tells me I’m not leaving the haven I thought I was coming to visit. I’m relieved to no longer be under the governance of the Red Command, yet this freedom is obviously just an illusion.

As an expatriated Brazilian, I feel responsible for their supplication for help and guilty for my uselessness. On two occasions married men with children confided in us their hope to escape this country and take their families abroad. It’s not that they’re not proud to be Brazilian, but they understood they’ve been neglected by their own people; by the government, the rich, and their neighbors. The desperation in their discourse is brutal to hear, disturbing to witness, and real: their only hope is another system altogether, because this one oppresses them and keeps them from the basic right which should be owed to each human: freedom. It’s incredibly naive for me to say this, but I wish I could help them. In a community this desolate, it’s too easy to foresee the catastrophic atrocities to come, the moral sacrifices the innocent will have to continue making to survive. A fine line keeps their tomorrow from an apocalypse of biblical proportions, and the threat is so imminent I can smell the bloodshed, hear the massacre all the way from my bedroom in France.

Book and Film Recommendations

What follows is a compilation of the works that came to mind while I was in this village and thinking about telling this story. It is in no way an extensive research of the works around the themes I address in this piece, it’s simply what came to mind in my feelings.

Books

Iracema by José de Alencar (1865)
Iracema is a classic in Brazilian literature, and tells of the mythical birth of Ceará. The protagonist, a native Brazilian woman named Iracema, has since become an important symbol in Brazil’s mythological history. José de Alencar was born in Ceará and is until this day one of Brazil’s most important literary figures. Read

The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel (2024)
Winner of the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature this novel tells the story of an illiterate homosexual man who decides to learn to read and write at 71 to read the letter from the man he encountered in his youth, and was prohibited to see after his father discovered their sexual relationship. The story takes place in Ceará. Read

Films

Black God, White Devil (1964)
A Revisionist Western directed by Glauber Rocha in Bahia. It was nominated for an Oscar as a foreign language feature. It tells the story of an outlaw who joins a religious cult.

The Oyster and The Wind (1997)
A movie filmed in the village I described in Ceará. It was directed by Walter Lima Jr. and based on a novel by Moacir C. Lopes. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival and competed for the main prize. One of the main actors in the film was Fernando Torres, the father of Fernanda Torres who was nominated for an Oscar last year for her role in the Brazilian film “I’m Still Here” by Walter Salles.

Bacurau (2019)
A Brazilian surrealist movie directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho that takes place in a small town called Bacurau in the Brazilian sertão. In 2019, it won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

*all auctions are available to international bidders.

1. A George Nakashima Collector: the Swiss collector Jeffrey Montgomery, who passed away last year, dedicated forty years to collecting Japanese design and craft. These prestigious pieces by Nakashima will be auctioned off in Paris (at Piasa on Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré 75008) on Tuesday, March 24.

2. Rei Kawakubo & Comme des Garçons Homme Plus, 1980-1999: nearly 200 pieces will be auctioned off in Paris (at Piasa on Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré 75008) on Monday, March 23.

And here are some other pieces going on auction starting today.

Mariano Fortuny Lamps
Estimate: 2 000 - 4 000 €
Wednesday, March 25 at Cambi Casa d’Aste (Milan)

Alvar Aalto Chair
Estimate: 550 - 600 €
Tuesday, March 24 at Quittenbaum (Munich)

Eileen Gray Table
Estimate: 700 - 800 €
Tuesday, March 24 at Quittenbaum (Munich)

Carl Auböck Objects
Estimate: 650 - 850 €
Tuesday, March 24 at Quittenbaum (Munich)

Jasper Morrison Desk
Estimate: 1 000 - 1 500 €
Wednesday, March 25 at Tajan (Paris)

William Klein Photograph, Gun 1 (1954)
Estimate: 3 000 - 5 000 €
Friday, March 20 at Drouot (Paris)

Afra and Tobia Scarpa Chairs and Table
Estimate: 2 000 - 3 000 €
Friday, March 20 at Casa d’Aste Capitolium Art (Italy)

Colombia Figurine
Estimate: 80 - 120 €
Thursday, March 19 at Artenchères (France)

Regency Mahogany Library Table
Estimate: 1 500 - 2 500 £
Tuesday, March 14 at Dreweatts (England)

Richard Serra Notebooks Signed Edition
Estimate: 3 000 - 4 000 €
Wednesday, March 18 at Piasa (Paris)

Robert Guillerme & Jacques Chambron Buffet
Estimate: 1 000 - 1 500 €
Saturday, March 21 at Enchères Côte d’Opale (France)

Pierre Leduc Chair
Estimate: 200 - 400 €
Saturday, March 21 at Artesia (France)

Josef Hoffmann Sofa
Estimate: 1 000 - 1 500 €
Thursday, March 19 at Casa d’Aste Capitolium Art (Italy)

Jean Lurçat Table
Estimate: 1 200 - 1 500 €
Tuesday, March 31 at Tessier & Sarrou et Associés (Paris)

Louis XVI Stool
Estimate: 400 - 600 €
Thursday, March 19 at Audap & Associés (Paris)

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Luc Tuymans

by Renata Mosci Sanfourche

Something about Luc Tuymans’ upcoming show ‘The Fruit Basket’ reads different from his previous exhibitions. The paintings are larger, more complex, and brighter than the works we’re used to seeing him present. Last week, when we sat down to speak about his practice, and the rigor that makes Tuymans the most important painter of our times—he’s credited with reviving painting in the 1980s and influencing a generation of artists—I left with an urgent reminder: it’s impossible, and irrelevant, to try and escape today’s reality.

In just a few days, at David Zwirner’s Los Angeles gallery, visitors will discover a series of new paintings by the Belgian artist Luc Tuymans.

They will encounter The Fruit Basket, the largest painting on view that lends its name to the exhibition. No matter where one stands, it will be impossible to avoid the five-by-sixteen-meter blue image fragmented into a nine-canvas grid and hanging as one piece. As one makes their way closer to the painting, they’ll notice it was once an iPhone picture of a fruit basket—we can see the artist’s thumbs on the bottom edges of the work. When one is but steps away from the painting, their proximity will start to impair their perception and the fruit basket will disintegrate into purposeful brush strokes.

Just like fruits rot, the painting also dissolves, reminding spectators in the United States of their proximity to the degeneration of America. Distance is integral to all of Tuymans’ work, as are the complex moral questions he observes. Over the years, it’s the scale of his paintings that have changed. Today, what reads different in this series is his achievement with light, with color and contrast, and Tuymans explains why: this is the first time he’s been able to paint digital light.

What follows below is a conversation that attempts to trace the evolution of his work. The more you understand about Tuymans’ capacity to capture reality—not romance—and his responsibility and self-awareness with his medium, the more you can appreciate the distance he sets between his work and his spectators, and thus the disintegration of his images, the fogginess in his paintings as the reality of the human condition. These are forces he casts to help us rethink our conception of the past, of humanity and their moral concerns, and the value of painting within this landscape.

Your work can be extremely difficult to process at different levels. For one it’s quite violent, sometimes even painful to sit with, and these qualities present themselves as early as when you started. Where does this feeling come from?

I don’t know, maybe it has to do with the trajectory of life itself and my vision of the world which is not really that optimistic, it’s more of a pessimistic feel for the world because you have to be prepared for things that can happen.

I’m also convinced that in a way things that are making people happy will last 30 seconds. The consequences of violence in any which way or form are gigantic. This also goes to the visual level in the sense that it creates a different form of visuals. That fascinated me and it’s why I also never wanted to make art from art or for art’s sake, but mostly art based upon either an experience or the real so to speak. That’s why I sort of tended towards that notion of a reality.

Were you exposed to violence during your upbringing?

Up until I was 15 I was probably to a certain extent autistic, I was very quiet and all that, and I was bullied at school during that period until I eventually grew and it all turned around. So that probably also enhanced this notion of the idea of cruelty and especially kids, how cruelty has an element of ignorance that plays out, being uninformed, not knowing, not taking the time to know things, and then actually this blunt element of violence which is something that probably enhanced that situation.

I said this many times already—the marriage of my parents was not really happy. There was also the situation that they both were in different camps during the same world war. There was always this situation while we were eating where this came up, there was this tension that was constantly there on different levels.

There’s also my assessment of course that after the second world war, Europe as an empire was dissolved, the colonies were dissolved, and this is sort of a building block for where we are now. Look where we are now. If you do this whole trajectory it explains a lot, and at the same time it doesn’t. That is the conundrum we find ourselves in, and I find this conundrum quite interesting.

In your catalogue raisonné, your paintings are documented starting in 1978 when you were 20 years old. What questions were you asking yourself then?

I was very young. First, painting was quite a problem during that time because it was seen as an antique. I had to revalidate it in a way that would make sense and that’s why I came up with the idea of the authentic falsification.

At first it was quite regressive and I wanted to make work that looked older than it actually was. I wanted to continue painting, because painting is all about the touch, and it’s a medium that grew on me and was appropriate. In the beginning it was very juvenile, it was very existential and tormented which I started to hate and that’s why I stopped painting from 1980 to 1985 when I started working with film, and then I came back to painting informed by film.

Can you talk a little bit about this torment?

The typical sort of romantic idea of the artist who is not doomed but in a sense feels this sort of weight with the world. It’s a selfish proposition and it’s a kind of stupid and naïve one, it doesn’t have enough distance actually. In order to create visuals you need distance.

Through the lens of the camera I achieved that distance and then I could go back. Because I evolved from Super 8 to Super 16 to 35mm, it became expensive, that was one thing. The other thing was that I didn’t have the right script. Then I started to paint again and I found out that this was really an evaluation I’d been making over the last five years. It enabled me to actually paint things that I didn’t have the distance to paint what I wanted to paint then.

There was also the connection between film and painting. I would be a very bad photographer because I would never be in the moment. With film and painting you can approach the image because it’s a different assessment. I mean you can overpaint a painting. You can actually edit in the lens while you’re filming, you can approach the image, so that was quite interesting as a perspective.

Distance with the spectator is also important to you.

Every great artwork is about positioning, and positioning on different levels, and what you mean about how the work is relevant, but also positioning towards the spectator. Even old masters have a real sense about how that will work.

For example, Velázquez used to work with an elongated pencil on a stick in order to see what the distance measurement would be for him, but also the spectator. The distance you measure between the image and the spectator is actually part of the work, and that’s why when you see an image of mine at a distance it will sort of make sense. It’s also important for me to work from a distance. That’s also why I work with a hand mirror that puts the image upside down, to see how it really works. Once you get closer to the image it will sort of disintegrate.

Can you explain this distance and the detachment this creates in your work perhaps through the 1992 series Der Diagnostische Blick?

I was always interested in medicine to a certain extent. I had my opening at the Kunsthalle and at that point I hadn’t painted a lot of portraits. The ones I painted were portraits that I dreamt up and that were halfway self-portraits. Those were the ones from the ‘70s, most of them I destroyed and overpainted, some of them still survive but not many.

So I wanted to paint figures again but not in terms of a psychological perspective. At the opening, I found a psychoanalyst and I asked if they still had these books students use from photographed subjects, with people they would use to make a diagnosis. He said he’d send me these books and out of that I culminated a whole series which is called A Diagnostic View.

It’s interesting because it’s the most naturalistic in a sense, but at the same time this was also the first time I started to apply paint in a horizontal way so that it flattens the surface of the painting and makes it into a barrier where you cannot enter. The paintings turns into a symptom and although it’s very naturalistic it’s missing the real completely. That was the angle.

You’ve said before that Our New Quarters (1986) isn’t your most famous painting but the most important one. Why?

It’s important because it’s about a taboo and because I never lived through the second world war, so there was a moral problem of could you touch up to this specific content. This particular painting came about because I found a book by Alfred Kantor in a bookshop in Antwerp from 1979. Alfred Kantor had survived three concentration camps—Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Schwarzheide.

A couple of works were culminated out of that, this one and Schwarzheide (1986). The first one was based on this postcard. What was interesting was that he didn’t write a diary, he made a whole book with drawings. In the beginning of the book he glued these postcards which were handed out in the very beginning when he was in Theresienstadt—a sort of mass model camp they used in propaganda. They gave the inmates these postcards to send to their relatives. Of course he had written in Czech, because he was a Czech Jew, in Czech this is our new quarters. In New York—because he died in ‘79, he lived in New York—he glued them in the book and underneath he wrote Our New Quarters, which is as if nothing had changed in between which I found interesting.

I used the backdrop of a military green color which gets darker on the edges, and then very fast made the contour of the Kasematte, which was an existing building in which they were all gathered. The interesting point is when he was freed he was repatriated to the same spot where he departed from after surviving the whole thing by the Russians, they were repatriated after this Kasematte in Theresienstadt, and he stole a box with these postcards.

By using a sort of white so slightly mixed with yellow undertone, it sort of lights up and gives the idea of a subtitle nearly, so it becomes like a documentary nearly. In that sense it’s an autonomous painting as is the Gas Chamber that came later and so on.

You understand yourself as a Flemish painter and you’re attentive to the lineage you’re carrying forward in that role. You love Jan Van Eyck, you trust in the work of your Flemish predecessors, and you demonstrate an enormous sense of responsibility. Why is this important to you?

When I was nine years old, I was in front of a Van Eyck painting and I saw this and I thought I can’t forget it, this is it. It was an extreme form of perfection. It was important for the entire Renaissance because it was the first time there was enough distance to open the window to the world.

The brothers Van Eyck did not completely invent oil painting but they perfected it. It was then imported into Italy and enabled Leonardo da Vinci to make his first masterpiece. He also had a very interesting motto, if I can, which means I’m big on humility but behind that I have gigantic ambitions.

What’s more important to understand is that the entirety of Belgium, which is a dreamt up country—and a young one, it’s younger than the United States—was given back to the Dutch after the Napoleonic Wars and nobody knew what to do with it, the Rothschilds bought it, it was a tax paradise and they put a king on it.

Flanders was also a region, never a country, it was always under foreign rule, but it was important because of that. There was no time to be romantic or rational like the French, or romantic like the Germans, there was this opportunism within the idea of survival. So the element of the real is really important.

To give an example, people talk about [James] Ensor and say he’s grotesque. He’s not grotesque, he’s a real precursor of expressionism as a soul within that framework. Then you have Magritte whose most famous painting, La Trahison des Images, where you see a pipe and under which he writes, this is not a pipe, of course not because it’s the image of the pipe.

So it’s much more about the real in this part of the world than something else, and that’s what connects it back to Van Eyck, who by heightening the real was able to contract itself from the mnemonic imagery of Christianity, opening it to the world. That is an important statement.

How do you overcome the influence of Van Eyck?

I’m not influenced by Van Eyck because I could never do that, so I’m not even going to try doing that. You have to accept you’re a dilettante in this iteration, accept your position, and work from there. I don’t also see any purpose in trying to mimic it, because that would be impossible and not really interesting. It’s just that you have to validate it for what it is.

In this process, where do you find your freedom?

When I’m working. Although I prepare everything extremely well—I make a lot of drawings—it takes a lot of time before I start the painting process. When I actually start painting it goes pretty fast. At that point, I don’t want to think anymore on the canvas. Some painters do, but I don’t. There are exceptions, there are painters who have changed, but very few. In that sense I know very well what I’m doing, but nevertheless you don’t know everything; there’s always something that sort of escapes you. By concentrating and letting the intelligence flow into the hands instead of the brain, you get an element which is extremely intentional, which is extremely nervous, which is extremely poignant. The first three hours of painting are hell, but when it starts to fall together that’s when the picture starts and you can do things that with the naked eye you know nobody would see but that are fundamental to the image in itself. That’s specific pleasure, and it’s also the pleasure of painting. If I wouldn’t have this tension and this pleasure of doing it I would just discard the work and then I would not do it anymore.

What happens to you at this precise moment when everything that’s inside your head becomes physical?

I don’t think about it. I’m activated. I’m doing it. It takes so much concentration I don’t want to think, I just want to do what I’m doing. As I said the intelligence goes from the head to the hands which is a different intelligence. And I think that’s very important. It’s not that I set out to make a painting in one day, because in the early days I painted for much longer, but at a certain point it grew organically to set myself this sort of situation to go through.

It also changed when I started no longer living in the studio, when I destroyed a lot of things because I worked a lot on it. During the relationship with my first girlfriend, when I was able to move to her place and use my apartment as a studio, I could make this distance, then disturb it and start to work to make a painting in a day, or paint to a point where I would say okay, maybe little changes the day after, but to come back the next day and look at it, if it worked or not. If not, I would destroy and overpaint it. Now I can afford to throw it away and start again in a new canvas.

Do you ever work from your own memory? Could you paint something that’s not visible?

I did work from my memory. There are some works solely made on memory. In the beginning it was a bit more. There were memories from drawings I made and reconstructed into paintings. It still happens, it all depends, it’s a cluster of different things.

Postmemory is a concept Marianne Hirsch developed at Columbia University. She defines it as: “the relationship the generation after bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before-to the experiences they remember only by means of stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up.”

One of my first works about memory was the painting I made about the brother of my mother who died during the war. The house was burned down so no photographs were left, only an oil painting in three-quarters which I turned frontal. At that point I was also really impressed by the frontal imagery of Sandar, which is completely dishonest in a sense because it’s a posed image, so it’s a presumption or an assumption of somebody. There, I understood that every form of memory is completely inadequate, and its inadequacy is actually the sort of ambiguity that makes the visual into something interesting, because it actually works on different levels; it works on presumptions, it works on assumptions, and it also has an element of premonition within it. Those are all the uncertainties that pile up within the imaginative proposition of making an imagery, which is always layered—it’s not one layer, it’s several layers. That’s what makes it important, because it will make you doubt the imagery, and doubting an image is important because it works on your brain and it works on your memory.

There was a museum director from Honolulu who hated my work, and when he saw my show at the Tate Modern in 2004 he hated it even more, until he started to dream about it. Then he became a fan. Painting works through time, over time, with time. It’s a very specific slow medium in that sense.

In past interviews, you’ve talked about tonality and a sensibility to light that’s particular to the region of artists you come from. Can you develop on this?

As we look out of the window right now it’s mostly gray here, but the gray has a certain luminosity. I don’t live in California, if I lived in California or Spain the shadows would be different. So in that sense the luminosity is something that eventually always ends up in the tonality. Tonality is an uncertainty within how you perceive culture. Tonality, unlike pure color, creates depth, real depth in a painting, not just a perspective, but real depth in how you assess it, and that is probably to a certain extent linked to the region.

The Fruit Basket is your most recent work on view. Looking at the past 50 years, how has your work changed? Has your process evolved?

The process has changed continuously because we live in a different world. Already the light of the digital is interesting, you can’t get away with it.

When I was given the Max Beckmann prize at the Städelschule, I had to work with the collection, I had to talk to the students, give lectures, and make a big exhibition. I made an exhibition choice about the whole collection, which I showed, but I was also asked to put one of my works in the museum at a specific space. So I shared a space with Max Beckmann and Fernand Khnopff, The Game Warden (1883), because it’s a painting I remembered, and it was actually an image I thought would fit in well. But it didn’t because it was digital light. In a sense you cannot get away from the contemporary, you will evolve if you like or dislike it, it’s going to have an impact. I came to the conclusion that you cannot fight new media, that’s stupid because that’s a fight you can’t win, so it’s better to incorporate it into the toolbox, and in that sense of course things will change.

Now, with The Fruit Basket this is quite imminent, and also with the Illuminations in the show. We show very enlarged images with a sort of dark border that I painted around them, and the fact that they become parallelograms, they’re not really straight. You can see there that the light is enhanced. For the first time I was able to paint digital light. The same is actually happening with the 9-piece sort of The Fruit Basket that you see, so of course it changes continuously.

It took me a long time to assess the idea of quantas. I was always afraid of going over my contrast, so a lot of the imagery looked over-developed on the vanishing point, which is interesting. Now three years I enabled myself to use more color and also to go deeper into the contrast, but a long sort of trajectory to actually come to that.

What does this deeper contrast do to the work for a spectator?

It will make the work and its experience different.

It’s also interesting in museum shows to see—especially the big show I did in Beijing, The Past—how the size grew, how the touch, I mean the way how paint was applied became loose or different than the concise things in the beginning. Also the early works are now 40 years old and already retrieved themselves in a very different way. That’s an interesting juxtaposition, it’s something that’s not completely controllable but on the other hand it grows in a very organic way and has a logic of its own.

In addition to painting, you also have a curatorial practice.

I thought the curatorial practice was an interesting experience, to have to work with another artist’s work. I worked on a big show for China which was art from the 15th century in the lowlands in combination with old Chinese masters from the same time period until the 20th century, which was shown in the Palais des Beaux Art and in the Forbidden City. The second venue was together with Ai Weiwei, where we did contemporary Belgian and Chinese art.

The interesting part is that you can open up the situation to include young artists, which I find really interesting. In the other way, with the old masters, you can make a different point, you can make a different assessment, different worldview which you oppose. So it broadens the scope where you get the idea you’re not just only part of a market that’s a system which has become corporate. So it’s kind of a good antidote against that.

In your lecture, Curating the Library, you evoke three literary works: Spinoza’s Ethics, Life on Earth by Jan Jacob Slauerhoff and Ästhetik des Vorscheins by Ernest Bloch. What is the connection between these works and your thinking?

Spinoza was the last philosopher with a sort of closed system, which was then destroyed by Immanuel Kant. Nevertheless it’s a mathematical proposition of the world and the idea of the principal of God. I found, and still find, it to be not only beautiful but very valid in the sense of the rationale, of how you can look at the world.

Ernest Bloch was the philosopher of the possibilities. He was a philosopher in East Germany and this one book, Ästhetik des Vorscheins, on the aesthetics of appearances was interesting in terms of culture. He also has this one saying that between there’s nothing and nothingness is the process where something actually starts to exist, which I found a very interesting statement.

And Jan Jacob Slauerhoff, specifically that one book I read in an afternoon is very famous, he’s a cult figure in Holland. He was a writer, a poet, but also a writer of novels. He was also a ship doctor and wrote most of his books in different places like in Mexico, China, he also learned Chinese, and he was one of the inventors of the Nouveau Roman before it actually happened. He died in 1934 and made a very interesting statement where he said the world has become smaller in distance but very large in terms of psychology, and I think that was an interesting statement right before the second world war.

The Fruit Basket will be on view at David Zwirner in Los Angeles from February 24 through April 4.

Chronicle

My Protagonist

You can feel when people have lost faith in you. When their words aren’t as gentle as they once felt, when they look at you in despair, unsure which eye to fix their gaze upon. When you speak, they stare at your lips. Your words aren’t void of meaning, but they do weigh less on their minds.

I don’t dream, I don’t have stories to tell, I have no convictions. I’m failing at my own perceptions. I tell myself, it’s not for me to worry about the other’s regard, it’s for me to look further out, so far beyond to a place where their gaze cannot meet mine. It is for me to catch my own shadow, the one I’ve lost faith in, to watch it, tie it away next to me.

Certain days I remember my head resting on my little pillow and you moving into my dreams, casting yourself in front of the light. You remind me of chalk, you are large and round and you chased me in a diagonal line, dust balls rolled around us. Now you chase me in plain daylight, when I think I’m most awake, when I leave my desk to drop off the dry cleaning, when I leave my desk to pick-up veal and ham from the butcher. During the day, when the alarm stops sounding you appear.

I believe I’m coming closer to you now, step-by-step, like a cat hunting rabbits in the grassland. This is the fight you want. When I catch you I discover you’re dry. I find clarity when you feel lost. I’m here, I exist and you don’t, and I know what it feels like to be you, to cross the streets, to get in the way when I’m reaching for something greater than your answers can provide.

Even if I’m blind to your beauty I still see you, so I’ll write you into something. How I’d like to see your eyes shrink when the sun gets too bright.

I’m strong enough now to push you to the side and watch you from the center. Today I become your shadow and you my protagonist. I will torture you, I will turn you around like a beetle in the grass and watch you move your legs back and forth in despair. I’ll make you face agony and I’ll ask you to recover. You will forget yourself, you’ll let me walk between you and the sun now. You will lie there dry as sticks, but I am not God, I’m not in control, you are. You do as you will, with your will and your reason, I give you only conditions. You are a woman. I will not show you what that means, you will discover it.

Why do I want to abuse you? Why do I want to torture you? Are you worthy of something better? Will you lose faith? At the end of this, I will be but a name and you will have inherited the world. You will want to go back to the blackwater river and paddle the Amazon looking for everything you’ve lost, but the forest won’t give it to you. You will have to find something new. We regenerate like dry trees, but never do any of us return to seeds.

New Books

Why I’m Buying These Books

Rhyme’s Reason by John Hollander
Because I read an article this week (which I link below) where the American poet Carl Phillips refers to this book as his introduction to poetry. Although I love poetry, and came to it by way of a Stéphane Mallarmé poem that touched me profoundly, I never studied it and I don’t understand its mechanics. I’d love to discover what he discovered in Hollander’s guide.

Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity by Richard Rorty
Because I listened to a 1990 lecture (which I link below) by the American philosopher and historian Richard Rorty, and I identified with his perspective on contemporary society’s moral and social progress.

The Good Apprentice by Iris Murdoch
Because she deals with humor in both a literary and entertaining way, and I find this to be a difficult combination to achieve. She’s also concerned with religion and I’m interested to see how she deals with spirituality within this context. To be honest, I had forgotten all about her until someone on Substack (I’m sorry I forgot who it was) posted a note about her and it prompted me to read her again, it feels like the right time for me. I listened to several interviews with her on YouTube, and I found she has a very unique perspective on literature and philosophy.

The Great Wave by Michiko Kakutani
Because I really enjoyed reading her book reviews and I went looking to see what she was working on recently and came across this book. I’m fascinated by the idea of the outsider and I’m curious to see how she places them as influential people in contemporary society.

Democracy and Education by John Dewey
Because I’m invested in constantly learning about the state of literary education and I’m curious to read John Dewey’s perspective from the early 20th century. Everything I’ve read by Dewey feels extremely contemporary and relevant to the issues we’re facing as a society today and I undoubtedly believe this is the case with this work:

As the American population appears increasingly subject to rhetorical manipulation and ideological extremism, Dewey imagines the possibility of education cultivating "habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder.

The Anxiety of Influence by Harold Bloom
I already own this one but I think it’s time to reread it. It has come up numerous times this year, and I think it can help push me forward. Each time I read this book it’s as if he was sitting in a room talking to me and helping me get over whatever hurdle I’m undergoing at that moment. There’s so much instruction inside that I couldn’t possibly not revisit it multiple times throughout my life. Each time I discover something else that enlightens my creative process.

The Visual Library

Portraits

Currently at Rue de Chabrol

Seven Articles and One Podcast I Recommend This Week

1. Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time used to be my favorite radio show/podcast. I was genuinely scared the show would come to an end when Bragg retired last year, and I’m relieved it’s continuing this year with a new host, the author and historian Misha Glenny. The first episode came out yesterday (February 12) and looks into John Stuart Mill and his landmark work On Liberty. Listen

   + upcoming episode topics include The Mariana Trench, The Roman Arena, Henry IV Part 1, and The Code of Hammurabi.

2. After 22 years as a NYT columnist, David Brooks writes his final op-ed. The result is a profound understanding of American identity and the value culture has on shaping its future: “We have widened personal freedom but utterly failed to help people answer the question of what that freedom is for.” Read

3. The poet Carl Phillips opens up about teaching himself to write poetry, his first encounter with William Carlos Williams, and the impact Williams’ poetry collection had on his life: “A poem seemed a space to store a secret, and I had plenty of secrets. I began then to write the poems that would become my first book—though if I’d known that, I wouldn’t have written them.” Read

4. The Harvard scholar Mark Ray Lewis recently translated A Tale Told to the Darkness, a short story by Rainer Maria Rilke about being present. Read

5. In light of Namwali Serpell’s upcoming book On Morrison (to be published by Hogarth Press on February 17), the Nation has published an excerpt of one of her essays where she offers a new reading of Toni Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye. Read

6. Bella Freud’s cousin Emma Freud also has a story to tell. In the Observer, Emma remembers how a plant brought her closer to her great-grandfather: “So there I was, moving from apathy to disbelief, holding the same plant my great-grandfather Sigmund had nurtured nearly 100 years ago.” Read

7. Hermione Lee reviews Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife for the New York Review of Books. Read

8. After a three-year break, the investigative journalist is back on Substack. I’ve been following Greenwald since Edward Snowden handed him the confidential documents that would lead to the global surveillance disclosure by the Guardian. Greenwald later co-founded the nonprofit news organization The Intercept, which he resigned from in 2020 after a dispute with its editors. I’m pleased to see him kick-off with a video on Howard Lutnick and the Epstein files. Watch

Four Essays and Two Lectures I Recommend This Week

1. Jung’s View of Christianity by C. G. Jung. Read

2. Ethics of Principle versus Sensitivity by Richard Rorty. Watch

3. Archive Fever by Jacques Derrida. Read

4. The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin. Read

5. The Generation of Postmemory by Marianne Hirsch. Read

   Postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that preceded their births but that were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Focusing on the remembrance of the Holocaust, this essay elucidates the generation of postmemory and its reliance on photography as a primary medium of transgenerational transmission of trauma. Identifying tropes that most potently mobilize the work of postmemory, it examines the role of the family as a space of transmission and the function of gender as an idiom of remembrance.

6. Sublime & the Beautiful Revisited by Iris Murdoch. Listen

My Morning Read

I’m not sure my therapist was being ethical (and neither was he) when he told me to read Doris Lessing more than ten years ago. Regardless, I never did. Let’s see where The Golden Notebook takes me. Every time I start on a new author I hope to find romance (I’m very often disappointed, I’m as much of a picky reader today as I was a picky eater more than thirty years ago). I hope I fall in love, and if I don’t I still win—there’s nothing like starting the day with a woman’s voice.

My Daughter’s Evening Read

Vita is letting me read to her in French again, and this book is on repeat. La Cabane sous le cerisier tells the story of two cousins who build a tent in their grandmother’s backyard but struggle with the ants, cats, and chickens invading their set-up. The story ends with a sweet lesson about respecting nature.

What My Husband is Listening To

A Movie I’m Thinking About

The Wind Will Carry Us by Abbas Kiarostami

A Poem

The Art of Poetry by Jorge Luis Borges

To gaze at a river made of time and water
And remember Time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.

To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.

To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.

To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness—such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.

Sometimes at evening there’s a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.

They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.

Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.

I also asked two Parisians, Lauren Collins and Constance Dovergne, for their recommendations. Here they are, in their own words.

Photographs and a Restaurant

Two Recommendations

Lauren Collins, staff writer at the New Yorker who also runs Lettre Recommandée

I’m keen to see Jeu de Paume’s exhibition of the photographs of Madeleine de Sinéty—daughter of impoverished aristocrats, chronicler of daily life in the Bréton village of Poilley, late-in-life immigrant to Maine, where she shot “elemental occupations” such as woodcutting with horse teams. Her work—the little I know of it—is flat-out beautiful: rubber booted children grabble in ball pit of apples; a mother pickets for daycare funding, a sliver of pink sweater peeking out of her coat, perfectly matched to the flyers strewn on the ground. But I’m just as interested in the way in which de Sinéty made it: over time, as a part of a community, with attention to the possibilities and vulnerabilities of society in the round.

from June 12 to September 27 at the Jeu de Paume

Constance Dovergne, lifestyle chief at Elle France who also runs Carte Blanche

Lately I’ve become less interested in being among the first to try the latest fashionable opening and more interested in enjoying what won’t last. In Paris, as anywhere else, nothing does! (terrace heaters! €1.90 metro tickets! riding scooters without helmets!) And I’ve just heard that Le Repaire de Cartouche, an 11th-arrondissement institution praised by in-the-know chefs, is for sale. So these days might be our last chance to enjoy this place that is everything American foodies fantasize about in Parisian restaurants without the superficial, folkloric and overpriced gloss you’ll get at, let’s say, L’Ami Louis. The decor is old school (insane seventies tiles in the restrooms), the terrines are legendary and the historic staff reminds me of the pot-au-feu restaurants where my grandmother took me when I was growing up in Béarn. The 30€ bistrot menu is everything you need to survive the last days of winter (bouillon de poule vermicelles, lieu noir et orzo au safran, poulet braisé aux morilles). And if you do survive, prepare to be rewarded with the most anticipated food event of spring: the reopening of Le Chateaubriand by beloved chef (and friend!) Robert Mendoza (who previously made a splash at Le Saint-Sébastien, Vivant 2 and numerous pop-ups), under the blessing of legendary chef Iñaki Aizpitarte.

Le Repaire de Cartouche, 8 Bd des Filles du Calvaire, 75011 Paris

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Art

Museums and Galleries

Josef Albers: Duets
Organized in collaboration with the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, this exhibition features important paintings and works on paper from the 1930s through the 1970s. (David Zwirner, January 15-March 21)

Tomorrow: Yes by Erwin Wurm
The exhibition unfolds around two monumental sculptures: a compressed schoolhouse and a six-meter sailboat. (Thaddaeus Ropac, January 17-April 11)

Global Warming by Martin Parr
Drawing from a body of 180 works that began with black-and-white photographs, Global Warming examines recurring patterns in human behavior. (Jeu de Paume, January 30-May 24)

Huma Bhabha / Alberto Giacometti
Responding to Giacometti’s work, artist Huma Bhabha presents a series of sculptures now on view at the Giacometti Institute: “Both artists draw from the art of all epochs and all civilizations—from the art of Ancient Greece to the Renaissance, as well as African arts and cinema—to create new forms and original modes of perception, other visions of humanity.” (l’Institut Giacometti, February 2 -May 24)

All is Portraiture by Barkley L. Hendricks
This is the artist’s first solo show in Europe. All Is Portraiture highlights the central role portraiture occupies in his practice and offers a comprehensive overview of his multifaceted approach. (Marian Goodman, February 6-April 4)

American Images by Dana Lixenberg
In Dana Lixenberg’s first retrospective, the MEP will display more than 30 years of her work, including iconic photographs like her 1993 portrait of Tupac Shakur. (MEP, February 11-May 24)

Photographe de Guerre by Robert Capa
With more than 60 works on display, this exhibition offers a historical look at a reality that is still new: the risks of covering war. (Musée de la Libération de Paris, February 18-December 19)

Clair-Obscur
20 contemporary artists from the Pinault Collection are placed side-by-side to explore pictorial representations of chiaroscuro in contemporary art. (Bourse de Commerce, opening March 4)

Renoir and Love
For the first time since 1985, Renoir’s masterpieces are shown together in France. (Musée d’Orsay, March 17-July 19)

This Will Not End Well by Nan Goldin
This is Nan Goldin’s first retrospective in France featuring her videos, which she calls “films made up of stills”. It includes six main titles spanning 50 years of work. (Grand Palais, March 18-June 21)

Matisse
More than 230 paintings, drawings, books, textiles, objects and watercolors by Matisse between 1941 and 1954 will be on view at the Grand Palais, an exhibition in partnership with the Centre Pompidou. (Grand Palais, March 24-July 26)

The Ambition of Painting by Henri Rousseau
The Musée de l’Orangerie is the first to welcome loans from the Barnes Foundation collection, bringing together for the first time a significant body of work by Henri Rousseau. (Musée de l’Orangerie, March 25-July 20)

Henry Taylor
Henry Taylor is one of the greatest figures in American contemporary painting. In this dedicated exhibition, the Picasso Museum presents nearly 100 works in 13 different rooms. (Musée de Picasso, April 8-September 6)

Lee Miller
The Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris prepares to receive a retrospective on the works of American photographer Lee Miller. Curated by the Tate Modern, the exhibition features 250 prints, many on display for the first time. (Musée d’Art Moderne, April 10-August 2)

Living Bodies by Michelangelo and Rodin
This Spring at the Louvre, the sculptures of Michelangelo and August Rodin will be exhibited together to highlight their mythical and transformative qualities. (Louvre, April 15-July 20)

Calder. Rêver en Équilibre by Alexander Calder
A retrospective to celebrate the works of Alexander Calder on the anniversary of his arrival in France 100 years ago. (Louis Vuitton Foundation, April 15-August 16)

Alechinsky, Balzac, Picasso, Rodin... les voies ardentes de la création
This exhibition shows the connection between labor and creation by looking at artists who, like Balzac, worked hard to create their oeuvres. (Maison de Balzac, through March 15)

exhibitions ending soon

Philip Guston and Raymond Pettibon (Musée Picasso, through March 1)

Gerhard Richter (Fondation Louis Vuitton, through March 2)

100 Years of Art Deco (Musée des Arts Décoratifs, through April 26)

General Exhibition (Fondation Cartier Palais Royale, through August 31)

Events

Events Across Disciplines

February 2 | The French-Mauritian writer Nathacha Appanah discusses her most recent work, which addresses the issue of femicide. (Bourse de Commerce)

February 10 | Arundhati Roy talks about her new novel Mother Mary Comes to Me with the French writer Frédérique Leichter-Flack. The conversation will be in English. She will be signing copies of her novel at Shakespeare and Co. the next day. (Amphithéâtre Émile Boutmy)

February 11 - 13 | The Memorial for Those Who Did Not Fall in War organized by Columbia University’s Global Center in Paris, is a symposium that will gather collaborators from across the globe to discuss what living in war and peace means to society today. (Reid Hall at Columbia Global Center)

March 13 | A Beowulf reading will take place at the Sorbonne with Professor Wilfrid Rotgé. The text will be read in English. (Amphithéâtre Guizot - Sorbonne)

March 26 | Daniel Mendelsohn on his new translation of The Odyssey and the impact reading the classics can have on one’s life. (Shakespeare and Co.)

April 9 | Ben Lerner on his new novel Transcription I. (Shakespeare and Co.)

April 17 - 19 | Festival du Livre de Paris, a three-day book festival in Paris will gather several international artists and publishers. (Grand Palais)

Music and Theatre

Concerts and Performances

January 21 -
March 14 | Hamlet by Ivo Van Hove
Odeon Theatre de l’Europe

January 29 -
March 8 | Contre a play based on John Cassavetes & Gena Rowlands
Petit Saint-Martin

February 4 -
February 5 | Opera To Be Sung by Pascal Dusapin, with Pharrell Williams
Fondation Louis Vuitton

February 10 | Meredith Monk with Katie Geissinger and Allison Sniffen
Bourse de Commerce

February 13 -
February 15 | Présences Électronique an electronic music festival
Maison de la Radio et de la Musique

February 17 | Alvin Lucier performed by Charles Curtis, Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O’Malley
Église du Saint-Esprit

March 10 | Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus in Concert, with Álfheiður Guðmundsdóttir
Cité de la Musique

March 18 -
March 19 | An Evening with David Byrne
La Seine Musicale

March 20 -
April 16 | Bovary Madame by Christophe Honoré
Theatre de la Ville de Paris

April 2 -
May 12 | Romeo and Juliet by Rudolf Noureev
Opéra Bastille

April 10 -
April 13 | Caterine Barbieri
Cité de la Musique

May 13 -
June 28 | Lumières, Lumières, Lumières, a play based on Virginia Woolf’s novel To The Lighthouse by Florent Siaud
Comédie-Française Studio

May 29 | Aya Nakamura
Stade de France

July 9 -
July 12 | Nelken (Carnations) by Pina Bausch
Châteauvallon-Liberté, Amphithéâtre, Châteauvallon, France

Film

What to Watch and Where

January 28 -
February 15 | Márta Mészáros retrospective, first woman awarded at Cannes
Cinémathèque Française

February 11 -
March 1 | Essential Asian Thrillers
Cinémathèque Française

February 14 | Night is Short, Walk on Girl by Masaaki Yuasa (2017)
Musée Guimet

February 18 | Women Are Born Twice by Yûzô Kawashima (1961)
MCJP

February 25 | Look Back by Kiyotaka Oshiyama (2024)
Musée Guimet

March 7 | Two Golden Lions by Lu Yi (2022)
Musée Cernuschi

March 11 | Early Summer by Yasujirô Ozu (1956)
MCJP

March 28 | Teddy Gray’s Sweet Factory (2011) & Think of England (1999) by Martin Parr
Jeu de Paume

Family

Kids Too

February 1 -
June 27 | Petit Sculpteur à Quatre Mains, after listening to a story about one of the museum’s sculptures, families create their own with clay. (4 years and older at Musée Bourdelle *the museum also offers activities using clay for younger and older children)

February 4 -
February 18 | Tapisser la Terre, children explore the universe of the artist Otobong Nkanga while manipulating new materials. (4 to 6 years old at Musée d’art Moderne *the museum also offers activities around this exhibition for younger and older children)

February 7 | Lunettes à Vision Wow, children make their own philosopher glasses to equip themselves with a new outlook. (6 to 12 years old at Palais de Tokyo)

February 7 -
July 18 | La Fabrique des Nymphéas, families design their own interpretation of a water garden using floating inks in a Japanese technique called suminagashi. (Musée de l’Orangerie)

February 14 | “Démouler le vrai du faux”, create real and fake museum pieces by using molds. (6 to 12 years old, Palais de Tokyo)

February 15 | Family Cinema: Beurk, a moment dedicated to independent cinema for children, with a 20–30 minute workshop offered before or after the screening. (6 years and older, Jeu de Paume)

February 23 -
February 25 | Paravents de Corée, children create their own Korean screen or their own Carpes Koï. (7 to 12 years old, Musée Guimet)

March 9 -
July 1 | C’est le Bouquet ! children discover the flower compositions in Louvre’s collection and compose their own arrangements. (6 years and older, Louvre)

March 15 | Atelier l’Empreinte de Ma Gravure, the Institut Feibai offers children and their parents an opportunity to create their own, personalized carved seal. (4 years and older, Musée Cernuschi)

March 15 -
May 10 | Atelier Cyanotype, after looking at Martin Parr’s exhibition with artist Gwenael Porte, children imagine a dream destination and make a postcard using the cyanotype. (7 to 11 years old, Jeu de Paume)

March 28 -
June 27 | Une Licorne Peut en Cacher une Autre, after looking at the unicorn exhibition, children use arts and crafts to transform a unicorn into a fantastical animal. (Musée de Cluny)

March 29 | Family Cinema: Le Carnaval de la Petite Taupe, a moment dedicated to independent cinema for children, with a 20–30 minute workshop offered before or after the screening. (2 years and older, Jeu de Paume)

May 24 | Family Cinema: Nina et le Secret du Hérisson, a moment dedicated to independent cinema for children, with a 20–30 minute workshop offered before or after the screening. (6 years and older, Jeu de Paume)

ongoing exhibitions

My Petite Cinémathèque (Cinémathèque Française, through March 8)

Transparency (2 to 10 years old, Grand Palais, through August 2017)

*all auctions are available to international bidders.

“A man who wishes to participate at an auction must pay equal attention to the book and to his competitors, in addition to keeping a cool enough head to avoid being carried away in the competition.” — Walter Benjamin

The Round-Up

George II Mahogany Hall Chairs
Estimate: 800 £ - 1 200 £
Thursday, January 22 at Hutchinson Scott (England)

Japanese Flower Holders
Estimate: 350 € - 700 € (left) and 450 € - 900 € (right)
Thursday, January 22 at Galerie Zacke (Vienna)

12 George III Dining Chairs
Estimate: 1 000 $ - 2 000 $
Tuesday, January 27 at Freeman’s (Chicago)

Candida Höfer Signed Print Edition 1/100
Estimate: 2 500 € - 2 800 €
Tuesday, January 20 at Setdart (Spain)

Charlotte Perriand Pair of Stools
Estimate: 1 200 €
Saturday, January 24 at Benedetto Trionfante Auction House (Italy)

Jean Prouvé Standard Chair
Estimate: 1 000 € - 1 500 €
Wednesday, January 21 at François Epin Auction (Paris)

Art Deco Vitrine
Estimate: 280 € - 420 €
Saturday, January 24 at Auktionshaus Kendzia (Germany)

1950s Oak Chairs
Estimate: 30 € - 50 €
Friday, January 23 at Côte Basque Enchères Lelièvre (France)

17th Century Oak Side Table
Estimate: 100 £ - 200 £
Thursday, January 22 at Hutchinson Scott (England)

Ingrid Dessau Handwoven Wool Rug
Estimate: 8 000 €
Wednesday, January 21 at Piasa (Brussels)

Huib Hoste Wood Shelf
Estimate: 3 000 € - 5 000 €
Wednesday, January 21 at Piasa (Brussels)

17th Century Italian Wood Refectory Table
Estimate: 1 500 $ - 2 500 $
Tuesday, January 27 at Freeman’s (Chicago)

Thonet Wooden Chairs
Estimate: 100 € - 200 €
Thursday, January 22 at Casa d'Aste Capitolium Art (Italy)

20th Century Chinese Lacquered Screen
Estimate: 1 200 € - 1 800 €
Wednesday, January 21 at Ansorena (Madrid)

Lounge Chair With Foot Rest
Estimate: 200 € - 300 €
Saturday, January 24 at Jack-Philippe Ruellan (France)

Oak Work Table
Estimate: 800 € - 1 200 €
Saturday, January 24 at Pousse-Cornet (France)

Handwoven Jacquard Coverlet 1831
Estimate: 400 $ - 600 $
Wednesday, January 21 at Nye & Company (United States)

George Gray Victorian Silver Tea Infuser
Estimate: 120 £ - 180 £
Wednesday, January 21 at Elstob Auctioneers (England)

16th-18th Century Chinese Lamps
Estimate: 500 € - 700 €
Tuesday, January 20 at Richard Maison de Ventes (France)

Scandinavian Chairs
Estimate: 300 € - 500 €
Saturday, January 24 at Jack-Philippe Ruellan (France)

Walker Evans Signed Photograph
Estimate: 1 000 € - 1 200 €
Tuesday, January 20 at Setdart (Spain)

Worthy of Mention

On Thursday, January 29 at 15:00 in Paris, a Christian Dior Masterpieces sale from the Mouna Ayoub Haute Couture Collection.

Chronicle

Our President (Nosso Presidente)

In the beginning there was no silence. It was loud, far too loud, far too crowded. The line was long. Every person wanted to say something. Something about the President. Something about who they wanted to be President. Something about the war. In their speech there was no trace of not saying anything, of not thinking anything. Of not having an opinion or a disagreement or an agreement.

Existing for them had meant drafting slogans and wearing comfortable shoes to march on the streets for or against anything. They were anything they wanted to be. Being, just being something, anything, made them belong. It was the force of the great majority you see. The voice of rebellion. We want. We need. Give us. Stop this. Start this. Criticize that. Speak up. Fight. They had all entered a place of importunity. But all their remarks were reactions. When you gave them a question: sir, madam, are you blue or are you green. These people felt that either green or blue was the answer. There was no other color outside of this question.

So when the time came to answer the right question. Is it this President or that President, you see, they felt the need to answer. Is this President corrupt or honest, the answer mattered little, because that is the President they were picking. And they were picking this one President over the other President. And soon what mattered to these people was not the grains that were missing on the tables of their neighbors, or the teachers that no longer wanted to present themselves in school, or the policemen who weren’t getting paid, or the entire identity crises of the nation they lived in, it was just the fight between Presidents. What mattered to them was not rather it was right for a man to pee in the mouth of another man in public. It was not rather it was right for a man to chop down the world’s largest natural reserve. What mattered was who won. What mattered was who was right. What mattered was if their vote counted, if they mattered, if they could be agreed on, if they won the argument that night over a beer at the table of the bar. One opinion. One shared desire. One common people. One, unanimous, one answer, one solution, one question, one cognition, one education. One of the same.

New Books

Why I’m Buying These Books

In America by Susan Sontag
After listening to Susan Sontag’s 1999 interview with Charlie Rose on the publication of her novel “In America,” I realized I had never read her fiction, and I became curious to see how she approaches the process of storytelling. At the time, she called “In America” her best work yet.

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
I’m still reading Henry James’ “The Portrait of a Lady.” In the introduction, James writes about Turgenev’s influence on the novel, and it isn’t the first time a writer I admire has made reference to the Russian novelist. Virginia Woolf also praised him, notably in a 1934 essay titled “The Novels of Turgenev”, and both Leo Tolstoy and Jorge Luis Borges recommended him as a lifetime essential read. I feel inadequate, as though I’m missing a piece, having never read his work.

The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati
Not too long ago, I was speaking with an Italian couple about the novels of Cesare Pavese, Natalia Ginzburg, and Italo Calvino, and they recommended Dino Buzzati.

Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty
It seems strange to know Willa Cather, Jane Austen, and Virginia Woolf but not Eudora Welty. After watching this 1974 television interview with her I decided to start where Harold Bloom recommended we start, with her novel “Delta Wedding”.

The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno
It seems more timely than ever to read Theodor Adorno’s study on the psychology of authoritarianism.

Rethinking Postcolonialism by Amar Acheraïou
This book was recommended by a friend during a conversation about colonialist discourse in modern literature.

The Visual Library

Portraits

Currently at Rue de Chabrol

Nine Articles I Recommend

1. On December 31, the New York Times published Robert Draper’s profile on the Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican party’s newest critic. Read

2. The Louisiana Museum’s video channel interviewed the textile artist Sheila Hicks talking about her work and her thinking. Watch

3. Rachel Aviv recently wrote about Oliver Sacks for the New Yorker. Sacks’ biographer, also a former New Yorker writer, Lawrence Weschler reacted to Aviv’s approach with a post on his Substack . Read Aviv and Read Weschler.

4. In Harper’s Magazine, Rosa Lyster writes about two men who chopped down an old Sycamore tree in England. Read

5. David Marchese is still one of our greatest living interviewers. At the end of the year, he interviewed the writer, lawyer, and activist Raja Shehadeh on what peace between Israel and Palestine might look like and how to get there: “Start teaching about the other, teaching the literature of the other, teaching that there were times in Palestine when the Jews and the Arabs lived together amicably and peacefully, and they were important times.” Read or Listen

6. For the NYRB, Kevin Power reviewed David Szalay’s new novel Flesh. Read

7. Inside a scientific research that sent four artificial intelligence models to therapy: “Chatbots put through psychotherapy report trauma and abuse. Authors say models are doing more than role play, but researchers are sceptical.” Read

8. Stephanie Wambugu interviewed Brandon Taylor in Bookforum on the occasion of his new book Minor Black Figures. Read

9. Ruth Scurr wrote a fascinating review of the new book The Rest Is Silence: Enlightenment Philosophers Facing Death by Joanna Stalnaker for the Wall Street Journal. Stalnaker’s book looks into the writings of Enlightenment thinkers as they approached their own death. Read

Six Essays I Recommend

1. What Are Master-Pieces? by Gertrude Stein. Read

2. Black Magic and the Academy by Kelly E. Hayes. Read

3. They All Just Went Away by Joyce Carol Oates. Read

4. A New Refutation of Time by Jorge Luis Borges. Read

5. Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown by Virginia Woolf. Read

6. Corn-pone Opinions by Mark Twain. Read

7. Writing a Novel by Elizabeth Hardwick. Read

My Morning Read

I’m still reading The Portrait of a Lady in the mornings.

My Daughter’s Evening Read

Vita is having a hard time digesting my French accent, so our reading time has taken a small turn. I think this is a normal progression in her development and I know she’ll come to accept my funny accent soon enough. Most of the books she’s obsessed with at the moment are in French and no matter how hard I try to read them to her, she ends up frustrated at the slightest pronunciation mistake. She’s even tried to argue with me that her mispronunciation of the film KPop Demon Hunters, which she came home from school pronouncing in French, was correct. Luckily, her father is here to save us and has been reading to her more. So, according to Dad, her favorite books right now are Le Bus Fantastique and The 101 Dalmatians.

What My Husband is Listening To

Antigone by the Japanese musician Eiko Ishibashi.

A Movie I’m Thinking About

The Others by Alejandro Amenábar (which seems to be inspired by Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw)

A Poem

Lieu Vague by Anne Carson

1

breakfast is ready Dad
happy birthday to you
it’s not my birthday
you better get a move on
sit down Dad
who’s been using my razor
you don’t have a razor
why don’t you just bugger off
sit down eat your eggs
that’s a hot mess
I know you don’t like the yolks so eat the white okay eat the toast
too late too late
Dad don’t cry
you been using my razor
okay yes I got up early to shave off my lips

Read the entire poem in the London Review of Books (published December 25)

Nicolas Trembley

Interview with Nicolas Trembley by Renata Mosci Sanfourche

Nicolas Trembley’s allure lies in his commitment to questioning certainty. The exhibitions he curates invite viewers to abandon inherited cultural hierarchies, reconsider how value is assigned in the arts, and open spaces for richer, more complex exchanges in culture.

For over a decade craft has been central to Trembley’s practice. His meticulous consideration for their display, installation, and presentation are in itself worthy of close study. Through his exhibitions Mingei: Are You Here? at Pace Gallery and Craft at Galerie Francesca Pia, he interrogates art history’s Eurocentric vision, framing non-Western vernacular traditions not as relics of the world’s past, but as renewed practices in contemporary art.

Through his research and numerous exhibitions, Trembley challenges boundaries to make room for new typologies in the arts, proposing time and again a critical rereading of the canon. His most recent book, Craft, published Tuesday in Paris by After 8 Books, offers insight into his working process and philosophy through a dialogue with fellow curator Véronique Bacchetta.

You are concerned with breaking hierarchies in the art world. Where do you see yourself as a curator within the institution? Do you consider yourself an outsider or an insider, and what responsibilities accompany this position?

I see myself somewhere in between. I’ve worked inside institutions and with galleries, but always with a desire to question their frameworks and hierarchies. I don’t believe in the simple insider/outsider dichotomy. I’m close enough to understand how the system works, and distant enough to challenge it. This position comes with a responsibility to create spaces where marginalized forms such as craft, vernacular practices, or utilitarian objects can be seen and understood differently.

How does Ursula Le Guin’s 1986 essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction align with your beliefs?

What I find compelling in Le Guin’s essay is that she proposes a completely different kind of narrative, one we could easily apply to art history. She challenges the traditional point of view, which has historically focused on heroic, often male-oriented stories: wars, conquests, geniuses, masterpieces. Instead of this linear, monumental structure, she suggests using the metaphor of a carrier bag as a container in which we collect many different kinds of stories.

This carrier bag allows us to hold together narratives that are usually overlooked, the minor, everyday, practical gestures that enable a community to live; gathering, making tools and cooking vessels, repairing things. These stories are generally treated as secondary, yet Le Guin shows they are just as foundational as the grand mythologies of heroes and battles.

This idea of a narrative made from a collection of diverse, modest elements, resonates strongly with my curatorial practice and with the title of the exhibition. It expands our understanding of what is worthy of attention. Rethinking narrative through this lens allows us to challenge the dominant conventions that elevate certain forms and marginalize others, in art as much as in literature or society.

In a 1985 interview for Artforum, Anni Albers said about weaving “I find that, when the work is made with threads, it’s considered a craft; when it’s on paper, it’s considered art.” It’s a very interesting observation on the hierarchies in art.

What makes something a craft and what makes something art? What role, beyond the work itself, does a craft artist need to play to challenge these institutional frames?

Anni Albers’s remark reveals how constructed and arbitrary artistic hierarchies are. Craft is often what comes from domestic life, utility, or illegitimate traditions, while art is what institutions decide to elevate. For craft artists, challenging these frames sometimes requires adopting institutional codes; writing, theorizing, and performing a public identity. Part of my work is precisely to dismantle these barriers and invite other forms of legitimacy.

But it is also, for many makers, a matter of choice. The choice of whether or not to position oneself as an artist. Some people are interested primarily in technique, in perfecting a gesture or mastering a tool. Artists, generally, worry less about technique for its own sake, they use it as a means of expression rather than an end. And yet, reading Anni Albers’s numerous writings on weaving, tools, looms, and techniques, it becomes clear these reflections are an essential contribution to 20th-century (abstract) art. Her work demonstrates technical inquiry and artistic thought are not opposed but can mutually reinforce one another.

Your work is also concerned with transcending time, style, and form. How important is the role of the curator in defending a work when the artist is no longer alive?

When an artist is no longer alive the curator becomes an essential mediator. We must avoid two traps: over-interpretation and fossilization. My role is to place works into new conversations, connecting them with other objects or practices so they remain alive and relevant in the present.

I find it particularly interesting to confront objects or artworks from the past with contemporary art, because it breaks the linear narrative we were taught. Display can disrupt chronology and create new ways of reading history. I often think of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, which I visited to inspire some of my own projects. When Pitt Rivers donated his collection to the University in 1884, he stipulated that the objects should be preserved and displayed in a specific way; grouped by use or function rather than by geography or culture.

This typological approach—placing weapons from different societies together or domestic tools side-by-side regardless of origin or date—creates a fascinating system. Chronology disappears, and what emerges instead are shared gestures, forms, and needs across cultures. This method offers a powerful model for thinking about juxtapositions today, it shows how objects from different times can resonate with one another, it allows the past to speak with the present in unexpected ways.

When you talk about “Mingei Are You Here?” the exhibition you curated at Pace Gallery, the principle seems to take precedence over the object itself. You even say other series of objects could have replaced Mingei and the exhibition would’ve been the same. What do you mean by this?

It’s not entirely accurate to say the principle is more important than the objects. I have a deep fascination for Japan, for its aesthetics and cultural objects. Mingei is a very particular movement because it forces us to look at things that were never meant to be looked at, objects considered minor or insignificant. I often think of something as simple as a wooden spoon carved by a farmer. Mingei invites us to recognise beauty and meaning where the canon historically saw none.

This philosophy, which radically overturns the aesthetic hierarchies we were taught, was already close to what I wanted to do when I showed so-called kitsch German Fat Lava vases. All it takes is to look at them differently and change their context—for example, removing them from the doily on top of the television set (before flat screens) and placing them in the white cube of a gallery—for the object to become visible in a new way.

So yes, the underlying approach is important, but not more important than the objects themselves. When I say that other objects could have replaced Mingei, it’s true, I recently tested this idea with vernacular Provençal furniture in the French Mingei exhibition in Kobe, and the method worked. What I meant is that there are many possibilities, many other fields still to explore. Mingei is one example of how we can challenge established hierarchies, but it’s far from the only one.

In your interview with Véronique Bacchetta for your new book Crafts you say, “art, architecture, and design develop cyclically, influenced by trends, tastes, as well as the ethical and economic values corresponding to every era.” What are these values today?

Things are changing, and when we see large international exhibitions presenting works by artists we did not previously know—often from communities or minorities that were long unfamiliar to the Western canon—it means the shift has already begun, and this is undeniably a positive development.

For decades, the financial art market was almost entirely dominated by works made by white, Western male artists. To some extent, this is still the case, but the margins have moved. We now see ceramics by Magdalene Odundo or textiles by the Gee’s Bend quilt-makers reaching prices completely comparable to those of painting. This evolution shows the values of our era are expanding: the center is no longer fixed, and forms once considered peripheral are finally receiving the attention and legitimacy they deserve.

The first definition of the readymade came in 1917 by Marcel Duchamp. He said “whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, and placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.”

Before Duchamp, Henry Moore was collecting bones and flints and showing them as found objects. Your work develops from a found object but is transformed in its collection and display. How do you relate to these ideas?

I feel very close to these ideas; it is always stimulating—and often amusing—to question the dogmas that structure the art world. I would like to cite a reference that was crucial for my own research on objects: the exhibition Raid the Icebox that Andy Warhol created in 1969 with the permanent collection of the RISD Museum. I still consider it one of the most subversive proposals ever made on display and on the notion of artistic value.

Raid the Icebox was initiated in 1968 by Jean and Dominique de Ménil. During a visit to the museum’s storage with Daniel Robbins, the director at the time, they agreed to invite an artist to propose a new vision of the permanent collection. Warhol responded in a radically provocative way: he moved entire sections of storage directly into the galleries, disregarding the objects’ condition, value, or even their authenticity or canonical status. Everything was exhibited, rococo paintings, sculptures, hat boxes, umbrellas, furniture.

The show, nearly sixty years old now, raised sharp, complex questions that remain absolutely contemporary: how and why do cultural institutions construct hierarchies, whether historical or aesthetic?

My relationship to the readymade emerges in this context. I am interested in found objects, but not simply in choosing them, rather, in how they can be reorganized, recontextualized, and displayed to produce meaning. It is in this shift from the isolated object to the system of presentation that I locate my own position in relation to the ideas of Duchamp and Moore.

How does a collection of objects transform the perception of an isolated object? How do the values of seriality and repetition we saw in the minimalist movement play a role?

I began collecting objects at the same time I started building a contemporary art collection for the Syz family. It allowed me to test possibilities and explore how meaning shifts when objects are grouped rather than seen individually. The question of the series was essential. It’s a bit like the game of Seven Families: some series share the same shape, but vary in size and color. If you manage to gather the whole set, the collection feels complete. But if you’re missing even one element, you can spend your entire life searching for it… and that search easily becomes an obsession.

A single object can be anecdotal, many objects become a narrative. Seriality reveals variations, forms, and gaps that only appear through repetition. This is something I have always appreciated in minimalism: its ability to make visible what would otherwise remain unnoticed.

I also try to avoid what I would call the atomization of a collection, having “a bit of this and a bit of that.” When a collection is coherent, when its internal logic is visible, it becomes much stronger. The relationships between the objects intensify and their meaning expands.

I am very drawn to systems of classification, to serial logics, to the mechanical rhythm of repetition, but also to the differences contained within similarities — the kind you find in natural history museum vitrines filled with beetles, or in the aisles of screws at the BHV department store. I am a fan of industrial design that advocates quality for the masses, and I have always been fascinated by atlases and their encyclopaedic ambitions.

Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas has been a major source of inspiration. In 2020, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin reconstructed the 63 historical black-velvet panels of the Atlas, with hundreds of his thumbtacked images. Warburg juxtaposed Renaissance frescoes with Etruscan symbols, newspaper clippings, postcards, maps, sports photography, or Hopi ritual documentation. The panels suggest connections and leap across time and space, functioning almost like a contemporary mood board where periods, styles, and forms intermingle freely.

Such arrangements create new links and interpretive possibilities that disrupt canonical systems of knowledge, making them richer and more complex. This philosophy deeply interests me, informs my projects, and is something I continually strive to apply in my exhibitions.

How do you build an environment for the display of crafts in the context of your philosophy? Is it important for you to show in galleries over museums?

I would actually love to show more in museums, but the temporality is very different. Galleries are more reactive, and of course the objects are often for sale, which creates another kind of flexibility. But my background is in museums. I studied anthropology and sociology, not art history, and this has shaped my entire approach to exhibitions. Over time, I became more interested in texts dealing with the ethnography of the cultural field and with the museum as one of its central tools of transmission.

I studied with the ethnographer Georges Balandier, and we reflected on Jacques Maquet’s The Anthropologist and Aesthetics, Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, and George Kubler’s The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things. In sociology, I had Edgar Morin as a professor. With him, we looked at cars, film, fashion, exhibitions, all through a transdisciplinary lens, exploring how different forms of knowledge intersect. We also read Stuart Hall on the deconstruction of the popular, and of course Pierre Bourdieu on the correlations between aesthetic taste and social structures.

You talk about applying the principles of ethnography to museology. Can you elaborate on this concept?

All my studies have profoundly influenced the way I think about display. In the earliest experiments in museology, exhibitions often contained objects rather than what we now call artworks. Curators at the time had to invent strategies to elevate these objects, to make them as desirable or as significant as the fine arts. This led to display methods that were far more inventive and exciting than those of traditional museums.

For me, this is where the principles of ethnography meet museology. Early ethnographic museums understood that context, juxtaposition, and narrative could transform the status of an object. They created environments that gave ordinary things a new visibility and a new dignity. This approach continues to inspire me.

Designing an exhibition is thrilling — it is like creating a stage for objects, a mise-en-scène that allows them to speak, reveals their relationships, and gives them a new presence. Whether in a museum or a gallery, the challenge is the same: to imagine a display that elevates and recontextualizes objects so they can be seen in ways they never were before.

In my first interview in this series I spoke with Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag. I noticed you curated the exhibition for BLESS No 65 Not That I Can’t Wait For it. How does your world collide with theirs?

I admired the way they disrupt the canons of fashion—the runway, production systems, even the idea of the brand—and how fluidly they move between design, art, and other fields. Their work occupies a space in-between, which is exactly the territory that interests me.

When we organized the exhibition in a gallery in Paris, the vitrine was arranged like an apartment, a domestic environment rather than a conventional display. The subtitle of the show, Constantly Challenging the Norm to Encourage New Perspectives, felt absolutely right for them. They were initially reluctant to do an exhibition, because they tend to question every context in which they are invited to participate. I remember that they even intervened in the exterior of the gallery, extending the project beyond the expected boundaries.

Their approach consistently pushes against established formats, and that is precisely where our worlds meet.

What’s your perspective on Ruth Asawa, her work, and the late interest the art market had for her?

I am very happy that Ruth Asawa’s work is finally receiving the recognition it deserves on the market. It is, of course, sad that she is no longer here to benefit from it. I remember when we showed her work for the first time in Mingei Are You Here? at Pace Gallery, it was one of the pieces with the highest insurance value, around one million dollars if I recall correctly. Everyone thought it was absurd at the time. And today, Zwirner sells her works for twelve million…

The problem in the art world is that context often shapes perception far more than quality. Some collectors assume if a work is expensive it must be important, which is absolutely not true. Many expensive works will never change anything in art history. That is not the case with Ruth Asawa. She is a locomotive, and she will pull behind her many other works and practices of a similar nature.

This is wonderful, because it will give far greater visibility to forms — especially craft-based, non-Western, or historically marginalized ones — that much of the art world has ignored until very recently.

The first time I read Marguerite Duras was ten years ago. It was her last book, a meditation on the process of writing, a gift from my husband who I’d only known for a couple of weeks. He lived in Paris and I lived in New York. I read it because I felt like I had to, because I was in love with him. I was consumed with desire, a longing for him, and I wanted this moment between us to burn inside me, I was entirely submissive to the choice he made for me. I’ll never forget that day. I propped a pillow up against the wall on my bed, it was a cold and sunny Sunday morning in New York when I started reading. For the next hour or so I wouldn’t come up for air. Duras took over, stole me from him and showed me what there was to be for a person like me.

When I see Duras in pictures or interviews I feel there’s only her, as if she was in my house. When I’m with her, I’m with her in her solitude. It all stops around me and I’m there in her room, her house, at night and during the day, in her madness, her sentences, with the women she writes into life. I see her, I love her like a lover would have loved her, it’s impossible to leave her, to let her be, to put her down, to forget.

There’s not a week I write when I don’t think about her words, her sincerity, her pain, her indifference, her becoming her person so she could write. I think of the silence she created for me and the madness I trail when I follow her steps. “To be alone with the as yet unwritten book is still to be in the primal sleep of humanity.” Wake up, WAKE UP she says.

Right now something called for her and I chose to listen, to read, reread, rewatch, feel again the solitude she brought into my life. She, who showed me the way to loneliness and silence, to the irreparability of pain.

Novel

The Lover (1984)

I began the week at the end, with The Lover, her greatest success. Published in 1984, translated into more than 40 languages, adapted into a film Duras detested. The novel recounts the coming-of-age of a teenage girl in 1930s Saigon, then part of French Indochina. Living with her impoverished family, she starts a romantic affair with a wealthy Chinese man.

In many ways autobiographical, The Lover wasn’t the only time Duras drew from her own life. The Sea Wall, Eden Cinema, and The North China Lover do the same, as do most of her works. But The Lover feels uniquely porous, her life seeps through the text with particular urgency.

The story’s different from how I remembered it. The tense relationship between the girl, her mother, and her brothers is still there, and the affair remains central, but I realized Duras uses the man to escape something, to leave her childhood. So painful was life with her family, that only through this man could she find the pleasure and hope to live on, to learn about the woman she was and assume her individuality. The structure follows the girl’s flow, Duras carries us past her limits and then pulls us back again and again, like a wave. The narrative voice shifts, we have mostly an I, occasionally a she, but the tone remains steady, a beautiful and sincere confession.

Film

Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959)

Watching Hiroshima, Mon Amour after reading The Lover feels like falling asleep on Duras’s lap only to relive our greatest pain, her greatest pain. With restraint for words and a meticulous use of language, Duras still manages to say too much. How beautiful it is, she makes us feel without saying, without writing, her words are as dead as she, there is only pain, she surpasses language.

She wrote the screenplay for Hiroshima, Mon Amour for the French director Alain Resnais (who later directed Last Year at Marienbad). Resnais wanted to make a film about Hiroshima and approached Duras for the screenplay. It tells the story of a French woman’s love affair with a man in Hiroshima 14 years after the war. It’s a story about love, death, memory, and reconciliation. Duras was nominated for an Academy Award for her screenplay.

Documentary

The Places of Marguerite Duras (1976)

I could never have imagined that a place could have such power, such force. All the women in my books have lived in this house. All of them. It’s only women who inhabit places, not men. This house was inhabited by Lol V. Stein, by Anne-Marie Stretter, by Isabelle Granger, by Nathalie Granger, but also by all kinds of other women. Sometimes, when I enter the house, a feeling comes over me, all of a sudden—the feeling of a profusion of women. This house has been inhabited by me, too. Entirely. I think it’s the place in the world I’ve inhabited most fully, and when I talk about these other women, I believe these other women contain a part of me, too. It’s as if me and these women, it’s as if we’ve been endowed with porosity.

Across the two hours of this documentary, we see Duras within the confines of her home, the property in the Yvelines where she was at her most prolific. We hear her talk about writing, about the house, about what it means to be a woman alone inside her home and in nature, in the park, in the forest. We witness the perilous image she keeps of nature, the violence she senses in it, the violence from her childhood, and the desire to escape, to propel oneself into the unknown.

Film

Nathalie Granger (1972)

Unlike Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Duras wrote and directed Nathalie Granger. In it, a mother and her friend feel a child’s violence seep into their home and into their lives. The violence saturates the silence of the house, haunts its rooms, just like it did Duras’s life.

It’s interesting to observe Duras’s relationship to music in this film, something I only grasped after listening to her speak about it in the documentary I mentioned earlier. She loves music but can’t bear to listen to it. As a child she could, but as an adult it becomes too much, too overwhelming. In the film, while the child practices her scales, the camera lingers over the scattered sheets of music spread across the floor, never touching them. Duras analyzed the scene in this way: “the distance covered here, from the scales of children, the scales of childhood, or the childhood of humanity, all the way to this language we can’t decrypt, the language of music—this distance overwhelms me.”

Novel

The Garden Square (1955)

When Samuel Beckett first heard The Garden Square on the radio, he called it “overwhelmingly moving.” The story unfolds as a dialogue between a girl and a man who meet for the first time on a bench in a public square. The only moments in which Duras uses narrative descriptions in this work is to describe changes to the weather—if the sun has come out from behind the clouds, if there’s wind—serving only to position each character’s experience with nature.

The girl is asleep, waiting for something to happen in her life. She’s incapable of experiencing the present, thinks only of the man she hopes to meet at the local dance hall, a marriage she imagines will jumpstart her life. The man is disillusioned by life, has accepted his fate, lost hope for change, and carries on travelling between cities and selling things no one needs to afford himself lunch. He can only think as far as his next meal.

Yet as they sit together, talking, something changes. We see them step into the present for the first time, unaware of the force their meeting holds. In that brief encounter, they share a moment outside their limits, one entirely at odds with the constraints that define them.

Novel

The Ravishing of Lol Stein (1964)

She’s incapable of reflection, Lol V. Stein, she stopped living before the time of reflection. Perhaps that’s why she’s so dear to me, that I feel so close to her, I don’t know. Reflection is a tense, a time that I’m suspicious of. Yes. Which bores me. And if you look at my characters, they all come before this time, or rather the characters I love most. It’s probably the state that I try to get into when I’m writing, a state of intense listening, you see, but in its external form.

Lol V. Stein is a character who is completely haunted by the experience of S Thala, by the ball. It’s an ugly word, le vécu, experience, but what can you do. I don’t know what other word I might use. She’s haunted like a place is haunted. That’s Lol V. Stein, someone who remembers everything for the first time, everyday of her life, and this remembering is repeated every day, she remembers it every day for the first time. As if for Lol V. Stein there were these unfathomable chasms of forgetting between each day. She can’t get used to memory, or forgetting for that matter. She waits outside the casino, she is asleep on the beach, half dead. Her fingers are half buried under the sand, she has a bag next to her, a bag that I think looks like a little girl’s. She’s dressed all in white. Half dead, asleep. There, I see her, but alive.

There’s no sense to get from Lol V. Stein, you see, no meaning. Lol V. Stein is what you make of her. Without that, she wouldn’t exist. I think I’ve just discovered something about her, from what I’ve just said. She began to have a sense for me, a meaning, after she came from. After I came upon her, rather, you see...

Essays

Practicalities (1988)

In these essays, Duras is at her boldest. She is a woman, a woman in relation to a man, a woman in the house, a mother, a writer, an alcoholic, a provocateur, and unapologetically herself. Alongside Joan Didion, she’s one of the rare authors whose voice I hear clearly in my head with every word. Practicalities reads as a confession, a sequence of everyday thoughts and pure, unfiltered gossip.

“I became an alcoholic as soon as I started to drink. I drank like one straight away, and left everyone else behind.”

“You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they’re simply unbearable.”

“One reason, perhaps the chief reason, why houses are flooded with material possessions is the longstanding rituals by which Paris is regularly submerged by sales, super-sales and final reductions.”

Film

Aurélia Steiner Vancouver (1979)

In Aurélia Steiner Vancouver, part of the Centre Pompidou’s permanent collection, Marguerite Duras revisits a recurring character in her novels through a letter she once wrote to her parents. She repurposes footage from an earlier film to build this work, and illustrates the mysterious story of the woman’s past.

*Duras also wrote several profiles for Vogue. In the mid 60s she profiled Jeanne Moreau, Brigitte Bardot, and Melina Mercouri.

Additional Resources

Duras is my intruder. She arrived without asking and I’ll never let her leave again. I’ll continue to revisit her, as I have since I first encountered her. It would be impossible to let her go.

Here are some other books, films, and readings I recommend.

Books
There are more, many more. Duras was prolific. She wrote constantly, stopping only when she was making her films. She published over 40 books in her lifetime, burning each of her manuscripts once they were published. These are the ones I recommend. Her early works are less experimental and I’m less interested in them, but I’ve never read them and in not doing so could not opine.

Moderato Cantabile
The North China Lover
The War: A Memoir
Emily L.
Blue Eyes, Black Hair
L’homme Atlantique
Détruire Dit-Elle
The Malady of Death
Suspended Passion
Me & Other Writings (Summer ‘80)

Film and Theatre

India Song
La Femme du Gange
Jaune le Soleil

Essays and Articles about Marguerite Duras

1. Edmund White writes In Love With Duras for the New York Review of Books in 2008, where he also reviews her books The North China Lover and The War: A Memoir.

2. Michel Foucault talks with Hélène Cixous about Marguerite Duras in Cixous’s book White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics.

3. An essay by the historian and film critic Robert P. Kolker on Duras’s films, The Cinema of Duras in Search of an Ideal Image in the 1989 French Review.

4. A 1961 article by Jacques Guicharnaud, Woman’s Fate: Marguerite Duras, in the department of French studies at Yale.

5. The Life and Loves of Marguerite Duras, a 1991 article in the New York Times by Leslie Garis ( she also profiled Georges Simenon, Rebecca West, John Fowles and Harold Pinter)

6. If you can understand French, RadioFrance did a piece on Duras in 2019.

Chronicle

Summertime Ghosts

There are ghosts that haunt me, ghosts from people who are still alive. They visit me at daybreak and at dusk, at night they hold me down. The night hag terrifies me, she keeps me bound to my bed, when I open my eyes she’s there. At dawn I move through my rooms, I place this in the right drawer and that on the left shelf, nothing moves forward with surprise. The days are paralyzed. I don’t feel my hands. I don’t feel my torso, my legs. I am entirely possessed by the ghosts of these people who are still alive. What will happen when they die?

The houses I lived in were sealed in white voile curtains. The windows were kept shut and only a sliver of light shined inside. The wind seeped through these windows as freely as air flows through a sand castle. She carried me to the patio where I sunbathed each morning. I fell and the muffled thud sunk, I cried and I was quieted. I can hear my sobs shrinking into ripples, soft small wrinkles opening on the shore.

Not all homes built of sand disappear. The water seeps through the towers, melts the sand, but the imprint, the memory, dense and rigid, will never seize to exist. From a cliff I plunge into the sea, into a dull roar where there is no human life, when my hands, my arms, my head pierce through its waves back into fresh air, I’m still here. My body floats to the top and into comfort, I find solace in the sea.

Blue waves, green waves, they can’t exist without that breeze, even the fish in mid-stream need to breathe. From the room I hear a bird sing, and then another bird, and another bird, they sing different, they sing random, but their song travels through the trees. And when the gardener turns on the string trimmer, they blow away towards the blue sky and their chorus falls broken, buried. I now see the beaches where big waves crash, I see windows open without curtains and hardwood floors flooded with wet leaves and rain. I see a woman standing, her child breathing, but she is haunted by the ghosts of these people who are still alive.

New Books

Why I’m Buying These Books

Renunciation by Ross Posnock
Because I watched Ross Posnock’s lecture at Yale, On The Pleasures of Self-Misunderstanding, and I’m interested in knowing more about his theory on the need for great thinkers to renounce the institutional framework.

Letters to Friends, Family & Editor by Franz Kafka
Because this volume includes a selection of the conversation slips Kafka used to speak with people at the end of his life, when he was advised not to talk.

Untimely Meditations by Friedrich Nietzsche
Because one of the essays in this collection is Schopenhauer as Educator.

When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut
Because I’m interested in how the philosophers Labatut observes dealt with their own existence while grappling with difficult existential questions, some of them made important discoveries that came to change how we perceive human life and many became isolated and mentally ill people.

The Essence of Christianity by Ludwig Feuerbach
Because I’m curious about Feuerbach’s humanistic approach to religion. It was an important book for Leo Tolstoy, and it was translated by George Eliot.

Reborn: Journals and Notebooks by Susan Sontag
Because I want to see how she was writing about her influences in the fifties.

For a New Novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Because I have yet to read his theoretical approach to the novel, although you can deduce a lot about his approach in all his writing.

Suffocating Mothers by Janet Adelman
Because Adelman’s reading of mothers in Shakespeare’s plays feels pertinent to my own research and work around the absence and presence of the mother.

The Visual Library

Portraits

Currently at Rue de Chabrol

Seven Articles I Recommend This Week

1. Adina Hoffman is fascinated by ancient Greek figurines, so much so that she’s writing a book about them: “The uncertainty that hovers over the origin of these “Keros” objects makes them not so much outliers as something like emblems.” Read

2. For the past few weeks, several critics have reviewed ’s new book Against the Machine, where he warns about technology’s war against nature, and human nature. In a video interview with the New York Times for the opinion section, Kingsnorth talks openly about his perspective on how detrimental technology can be to our spirit. Watch

3. In the Wall Street Journal, James Campbell takes us through Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein only to ask us an important question: “What stands in for modernism in our own era?” Read

4. New Directions published a series of new stories, A Certain Lucas, by the late Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. In Martin Riker’s review, he offers a new way to read Cortázar and reminds us of the importance of artistic freedom over popular success. Read

5. In The Mysteries of Love, offers a new approach to reading Alice Munro. Read

6. Robert Pinsky reviews the The Poems of Seamus Heaney in the New York Times. Read

7. Carl Rollyson revisits Sylvia Plath’s suicide. Read

Six Essays and Lectures I Recommend This Week

1. Thinking and Moral Considerations by Hannah Arendt. Read

2. The Poet by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Read

3. Of Experience by Michel de Montaigne. Read

4. The Struggle of the Artist by James Baldwin. Listen

   The poets, by which I mean all artists, are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t, statesmen don’t, priests don’t, union leaders don’t. Only the poets.

5. Unspeakable Things, Unspoken by Toni Morrison. Read

6. Translating Truths by Nadia Abu El-Haj. Read

My Morning Read

It’s my first time reading The Portrait of a Lady, I’m coming to it after The Wings of the Dove and The Turn of the Screw.

My Daughter’s Evening Read

Vita is fascinated with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, we’ve been reading it over and over again. I’m hoping this is going to open the gates for Hansel and Gretel, The Twelve Brothers, and so on. In French, we’re reading Toc Toc Zinzin, where each planet in this galaxy has a zinzin, and when one planet’s zinzin goes missing, we need to visit all seven planets to find out who took it. When I read this to her she said it’s for babies.

What My Husband is Listening To

Cryptophony by Reeko and Jonathan by Yung Lean

A Movie I’m Thinking About

Arco by Ugo Bienvenu

A Poem

The Flowers by Stéphane Mallarmé

From golden showers of the ancient skies,
On the first day, and the eternal snow of stars,
You once unfastened giant calyxes
For the young earth still innocent of scars:

Young gladioli with the necks of swans,
Laurels divine, of exiled souls the dream,
Vermilion as the modesty of dawns
Trod by the footsteps of the seraphim;

The hyacinth, the myrtle gleaming bright,
And, like the flesh of woman, the cruel rose,
Hérodiade blooming in the garden light,
She that from wild and radiant blood arose!

And made the sobbing whiteness of the lily
That skims a sea of sighs, and as it wends
Through the blue incense of horizons, palely
Toward the weeping moon in dreams ascends!

Hosanna on the lute and in the censers,
Lady, and of our purgatorial groves!
Through heavenly evenings let the echoes answer,
Sparkling haloes, glances of rapturous love!

Mother, who in your strong and righteous bosom,
Formed calyxes balancing the future flask,
Capacious flowers with the deadly balsam
For the weary poet withering on the husk.

Some bookstores bring out the same hunting instinct I have at flea markets. For moments like these, I keep a mental list of books I’d like to own in their first-edition format, hoping to find a bargain on the shelves. It’s never a quick find, it can take years even, but there’s something about the unexpected moment when it happens that surpasses the feeling of buying it any other way. Mind you, it’s as rare for me to covet a first edition as it is for me to want a table or a chair, I’m an extremely cautious buyer. I like to buy things once, own things that will last me a lifetime. For the last sixteen years I’ve been looking for a coffee table. I still haven’t found one, I still don’t own one. All this is to say that books on auction are now joining the round-up.

Auction Highlights

First Edition Books: An auction of rare books and first editions that includes The Apocrypha, Samuel Beckett, William Faulkner, Harper Lee, and Joan Didion. In New York at Doyle Auctioneers on November 25, 2025 at 4:00pm.

The Round-Up

Arne Vodder Table
Estimate: 400 € - 600 €
Monday, November 24 at Maurice Auction (Paris)

Jasper Morrison Chair
Estimate: 800 € - 1 200 €
Monday, November 24 at Maurice Auction (Paris)

Sculpted Wood Armchair
Estimate: 400 € - 600 €
Monday, November 24 at Daguerre (Paris)

Borge Mogensen Shelves
Current Bid at $100
Tuesday, November 25 at Wright Auction (Chicago)

Sculpted Wood Chest
Estimate: 200 € - 300 €
Tuesday, November 25 at Lynda Trouvé (Paris)

Claudius Linossier Copper Cup
Estimate: 150 € - 250 €
Tuesday, November 25 at Gros & Delettrez (Paris)

xx Aldo Rossi Marble Table
Estimate: 6 000 € - 9 000 €
Tuesday, November 25 at Piasa (Paris)

Oinochoe Trilobata Terracotta ca. 350-300 BC
Estimate: 1 500 € - 1 600 €
Wednesday, November 26 at Setdart.com (Barcelona)

Claudius Linossier Vase
Estimate: 4 000 € - 5 000 €
Wednesday, November 26 at Artcurial (Paris)

Carl Auböck Brass Objects
Estimate: 50 € - 100 € (left) and 200 € - 400 € (right)
Thursday, November 27 at Tiberius Auctions (Vienna)

Antique Wood Cabinet
Estimate: 180 € - 360 €
Thursday, November 27 at Bid by Bid (Porto)

Pierre Chapo Bench
Estimate: 2 000 € - 3 000 €
Saturday, November 29 at Hôtel des Ventes Montpellier (Montpellier)

English Hardwood Chairs
Estimate: 20 € - 30 €
Saturday, November 29 at Salorges Enchères (Nantes)

Papua New Guinea Wooden Object
Estimate: 250 € - 300 €
Saturday, November 29 at Varenne Enchères (Paris)

Candida Höfer 1991 Print (30/30 edition)
Estimate: 2 200 €
Saturday, November 29 at Bassenge (Berlin)

Pierre Chareau Exotic Wood Stool
Estimate: 8 000 € - 10 000 €
Monday, December 1 at Wannenes (Milan)

Jules Leleu Desk and Chair
Estimate: 4 000 € - 6 000 €
Monday, December 1 at Wannenes (Milan)

Final Recommendation

Issey Miyake: An Issey Miyake wardrobe auction by Saint Auction in Paris on Sunday, November 30 at 18:00.

Additional Listings

Pre-Columbian Michoacan Bowl, Herbert List Poseidon Print, Frank Lloyd Wright Table, Jorge Luis Borges Draft, Philippe Anthonioz Lamp, Antique Wooden Table, Pablo Picasso Bowl, English Style Sofa, Edward Weston Illustrates Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Tina Barney’s The Europeans, Thomas Struth Print.

BLESS, The Woman Without Anxiety to Conform

Interview with Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag by Renata Mosci Sanfourche

BLESS is a woman without any anxiety to conform. Created in ‘95 by the German duo Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag, she’s off-the-grid, mother of her own discipline, her own profession, her own process, her own language. What BLESS has birthed into our growing material world is a constant desire to confront our patterns of behavior and respond to industry. If you were a fan in 2018, you may remember their collaboration where the writer appears in a series of videos inside the neighborhood BLESS had moved into. “One Saturday,” July writes in an Instagram post, “I slipped in when they weren’t home and wore their clothes and practiced some loose thinking—which is super easy to do in their world.” Yes, BLESS makes clothes, accessories, and objects, she writes, but most important, she creates concepts, because she’s above all a dynamic environment and independent practice that Heiss and Kaag have chosen to live with.

In BLESS N°42 Plädoyer der Jetztzeit (pleading for the present moment), you’ve chosen to use the German term Jetztzeit. This is a unique word established by Walter Benjamin in his last major essay, to convey the idea of “time filled by the presence of the now”. What does using this term mean to BLESS, and to this body of work?

First, we should explain our passion in ‘title designing’ as it is a discipline we developed from the very beginning and established as a structuring element, together with the system of numbering our collections (a BLESS collection comprises a variety of products that came to life in a certain time frame). In general, the titles refer to a specific aspect, act as headlines for some elements, or are messages and statements related to the time being—a comment on a political occasion or simply facts we want to draw attention to. Later, the titles help us remember the moment we found them, as if they were headlines in a bless diary.

In the case of Jetztzeit, we wanted to emphasize our wish of acting in the moment more than developing products for a specific time, or lifespan. Jetztzeit as “time filled by the presence of the now,” feels like a good wish and promise for long lasting companionship. We’re both native German speakers who like to play with the typical German language possibility to construct new words by attaching nouns, this often triggers new creations that we regard as important for a product. Sometimes this could even kickoff an idea we would include in the collection.

What’s your definition of a home or an interior, and what kind of qualities do you try to bring to spaces when you design and conceive objects?

It’s interesting that, while reading your question, we realize it’s the kind of question we never ask ourselves, we never try to find definitions for things. Maybe because we like for them to stay in constant motion. Do we need to verbally define a home or an interior when what we love are the multitude of aspects, definitions, and promises the word home can hold? When it comes to our vision of interior, there is strangely also the urge to open it up, to let the outside in, to bring both together. Interior itself is boring and only one side of the game. Only when experienced, thought, and brought together with the outside it becomes somehow complete, like the yin and yang principle.

In the description of BLESS N°07 Tablecare from Livingroom, it says “the charm of old furniture as experienced companions reacts with environmental accessories on the way to a personal living concept.” What kind of possibilities does the relationship this interaction creates open for its user?

BLESS N°07 Livingroom Conquerors came to life in 1999 during a time when people had discovered the concept store formula, such as Colette. Inside these shops, you could blindly trust and buy anything from their curated selection, you knew it was somehow hype or at the edge of the moment. The only thing these shops couldn’t provide were products with traces of lived moments, so people who thought they could consume and relate to taste blindly, were outed by the relatively antiseptic newness of their surroundings.

In the midst of this contemporary setup, we pledged to think of new furniture less as purchasing entirely new pieces to substitute one’s old furniture, but as dressing the items one’s lived with for quite a while in new gowns that would provide fresh shapes, and give them new aesthetic and functional options.

BLESS rarely designs entirely new things, we often use familiar items as a base to build on and/or evolve into something else. In this way, the new never comes from a cold and harsh approach, it brings trust to build on one’s own life experiences, to welcome the new while embracing the familiar.

What is your approach to antiques?

Like anybody and anything that experienced a certain lifespan, antiques are charged with depth, traces of usage and touch that new products can’t provide. A bit like old wine that becomes more complex with time. This can be a plus, can be quite emotionally charged. At the same time, it can also be a burden and a weight that doesn’t allow one to simply let go to freely and lightheartedly construct from scratch. As with anything else, using antiques requires responsibility and a great sense of balance of how much old and new you need to feel your life all right.

I find BLESS to be extremely playful. Last year, I watched a video at your Paris store from when BLESS N°50 Todaying invited people to an apartment full of sheep. Is play an intentional element in your work, and is there any conscious correlation to play and psychological development?

We guess the example you give here illustrates quite well how much we act unplanned and ‘drive-by-sight’, allowing things to happen and to surprise us. In this particular case, we met a wholesale client and friend, by chance, in a café, two days before our small presentation in an apartment, it was to be quite ordinary, with no special features. Of course she asked us what the new collection was about, and we told her about our boredom, that it’s always the same, and that the only characteristic of this collection was that it used lots of wool. Her nonchalant reply was that we should get sheep.

We went back to the office and asked our collaborator to organize sheep, and she managed. We told our model friends there would be surprise guests. Everyone thought that eventually someone well known would show up. It was also the first presentation where we regretted not collecting the mobile phones prior to the arrival of the sheep, we barely found pictures of this presentation without our models having phones in their hands to take pictures of themselves in this situation.

The wallscapes we see in BLESS N°29 have potential to really transform a space. What is the intention behind making a space appear to be what it’s not? What emerges from this?

The BLESS N°29 Wallscapes were originally developed for our retrospective show at the Boijmans Van Beunigen Museum in Rotterdam in 2006. It was to be a quick fix for the eternal and imminent BLESS question of how to expose products that were made to be applied to daily life, not for exhibition purposes. The wallscapes offered a 2D solution by transporting real-life interiors, where BLESS items could potentially live, into the museum. By mixing them in the museum’s architecture, with pieces from their permanent collection, they formed an equally harmonious and exciting environment that offered visitors new perspectives of the museum and its contents, and new insight of the BLESS world.

To attach a life-size motive to a space means to direct the attention of the viewer. The space naturally opens to another dimension: the products you see in the picture seem to make sense as their appearance and application is proved by the picture. Products that you place in front of the motive, or attach directly to the wallscapes, profit from that aura as well. We like to interfere in spaces and bring not only a specific product, but its whole entourage into a situation.

This is a way to emphasize that an idea, or a design, is not only a disconnected object, but wants to be seen in connection and correlation with its environment. The question of where the physical object starts and ends is an interesting one.

BLESS N°41 Retrospective Home and N°56 Worker’s Delight, really play with the idea that we don’t interact with the world in the same ways we used to, and that at times this can be harmful for our well-being. Why was broaching this topic important for BLESS?

Although BLESS was never a fashion label in a classic sense, we still started from a rather garment and object point of view after both of us had studied fashion. It was only in recent years though that we understood the main quality of our work experience, and achievement with and through BLESS, is that we managed to form our own personal, made-to-measure profession, that offered us the ultimate luxury to work on whatever we would love to work on, disrespecting completely categorization of any kind. We’re aware that we created en passant a very precious path of working through living, and the other way around, which is today what we are the proudest of and take pleasure in.

What kind of relationships have you established with your own homes in terms of your personal lives and everyday needs? How has your interaction with space changed since you created BLESS?

Funny enough not a lot of BLESS products live in our homes. Most likely because we always needed the bigger pieces to generate our income through their sales. However, many products were triggered through personal needs even if we end up living with first-prototype versions of them.

What is the architumiture we see in BLESS N°60 Lobby Conquerors?

BLESS N°60 was a dream collaboration, where our friends Mark Lee and Sharon Johnston from Johnston Marklee architects, curators of that architecture biennial, brought us together with Artek. Again, it was very clear to us that we had nothing to exhibit, but would love to create a nice resting situation in the venue’s generous lounge area. The fur stools resembled home pets more than furniture pieces, while the other chairs contained pieces of architecture. The client who purchased the Corner chair baptized it the ‘anti-social chair’, because of its quality to hide you away and provide privacy. We’re happy this project evolved over the years into BLESS N°63 Architecture Reminiscences and BLESS N°66 Architecture Souvenir Baggages, where we rebuilt cut-out pieces of environments that hosted some of our projects. The pieces are somehow ‘takeaway’ architecture pieces that serve as luggage, and provide you with the possibility to take bits and pieces of these locations to another as mobile souvenirs. There will certainly be more in the future. They’re in a way a 3D complement to the wallscapes, coming simply from a different approach, but providing again an interior piece from somewhere else.

Can you explain the philosophy behind BLESS N° 67 Situation Designer, and how the term situation design came to exist and define BLESS’s professional field?

The term situation design is a temporary one, we won’t exclude that we’ll find still another title for our profession as BLESS evolves. For the moment, we simply feel comfortable to shift away from bringing materialized work into this overcrowded world. It’s more interesting for us to move with all our senses into a situation, to create a memorable moment collectively.

The BLESS N°77 BOOKBAG

All the images featured in this interview are extracts from the book Celebrating 25 Years of Always Stress with BLESS N°42-N°74, which was also produced as a limited edition series of tote bags featuring its contents (see below). One bag corresponds to one page (front and back), and there is one bag available for each of the book’s 200 double-spreads.

The Canon Wars

No one person in their lifetime would be capable, even if they tried, to read the entire Western canon. This is partly the reason why the late American literary critic Harold Bloom wrote The Western Canon in 1994, where he lists more than 800 titles in Western literature preceded by a defense of 26 canonical writers.

It’s true, our human physiological condition limits our ability to read everything written throughout history during our lifetime. We have no choice but to make concessions on what we read, and in effect, what we teach. The concessions we make when we choose to read a book are as much a decision in the type of knowledge we’ll absorb and the kind of pleasure we’ll feel, as are the choices the academy makes in determining the works students will learn, the knowledge they’ll absorb, and the impact they’ll have on the future of literature, inside and outside academia.

In the '70s, with the arrival of French theorists Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault into American thought, New Criticism, the formalist movement in literary theory that dominated our teachings at the time, was urged to revise its aesthetic approach to reading. There came to be an imminent demand to restructure the syllabi of literary studies, to expand it to embrace a pluralist American perspective.

The American literary critic John Guillory, influenced by Pierre Bourdieu’s theory cultural capital, studied the initial impulse that called upon the canon’s revision. In Cultural Capital (as he consequently titled his work), Guillory ascribed the need for change to a growing need for representation of social minorities in American culture:

In retrospect it was only in the wake of liberalism’s apparent defeat in American political culture that such agendas as “representation in the canon” could come to occupy so central a place within the liberal academy. The new curricular critique made it possible for the university to become a new venue of representation, one in which new social identities might be represented more adequately, if also differently, than in existing political institutions of American society.

This phenomenon was the onset for a centuries-long debate around the academy, which would come to be known as the canon wars. On the one side stood the aesthetes wanting to center the curriculum on literature’s classic works, and on the other side the multiculturalists, wanting to rebuild the curriculum to comprise a more socially inclusive criteria.

It was a decisive period for the future of American education. And with the 1987 commercial successes of E.D. Hirsch’s book Cultural Literacy and Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, it was clear that an end to the war was near. By the '90s, multiculturalists had won and universities were reforming the canon to include noncanonical works.

For years to come, progressive and traditionalist critics would continue to do profound work around the controversy.

In her 1989 speech Unspeakable Things Unspoken, Toni Morrison questioned the constructs of quality as the central criterion for greatness in the canon, and affirmed the presence of Afro-American literature as essential to raising the standards of both culture and literary studies in America:

What is possible is to try to recognize, identify, and applaud the fight to and triumph of quality when it is revealed to us and to let go the notion that only the dominant culture or gender can make those judgments, identify that quality, or produce it.

Harold Bloom lamented the future of the humanities, “literature is not an instrument of social change or an instrument of social reform,” he said, “it is more a mode of human sensations and impressions, which do not reduce very well to societal rules or forms.” In An Elegy for the Canon, his introduction to The Western Canon, Bloom would refer to the reformers as the school of resentment1, and was determined to maintain an aesthetic approach to teaching and reading the Classics:

A poem cannot be read as a poem, because it is primarily a social document or, rarely yet possibly, an attempt to overcome philosophy. Against this approach I urge a stubborn resistance whose single aim is to preserve poetry as fully and purely as possible.

As the journalist Rachel Donadio pointed out in Revisiting the Canon Wars, the outcome had presented us with a sort of ironic reversal in literary studies:

[John] Searle also noted a “certain irony” that the Western canon, from Socrates to Marx, which had once been seen as “liberating,” was now seen as “oppressive.” “Precisely by inculcating a critical attitude,” Searle wrote, “the ‘canon’ served to demythologize the conventional pieties of the American bourgeoisie and provided the student with a perspective from which to critically analyze American culture and institutions. ... The texts once served an unmasking function; now we are told that it is the texts which must be unmasked.”

It was true, the very works that taught us to think, were the works we were now being asked to reconsider. And with the academy restructuring the concerns of literary studies, making less space for aesthetic conversations in classrooms, it became nearly impossible for critics to contest the “balkanization of literary studies,” as Bloom would put it, without backlash.

The Education Wars

Today, we’re seeing the canon wars turn on its fold.

In April, President Trump’s administration canceled 85 percent of grants to the National Endowment for the Humanities (N.E.H.), placing staff on leave in preparation to redirect its resources “toward supporting Mr. Trump’s priorities.”

In August, the administration announced funding for 97 new projects, many including “work on papers relating to the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution and the Founding era,” reported the New York Times:

Shortly after the grant cancellations in April, the agency also announced that, in keeping with executive orders by Mr. Trump, it would not support projects promoting “extreme ideologies based upon race or gender.”

These series of executive orders were later used by state schools to justify book bans across the nation, including the removal of nearly 600 books—Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner for example—from a school run by the Department of Defense.

According to a report by the PEN America organization, which has been tracking book bans in America for the last 14 years, during the 2024-2025 academic school years, 6,870 books bans were recorded across 23 states and 87 school districts. A great majority of these bans were initiated by conservative parents.

Today, any progressive book or work that doesn’t conform to a particular ideology is subject to censorship. A study conducted by researchers at Cornell University found “liberals and conservatives both oppose censorship of children’s literature – unless the writing offends their own ideology.”

So far, 11 schools have banned Toni Morrison’s Beloved and five Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. There are 11 instances where I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou was banned, and three where Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God was removed from school libraries. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which was at one point mandatory reading at my middle school, was banned in four schools.

The federal government has demonstrated a willingness to exert excessive influence over our institutions and universities in order to serve their power agenda with a partisan national narrative. They’ve found support not only in American citizens with conservative ideologies, but in weakened university systems, which, at the first strike of a federal blow, withdrew into their academies with big plans for policy change and payoffs tucked between their legs.

The academic freedom American education was founded upon is at stake on the false premise of indoctrination: “President Trump and his allies have focused their attacks on elite universities, which they say are bastions of antisemitism and ideological indoctrination,” wrote the reporter Alan Blinder in How Universities Are Responding to Trump.

If we add the decline of our intellectual capacity to the government’s attempt to penetrate our universities, we find an entire education system on the brink of major change, one that will once again reshape our canon.

Our ability to think, speak, articulate, to understand people, to understand the differences between people, between our various natures, they depend on our capacity to read and to retain what we read.

Children and teenagers are exponentially less interested in reading. and recently observed technology’s impact on a child’s capacity to acquire early language skills, and reported that only 41 percent of parents read books to children aged five and under, a crucial period for the development of their memory and vocabulary:

Knowing more words helps students process information more quickly, because prior knowledge of vocabulary lightens the load on working memory. The breadth and depth of a student’s vocabulary moves in tandem with their capabilities for abstract thinking. Each new word opens up a new pathway and leads to better expression of their own thoughts, as well as understanding others.

A survey by the National Literacy Trust in 2025, reported that only 18.7 percent of children and teenagers read in their free time, as opposed to 38.1 percent in 2005. If we account for the population increase in America in the last 20 years, which is approximately 44.6 million, this still means we’ve lost 48.92 million readers, that’s almost half the amount of leisure readers we estimated in 2005.

We’re not only limiting our children’s exposure to literature at home, but we’re also choosing not to stimulate their interest in books at schools. Most elementary schools in New York City have adopted a new literacy curriculum that excludes reading books cover-to-cover from the syllabi. The coursework relies on a text compilation called myBook, built on the premise of reading excerpts in order to answer questions. Since it’s the only curriculum (out of the three offered by the state) that integrates Spanish, two-thirds of schools have opted to teach it.

How are our youth supposed to use reading as recreational and educational tools, if we’re not giving them opportunities to read? In The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books, Rose Horowitch reports that only 17 percent of educators for 3rd-to-8th-grade students teach whole texts.

The Common Core, a multistate education initiative that provides the curriculum for schools in 41 American states, recently added more nonfiction readings to their syllabus because universities are prioritizing informational texts over literary ones. By 12th grade, 70 percent of assigned readings are nonfiction.

Reading is no longer taught as a tool for thought and expansion of the mind. It’s offered as prompts for answering the questions we’re asked. In other words, we’re not teaching our children cognitive skills, we’re teaching them to follow the rules, answer the questions, and not create new ones.

By the time students are ready to start their higher education career, it’s far too late to convert them into passionate readers. How can we teach them the rewards of solitary reading? If we’re not invested in creating passionate readers, does it come as any surprise that literature departments across the country are seeing a drop in enrollment?

In The End of the English Major, a 2023 article in the New Yorker, Nathan Heller reported that between 2012 and 2020, humanities enrollment declined by 17 percent in American universities:

The trend mirrors a global one; four-fifths of countries in the Organization for Economic Coöperation reported falling humanities enrollments in the past decade. But that brings little comfort to American scholars, who have begun to wonder what it might mean to graduate a college generation with less education in the human past than any that has come before.

It seems like the cultivation of the mind is no longer as much of a priority as the quest toward lucrative positions in our economic world:

At Columbia University—one of a diminishing number of schools with a humanities-heavy core requirement—English majors fell from ten per cent to five per cent of graduates between 2002 and 2020, while the ranks of computer-science majors strengthened.

Students enrolled in Columbia’s humanities program are “bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester,” Horowitch reported. Having never been asked to read an entire book in secondary schools what else could we expect: “It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how.”

Literary Renaissance or Literary Doom2

Is this reversible? Will there be a moment in time when we will see a renaissance in literature? Will our society find the passion to read deeply again? Will we acquire the knowledge needed to understand and retain literature?

These are the questions some of my contemporaries are trying to answer.

In The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society, Times columnist suggests we’re living through a counter-revolution to the reading revolution that turned the 18th-century population into prolific readers. Marriott takes us through what he terms a post-literate society, all the way to the end of democracy. Like many other critics, he attributes our dying interest in literature and reading to excessive screen-time, which he in turn equates to people’s growing incapacity to think critically.

I’m also disappointed by the present state of intellectual thought in literature. We’re no longer living through the exciting times of the canon wars, arguing between aesthetics and diversity. Yet, it’s shortsighted to attribute the state of our literary landscape to the reduced attention-span caused by technology, and it also doesn’t move the conversation forward.

If we had succeeded at inspiring our children to become passionate, deep readers, and encouraged teenagers to seek out cognitive power over social and economic power, perhaps today we’d have a larger cohort in favor of reading over scrolling. The data only highlights how American society continuously fails their children in literary instruction.

We’ve failed the literary discipline as parents, as instructors, and as institutions, but also as writers, publishers, and critics. It’s hard to admit, it’s easier to transfer this responsibility to Silicon Valley CTOs and Wall Street fat cats. I’m not saying they’re exempt from responsibility, but until we can admit our own fault, and attempt to educate and inspire people with audacious work, change cannot be imminent.

Our Collective Failure

Perhaps the canon wars were such a prominent literary phenomenon in the '90s because they foresaw today’s crisis.

It’s impossible to estimate whose approach was correct, but it’s also impossible to ignore that restructuring the literary canon to reflect identity politics did little to engage our society to read anew.

On one side, aesthetes aimed at a wider audience by focusing on form, beauty, on the sophisticated experience of reading. We can’t say today that their elitist approach would’ve avoided the mass indifference we see toward reading, but we also can’t say the progressive approach was effective.

Above sophistication and inclusion, above the elitist and the democratic, general education today ignores an important part of reading, which is the pleasure, the transformative possibilities it holds when a reader is connected to the otherness of a writer.

Morrison and Bloom were both right to believe the canon wars put at risk the future of literature. In the midst of this battle, the American writer lost purpose and instruction, we failed as a collective to inspire our society to widen their outlook. We felt compelled to engage in political discourse, to be partisan, and reading became a way to reinforce and propagate individual rhetoric. Once upon a time the author was the mind of the American nation, when the author could observe society from afar, experience social constructs from the bleachers, measure the present against the past. That was when they told powerful stories.

It’s not the writer’s job to belong, yet here we are succumbing to the pressures of contemporary demands, writing what’s in, publishing what’s agreeable. Today, we are no more than another piece working in the nucleus of the world. After all, we have been instructed to fit in, to answer the questions, not to create new ones remember? It is a misfortune, the federal government isn’t taking us toward the expansion of thought, they’re taking us to the place where they can define it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.” Haven’t those of us who’ve read Shakespeare, Dante, Woolf, and Proust (to name a few) experienced those moments when what we’re reading surpasses our capacity, our own nature?

Not everyone passionate about reading is reading to find a masterpiece, not all our readers are looking for innovation, for the sublime. But there is a chance, that if a reader falls upon a book that has these qualities, their approach to literature may forever be changed.

Those established in literary culture, the critics, look at literature as a medium, look for excellence, it’s their job to praise great texts so passionate readers can encounter the other, connect with the other, perhaps even feel enriched by the other. The motivations for reading are countless, and all experiences are valid. Yet, without the dance between writer and reader there’s no longer a literary body, when one fails the system fails, when all fail the system no longer exists.

It’s been 140 years since the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé criticized 19th-century writers in the verses of Le Vierge, le Vivace et le Bel Aujourd’hui:

Un cygne3 d’autrefois se souvient que c’est lui
Magnifique mais qui sans espoir se délivre
Pour n’avoir pas chanté la région où vivre
Quand du stérile hiver a resplendi l’ennui.

“A swan from another time,” Mallarmé laments the loss of beauty, the loss of the writer and the word’s capacity to go beyond its environment. He was urging writers to go deeper, to transcend traditional narrative forms to achieve a higher aesthetic and symbolic experience in their works. His approach heavily influenced James Joyce, who went on to produce works of great value about the complexity of the human experience and identity.

Like Mallarmé’s contemporaries, we have also become overly literal, concerned primarily with the representation of reality. We’ve lost touch with our nature because of our preoccupation with individual politics. Our literature today is permeated with social commentary, they mirror everyday life, rarely do they inspire a mystical experience.

As a group of literary thinkers and writers, we have succumbed to the power fame feeds us, to the validation success brings, to social commodities, transactional feats, to the pressures of politics. We’ve let these forces envelop us, validate our anxiety to influence and have an impact. The quality of contemporary literary fiction reflects this very climate. We’re anxious about our status:

When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise,—and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things that are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson on Nature

As literary fiction writers we must take risks with confidence and confront the very system we’re conforming to. David Brooks offered a refreshing observation of the artist’s role in his recent New York Times op-ed When Novels Mattered.

Given the standards of their time, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain and James Baldwin had incredible guts, and their work is great because of their nonconformity and courage.

Most important, if you don’t have raw social courage, you’re not going to get out of your little bubble and do the reporting necessary to understand what’s going on in the lives of people unlike yourself — in that vast boiling cauldron that is America.

I’d like to offer some exceptions to my critique, but it’s impossible, only time can reveal them to us. I can however present a case study around the early literature of Sally Rooney.

In Conversations with Friends, she observes the possibilities for intimacy vis-à-vis social constructs, how the transactional nature of our society, among other factors, may weigh on people’s capacity to be passionate. Yet Rooney’s novels are hardly criticized through this framework. Alexandra Schwartz, a staff writer and literary critic at the New Yorker, reviewed Rooney’s novel primarily as a love story and affair, which it is, but the urgent messages that needed to be extracted from this novel and communicated to the reader, were much greater than this simple narrative.

In the few instances we publish literary fiction with strong theory, our critics aren’t able to grasp the philosophy deepening the work. They are stuck in the multiculturalist reading, unable to read for the form, for the aesthetic values.

How can criticism serve our passionate readers, pressure our greedy publishers, or inspire our writers, when it’s become candy with no taste? “It is not ‘literature’ that needs to be redefined; if you can’t recognize it when you read it, then no one can ever help you to know it or love it better,” Harold Bloom said.

The canon wars gave rise to a new library, a moral one that teaches us great values—empathy, inclusion, compassion—but too few of those books teach us how to think about creation.

Readers have stopped reading writers who go beyond our limitations, not because they want to, but because there aren’t many new ones being offered to them, and the ones that do exist, are presented to the public as metaphors without meaning. Emerson wisely concluded, “Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.”

American publishers in their concern for financial success, have failed to connect reader and writer. They’ve resorted to entertainment, they’ve let pass a marginalia of text that do no more than underestimate the reader’s capacity.

The defiance in our practice must rise alongside our determination to form deep and passionate readers. We need to confront the publishers who don’t consider writers without a social following. We need to rescue our youth from dwindling institutions. We need to review the concessions we’ve made because we thought conforming was a priority.

Literary Renaissance

Where is the genius sleeping?

Our literature departments have grown so small, identity politics have eaten such a large slice of its pie, perhaps the study of the Classics is not as far away as we once imagined.

In Ignore the Pessimists — we are living through a literary golden age, observes the rise of nonliterary readers revisiting the Classics, and encourages us to adopt a more optimistic outlook toward the future of literary fiction.

observes that historically, most renaissances happened outside of academic institutions, he also believes a literary revival has been set into motion.

Even Harold Bloom wasn’t so pessimistic about the future:

I do not believe that literary studies as such have a future, but this does not mean that literary criticism will die. As a branch of literature, criticism will survive, but probably not in our teaching institutions.

The future of literature is certainly not in the hands of our academic institutions. We’re already seeing this shift. Among the writers teaching literature outside the traditional academic environment is , who takes on Western giants like Augustine’s Confessions in a private Substack course. studies Tolstoy and Kafka with his readers. And there’s the Catherine Project, a five-year-old digital initiative offering seminars on Homer, Plato, and Aristotle.

Many of us have continued to read despite the widespread use of technology, and we will continue to do so. “The common reader is still out there,” Oliver says, and I believe him. Now it is up to them to decide how they’ll engage with literature, if it’s in the context of aesthetics or social justice, and it’s up to our literary critics to properly orient us all.

I don’t believe all writers are created equal, nor all readers. To those instructed in Shakespeare, contemporary fiction entertains, to those instructed in contemporary fiction, fantasy entertains. What happens next?

The future is in the hands of the writer, and writers capable of genius can emerge, they will emerge, but they must come with nerve, it’s a vicious undertaking to confront convention today.

While I was looking through the hundreds of auctions this week, I thought I wasn’t finding anything special. Then I landed on this Michael Schmidt edition and I took it all back. The choices this week are subtle and it’s in their nuance that we find so much beauty.

Auction Highlights

1. French Cookbooks: An entire sale dedicated to vintage cookbooks. I’m very bad in the kitchen, but I’ve heard from people who are good at it that in the old cookbooks is where we find the best recipes (I picked my favorite covers). In Central France at Hôtel des Ventes Giraudeau on October 30, 2025 at 14:00.

   

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   The Round-Up

   Alvar Aalto for Artek Chairs
   Estimate: 3 000 € - 5 000 €
   Tuesday, October 28 at Cambi Casa d’Aste (Milan)

Michael Schmidt Print (Edition 2 of 4)
Estimate: 2 500 € - 3 500 €
Tuesday, October 28 at Aste di Antiquariato Boetto (Italy)

Roman Vases Third Century A.C.
Estimate: 300 € - 500 €
Tuesday, October 28 at Keizersgracht (Amsterdam)

Schedar 20th Century Cabinet
Estimate: 250 € - 300 €
Tuesday, October 28 at Corso Verona 34D (Torino)

Tell Brak Marble Idol
Estimate: 300 € - 500 €
Tuesday, October 28 at Keizersgracht (Amsterdam)

Pierre Jeanneret Student Chair
Estimate: 3 000 € - 4 000 €
Tuesday, October 28 at Lux-Auction (Luxembourg)

Elieen Gray, E.1027 Book
Estimate: 44 €
Monday, October 27 at Castor Hara (Paris)

South American Fragments
Estimate: 100 € - 200 €
Tuesday, October 28 at Keizersgracht (Amsterdam)

Brassaï Graffiti Signed
Estimate: 200 € - 300 €
Tuesday, October 28 at Ader (Paris)

Franz West Chaise 2000
Estimate: 3 000 € - 6 000 €
Tuesday, October 28 at Aste di Antiquariato Boetto (Italy)

Maurizio Cattelan Tarzan and Jane (1993)
Estimate: 4 000 € - 7 000 €
Tuesday, October 28 at Aste di Antiquariato Boetto (Italy)

Barovier & Toso Vase
Estimate: 600 € - 700 €
Wednesday, October 29 at Aste di Antiquariato Boetto (Italy)

Aina Aalto Table
Estimate: 5 000 € - 7 000 €
Wednesday, October 29 at Piasa (Paris)

Persian Ceramic Jug
Estimate: 300 € - 500 €
Thursday, October 30 at De Zwaan (Amsterdam)

Ebony Carved Armchair
Estimate: 1 000 € - 1 200 €
Friday, October 31 at Coutau-Bégarie (Paris)

Gold Necklace
Estimate: 3 000 € - 4 000 €
Thursday, October 30 at Fidelis Aste (Bologna)

Prosper d’Epinay Vase 1888
Estimate: 2 000 € - 3 000 €
Friday, October 31 at Millon (Paris)

Rare 19th Century Russian Chandelier
Estimate: 15 000 € - 20 000 €
Sunday, November 2 at Osenat (France)

Neoclassical Tables
Estimate: 400 € - 600 €
Wednesday, November 26 at Artcurial (Paris)

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I also asked three Parisians: Stéphanie D’heygere, Maud Charmoy, and Christine Doublet for their recommendations. They each responded with a restaurant.

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Art

Museums and Galleries

Gerhard Richter (Fondation Louis Vuitton)
The Fondation will dedicate all of its galleries to Gerhard Richter, featuring 275 works by the artist stretching from 1962 to 2024. (Through March 2)

Gerhard Richter (David Zwirner)
This is the artist’s third show with David Zwirner since the announcement of his representation in 2023. On view will be new works on paper, as well as multiple important and distinct bodies of painted work by Richter from the 1990s to the 2010s, including photo paintings, Abstrakte Bilder, and reflective glass installations. (October 20 through December 20)

Polaraki by Araki Nobuyoshi (Musée Guimet)
Over the last 25 years, the collector Stéphane André amassed more than 1,000 polaroids taken by Araki Nobuyoshi. Earlier this year he donated the collection to Musée Guimet. This is the first time these works are shown. (Through January 12)

Childhood Illuminated by Jean-Baptiste Greuze (Petit Palais)
This 18th century French painter is fairly unknown today, but at the time he was an established artist in prestigious art collections. (Through January 25)

George Condo (Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris)
The most significant exhibition to date of George Condo’s work, it features 80 paintings and 110 drawings grouped together in a space devoted to graphic arts and some twenty sculptures. (Through February 8)

Minimal (Bourse de Commerce)
Includes works by Walter de Maria, Sol LeWitt, On Kawara, Dan Flavin, Agnes Martin, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, Robert Irwin, Donald Judd, and many more. (Through January 9)

Jacques-Louis David (Louvre)
Considered the father of the French School, revered for breathing new life into painting, he produced imagery that still inhabits the collective imagination. (Through January 26)

Le Bruit du Monde by Luc Delahaye (Jeu de Paume)
Presenting the French photographer’s work between 2001 and 2025. (Through January 4)

Weaving Space by Lygia Pape (Bourse de Commerce)
Pape’s first solo exhibition in France brings together works fundamental to her practice, from her first abstract engravings to her majestic Livro Noite e Dia III alongside with a selection of her experimental films. (Through January 26)

Couples by Eric Fischl (Skarstedt Gallery)
Eric Fischl returns with a series on the historical theme of couples, as well as the feelings linked to relationships: fidelity, passion, and love, but also breakups, betrayal and solitude. (October 20 through December 6)

Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann (Galerie Guelfucci)
After spending years in Berlin, this 20th century design gallery opens in Paris with an exhibition dedicated to the Art Deco designer Jacques-Émile Ruhlmann. (Through November 25)

Design Miami Paris (Galerie Éric Philippe)
At the Hotel de Maisons (October 21 through October 26).

Kai Althoff (Tramps)
Gallerist Parinaz Mogadassi opens her new space in Paris with an exhibition dedicated to Kai Althoff. (Through December 7)

Paul Sietsema (Marian Goodman)
This exhibition brings together new works and older works, including two 16mm films. (Through December 20)

Mickalene Thomas (Galerie Nathalie Obadia)
This new exhibition unveils 11 previously unseen works drawn from series inspired by JET and Nus Exotiques-publications known for their portrayals of nudes. (October 19 through January 3)

Exposition Générale (Fondation Cartier Palais Royale)
600 works by more than 100 artists that have marked the Cartier Foundation’s programming from 1984 to today. All displayed in their new headquarters near Palais Royale. (October 25 through August 2026)

Philip Guston and Raymond Pettibon (Musée Picasso)
The two master draftsmen are brought together at the Picasso Museum in two parallel shows. (Through March 1)

Gluts by Robert Rauschenberg (Thaddaeus Ropac)
First exhibition in 15 years dedicated to Robert Rauschenberg’s sculptural Gluts series. (October 20 through November 22)

Ladies & Gentlemen by Daragh Soden (Centre Culturel Irlandais)
Winner of the Grand Prix du Jury Photo at the Hyères Festival in 2017, Daragh Soden came to international recognition with his series Young Dubliners. (November 14 to December 21)

Photographs from The Olbricht Collection (Sotheby’s)
Wolfgang Tillmans, William Eggleston, Cindy Sherman, to name a few. (November 12 through November 19)

100 Years of Art Deco (Musée des Arts Décoratifs)
The Musée des Arts Décoratifs celebrates the centenary of Art Deco with an exhibition of contemporary scenography. (October 22 through April 26)

Art Basel (Grand Palais)
Galleries specializing in modern and contemporary art. (October 24 through October 26)

Paris Photo (Grand Palais)
Leading galleries in the photography market. (November 13 through November 16)

Edward Weston and Tyler Mitchell (MEP Paris)
(Through January 1)

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Restaurants

Three Recommendations

Stéphanie D’heygere, Designer and Founder of Dheygere

My boyfriend chef Mathieu Canet is doing a pop-up at Cravan in Saint-Germain-des-Prés on the 23rd of November. The place is very cosy with good cocktails and the food will be delicious.

Maud Charmoy, Founder of Amuse Bouche

So, I’m very excited about the opening (on the 20th of October) of the restaurant La Table by Christophe Vasseur, the owner of the cherished bakery in the 10th Du Pain et des Idées. It will be open all day from morning to evening, serving coffee and pastries for breakfast, pizzas at lunch, and oven-baked dishes for dinner. He’s serious in terms of quality and good taste so...

Christine Doublet, CEO at Le Fooding who also runs Skip the line

My current dining recommendation in Paris is À La Renaissance on rue de la Roquette. A well-known old neighborhood café, it was recently renovated and reopened by Carina Soto-Velasquez and Joshua Fontaine (the team behind other Parisian favorites like Candelaria and Le Mary Celeste). It was important to them to stay true to the cafe’s roots, with long opening hours open (every day of the week from 8 to midnight), a reasonable price point, a daily set lunch menu and traditional yet updated decor. They brought their personal touch though with excellent classic cocktails, a sharp wine list and perfectly executed bistrot food. They’ve managed to hit the sweet spot of being a spot that has maintained its local clientele while also attracting a hip new one and it’s lovely to see this mix-and-match crowd come together. A must visit! (Of note: they take reservations for meals, but there are always seats available at the bar or outside for a drink and a nibble!)

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Events

Events Across Disciplines

October 21 | Sylvain Maestraggi talks about his new photography book Notes sur Les Rivières d’Athènes
Jeu de Paume

October 21 -
October 27 | Miu Miu presents a film and performance composition for 30 Blizzards by Helen Marten, developed in collaboration with musician Beatrice Dillon and director Fabio Cherstich.
Palais d’Iéna

October 24 | Conversation about the 90s with Sonia Boyce and Edward Enninful.
Petit Palais

October 28 | A conversation with Teri Wehn Damisch to coincide with the launch of the book Passages Transatlantiques Entre les Arts.
Jeu de Paume

October 28 | R.O. Kwon in conversation with Chloé Quenum about questions of ownership and origin in art.
The American Library in Paris

November 4 | John Singer Sargent and Henry James: Painting and Prose in a Gilded Age with Jean Strouse and Madeleine Schwartz.
The American Library in Paris

November 5 | An evening with Fitzcarraldo Editions and Ed Atkins.
Lafayette Antecipations

November 6 | A conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates.
MK2 Bibliothéque

November 8 | Dialogue with Annie Ernaux on Laurent Cantet’s film Ressources Humaines.
La Cinémathèque

November 13 | Conversation and book signing with photographer Bharat Sikka.
Fondation Henri-Cartier Bresson

November 20 | Jonathan Coe on The Proof of My Innocence.
Shakespeare & Co.

November 27 | Ian Leslie discusses the biography John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs
Shakespeare & Co.

November 29 | Michaël Lucken talks about Araki’s flowers.
Musée Guimet

December 2 | Meeting between the philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman and historian Enzo Traverso about the image of politics and the politics of images.
Jeu de Paume

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Music and Theatre

Concerts and Performances

September 11 -
January 15 | Les Fourberies de Scapin by Molière, Denis Podalydès.
Comédie Française Richelieu

September 24 -
November 4 | Aida by Giuseppe Verdi
Opéra Bastille

October 24 | Edging with Crystal Mess and Hey Bony
La Station - Gare des Mines

October 24 -
October 25 | Thomas Bangalter performs at the Centre Pompidou.
Centre Pompidou

October 26 | Ellen Arkbro: Nightsongs, Daysongs, after inviting Ellen Fullman, the Bourse de Commerce invites Swedish organ experimentalist Ellen Arkbro.
Bourse de Commerce

October 29 | Erykah Badu
Zenith

November 11 -
November 30 | La Walkyrie by Richard Wagner
Opéra Bastille

November 14 +
November 15 | Sleep by Max Richter, a night at the foundation (8-hour concert).
Fondation Louis Vuitton

November 26 -
December 06 | Mémoire de Fille a play based on Annie Ernaux’s novels.
Les Abbesses, Theatre de la Ville de Paris

December 12 +
December 13 | Creation by Bryce Dessner with Isabelle Huppert and Alice Sara Ott, based on excerpts from the anthology of letters between John Cage and Merce Cunningham entitled Love, Icebox.
Fondation Louis Vuitton

December 21 -
January 4 | Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky, ballet Preljocaj.
Théâtre des Champs-Élysées

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Film

What to Watch and Where

October 17 -
October 26 | Louvre Film Festival, from David to Kubrick, the French empire and revolution in film at the auditorium du Louvre Michel Laclotte

October 8 -
November 29 | Orson Welles retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française.

October 9 -
November 30 | Harutyun Khachatryan Retrospective in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou at MK2 Bibliothéque.

October 20 -
November 2 | Hafsia Herzi cinematographer and actress at the Cinémathèque Française (I couldn’t recommend more going to see La Graine et le Mulet).

November 5 -
November 16 | Laurent Cantet retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française.

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Family

Kids Too

Ongoing -
August 2027 | Transparency, an immersive experience for children that includes an ice palace, a mysterious forest, a cave of mineral treasures, a sunny sky or a sparkling ocean. (2 to 10 years old)
Grand Palais

Ongoing -
January 4 | 1,2,3 Couleurs experiment with colors and emotions, every Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday at 14h30. (3 to 5 years old)
Louvre

October 4 -
March 7 | Dancing Visit discover the works of Claude Monet with a choreographer every Saturday at 9h00. (3 to 5 years old, parents must be present)
Musée de L’Orangerie

October 5 -
February 1 | Au pays d’Orsay “when a museum is born in a train station, its works never stop traveling” a tour and workshop every Sunday at 10h00. (3 to 5 years old, parents must be present)
Musée de d’Orsay

October 18 -
March 3 | Storytelling Tour: In The Clouds, Betty the dreamer wakes up one day with her head in the clouds and her memories all mixed up! Accompanied by a Cultural Guide, set out on a captivating quest to help her regain her memory. The painting by her father, Gerhard Richter, shows the way! Every Saturday and Sunday, and daily during Holidays at 11:00. (2.5 to 5 years old)
Fondation Louis Vuitton

October 18 -
October 26 | Young Audience Film Festival around the Amazon theme: short and feature films by Miyazaki and beyond. (All ages)
Musée du Quai Branly

October 22 -
October 28 | My First Festival (all ages) a film festival for all ages.
Cinémathèque Française

October 25 | Trick-or-Treating (all ages) and Halloween Hop (ticketed event)
The American Library

November 8, 22 +
December 6 | Atelier de Création with the artist Camila Salame based on the works of Martin Parr. (3 to 6 years old, without parents)
Jeu de Paume

November 9 +
November 16 | Atelier Family Cinema on the footsteps of Mary Anning, a moment around independent French cinema for children with a 20 to 30-minute ateliers proposed before or after the film.
Jeu de Paume

November 22 +
November 23 | Family Weekend with several activities including dance, family yoga, meditation, creation, and a guided story visit around the museum. (All ages)
Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris

November 22 +
November 23 | Super Kids Party the annual party this time with Join Cheb Runner, composer of the symphony performed by Meriem Bennani’s flip-flop orchestra.
Lafayette Antecipations

December 22 -
December 24 | Drawing and Painting with Cécile Colom from 10:00 to 12:30, there are many other ateliers in several dates, I’m simply listing the one that falls in my daughter’s age bracket. (4 to 6 year olds)
Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris

• I’ve included only special events, some institutions propose year-round activities for children: Musee Rodin, Palais de Tokyo, American Library in Paris, Cite de l’architecture, Jardin des Plantes.

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Chronicle

What’s a Chronicle Anyway?

A long time ago in New York City, I dated a writer who kept associating me with Clarice Lispector, particularly with her crônicas. Not because of my work, but because we were both Brazilian women (except she was born in the Ukraine, I was raised in America). Each time he asked me what I was working on, I fluttered, wavering between the stories I was writing at home and some sort of cuticle cream article I was working on for the paper.

It was hard for him to imagine how a girl writing backstage beauty reports for the fashion desk could aspire to write anything other than the latest trends on mules, and I think he leveraged my ambition into something obvious for me to do: follow in Lispector’s footsteps by going where she left off, to chronicles. Everything about this annoyed me. I didn’t need to be prescribed a genre, I didn’t need him telling me night after night, over rounds and rounds of gin and tonics, that this was how I’d make it. I would’ve needed someone who believed in my capacity to find the right symbols for my thoughts and to turn them into something new. If I didn’t do this work I was going to shrivel inside, I depended on my ability to understand myself through words.

Years have passed since, and Lispector’s chronicles are now safe and out of exile (yes, I put them away for a long time). When I started conceiving this newsletter, and the type of stories I was willing to share, the New York writer, the guy who sat alone at skater bars reading Homer and telling me what to do, came briefly back to mind. I finally came around to the chronicle, but out of my own will and in my own way, all while keeping the round-ups I had become better at creating, and the short stories I worked on quietly at home.

A chronicle (as I’m calling it on my newsletter) is a literary genre where writers use poetry and fiction tools to recount a reality. They’re often published as weekly columns in newspapers, except chronicles are to newspaper columns what op-ed pieces became to objective journalism. Or what the New Yorker’s stories in The Talk of Town would be if writers were offered more creative freedom.

In the late nineteenth century, chronicles in Latin America became somewhat of a phenomenon. Many newspaper editors invited writers to break from the daily news with a weekly chronicle. Gabriel García Márquez wrote several political chronicles, as did the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío, the Cuban José Martí, and the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges.

What distinguished Lispector’s and Márquez’s chronicles from the other writers, and from the other pieces in the paper, was their take on the truth. Márquez believed embellishment was sometimes necessary to help convey the truth: “If to speak the truth you need to add one more tear, then what’s the problem?” he said to one of his students. He built on existing realities with his own truths, turning objective material into subjective, and some times fictional work.

Take for example the chronicle Márquez wrote about the Colombian man who survived a shipwreck. The editor didn’t believe he could add anything to a story the paper had already successfully covered, but Márquez insisted on speaking with the victim, and when he returned the next day with a four-part series that shared a colorful, detailed survival story, the paper’s sales grew tremendously.

It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.

— Gabriel García Márquez (1981)

If chronicles are an extension of a writer’s work, daily insight into their perspective, and a way for readers to fix the author onto their imaginations, then the writer really is the greatest character of all. To me, it is only by reading all of Lispector’s chronicles that we can begin to understand the woman who invented the protagonist G.H., who eats a cockroach in her maid’s bedroom.

The same phenomenon we see in Márquez’s approach to the chronicle, we also see in Lispector’s, except she went further. She had a great desire to dissociate from the form, to create something that could really obfuscate the author by blurring the truth, hiding what’s real with the unreal.

In an early piece from June 1968, she wrote: “Is the crônica a story? Is it a conversation? Is it the summation of a state of mind?” Three years later, in May 1971, she mused, “Let’s be honest: this isn’t a column at all. It barely is. It doesn’t fit the genre. Genres no longer interest me. Mystery interests me. Do I need to have a ritual for mystery?” This is exactly what the crônicas became.

— Jared Marcel Pollen in The Yale Review

Her chronicles read like an unrepentant confessional, her language is opaque and it’s impossible to understand why. That’s the beauty in them, what makes them even more relevant today. In a 2017 article for The Paris Review, Gabrielle Bellot positions chronicles in our current media landscape, “There is a pressing sense that we need definitive, well-sourced reporting to combat propaganda—including that of the current administration.” Bellot is referring to the early days of Trump’s administration and the rise of fake news, a time that gave rise to op-ed columns, a tool used by the media to heighten emphasis on its objective and factual content. “Partly because of this, some critics have declared that the confessional, as well as the personal essay more generally, no longer should define writing in the era of Trump,” Bellot continues. She goes on to refer to an essay Jia Tolentino wrote in The New Yorker where she comes to condemn personal stories, “individual perspectives do not, at the moment, seem like a trustworthy way to get to the bottom of a subject.”

How impersonal and withdrawn can anything we write be when we’re all our each accumulation of our experiences. The truth in all nonfiction is inherently fraught. Our columns, our reported pieces, our essays, what we call factual, rely on our personal failures as much as they do on our successes, they’re founded on our individual perspective, whether intentional or not. To this idea, Lispector’s and Marquez’s confrontation with the truth becomes liminal both to the arts and to the many forms of nonfiction narratives.

As much as I wanted to call my writings on here chronicles I thought I couldn’t. I couldn’t find my chronicles in their crônicas. The period in my life from which I extract my realities hold more time than Lispector’s and Márquez’s, and it is after all the chronicle’s proximity to the present that allows them to exist in the paper. What’s more, my memory can’t be a reliable source even when I’m telling the truth.

Although my use of time separate me from their chronicles, I still share something primordial with them as cronistas. I need a place to hide. I live with apathy toward telling the truth, I’m not capable of confessing like Neige Sinno and Edouard Louis. Perhaps because it’s impossible for me to know this truth, perhaps as much as I search for it I still won’t find it, perhaps I need to keep the real and the unreal colluded. What I’m sure about when writing this newsletter is the process, that like Lispector I can discover something new when I’m writing it. This is the freedom this newsletter purports to give me. There are truths that are easy for me to share, there are others that are secrets I cannot reveal, what I make of all of this is what I like to call chronicles.

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The Visual Library

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Currently at Rue de Chabrol

Nine Articles I Recommend This Week

1. Solange Knowles launched a digital library, Saint Heron Community Library, that gives people access to an important roster of literary works. The library process is entirely digital, which is in itself a brilliant idea. People can reserve and check-out physical copies of these works for free and have them mailed to their house. Beyond making reading even more accessible, what stands out about this project is the titles Knowles curates and emphasizes as required reading. There’s great education to be had in a curated library. (Lithub)

2. is collaborating with the French bookstore Shakespeare & Co. to publish transcripts from conversations they host with international writers. Guests have included Abdulrazak Gurnah, Sheila Heti, Emmanuel Carrère, , and . The first collaboration launched with Neige Sinno, author of Sad Tiger, an autobiography about the abuse she suffered as a kid in the hands of her stepfather.

   When I studied literature, I wasn’t interested in autobiographical genres. I didn’t think that would be the path for me. For some strange and unconscious reasons, I convinced myself, later in life, to do something I hadn’t wanted to do in the first place.

   — Neige Sinno

3. I didn’t read BOMB Magazine until someone sent me an article from their September issue where Björk interviews Ocean Vuong about his new novel The Emperor of Gladness. Who was the brilliant person that thought of this? I didn’t know they were friends! I also didn’t know Björk took weekly qigong classes. What emerges is a conversation about the simplicity of experiencing life without conforming to the pursuit of the American dream, being present can be fulfilling enough, no grand narrative arc needed, neither in the book nor in real life.

   I wanted to write about kindness without hope, where people know that kindness will make no significant change in their lives and yet they commit to it anyway.

   — Ocean Vuong

   also had Ocean Vuong over on her podcast Fashion Neurosis.

4. David Trotter writes about Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway for the London Review of Books. He looks at the ways in which academics are celebrating the centennial of this particular novel (through four publications each offering a new reading of Woolf’s masterpiece).

5. A few weeks ago I told you Garth Greenwell was teaching an open course on Augustine’s Confessions. Last Friday, in his most recent newsletter, Greenwell gave us a taste of what sitting in that class might be like. His reading is detailed and pointed, he goes down to the bone. He looks at Augustine’s work and intention, at all its entry points, examines its construction in detail and extracts the parts that make us think differently not only about the work itself but about our own approach to writing.

   This is the characteristic move of the Confessions: Augustine is constantly trying to turn around to face the self, to catch the self out, to investigate anything we might take as given about ourselves. Augustine can never merely think a thought or feel a feeling: he has to examine the act itself of feeling and thinking. He has to figure out everything, especially the most obvious things, from scratch. He has to become a problem for himself.

   — Garth Greenwell

6. I got a teaser on Instagram for Rosalind Krauss’s October Magazine issue 191, for the essay Women on Walls: Projection, Anonymity, Envy, and Eileen Gray by the culture theorist Anne Anlin Cheng. I haven’t received my copy yet, all I can tell you is Anlin Cheng will be analyzing a collage made by Eileen Gray:

   I bring to bear on Gray’s collage two other, seemingly separate stories, each with its own secrets and surprising revelations—Melanie Klein’s work on reparation and the creative impulse, on the one hand, and Le Corbusier’s fraught relationship to Gray’s architectural creation E-1027 on the other—and trace how the specters of female creativity, Baker, and racialized femininity haunt all three. By triangulating Gray, Le Corbusier, and Klein, we see not only the ghosts of women of color in the machines of modernist innovation but also how the tensions of fame, anonymity, envy, and projection (congealed through the figure of the Black woman) fuel the theorizations of the artist, the architect, and the analyst.

   — Anne Anlin Cheng

7. In Close Readings, a podcast by the London Review of Books, Jonathan Rée and James Wood discuss Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity. I didn’t know about this particular work of Beauvoir’s, but I’m compelled to read it after listening to them summarize her perspective on the individual will to be free and what one asks themselves in order to arrive at this freedom. In this work Beauvoir talks a lot about childhood, memories, and how our values are shaped and formed and later emancipated, which is a topic I’m very curious about in my own work.

8. In ’s newsletter, he shared a list of his favorite YouTube videos out right now. One that stood out and that I hadn’t seen before in all the coverage of the Nobel Prize in literature was László Krasznahorkai’s reaction when the Nobel announced his win over the phone. If you want to dig a little bit further into Gioia’s Substack, I recommend this post: Hamlet Is the Gen Z Story We Need Right Now.

9. ’s piece on a YouTube education includes some fantastic recommendations: Kenneth Clark’s documentary Civilisation, John Berger’s series Way of Seeing, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker on evolution, the philosopher Bryan Magee’s BBC show, and more. Also, staying true to my pessimistic perspective on the future of the humanities and of our society’s literacy, here’s a great essay: The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society.

My Morning Read

I cannot put down Susan Choi’s new novel Flashlight. I’m not a big contemporary reader but I decided this year I’ll read every book on the long list for the Booker Prize. This is the first one and I’m immersed in the way she depicts the lives of this family after the Korean war, their establishment in the U.S. and relocation to Japan. It reminds me a lot about Toni Morrison, about her ideas of generational trauma and its dimensions, about Marianne Hirsch’s work around postmemory. It’s a bold, complex novel that so far, I highly recommend.

My Daughter’s Evening Read

A book by the Chinese writer Yue Zhang: La Meilleure Boulangerie du Monde, that tells the story of a wolf and a rabbit who are at first scared of each other but end up making the best bread together. We’re also reading a lot of Richard Scarry. Her favorite read in english is The Cave Downwind of the Cafe by Mikey Please which was published on September 5.

What My Husband is Listening To

Boccaccio Life by Age of Chance

A Movie I’m Thinking About

La Graine et le Mulet by Abdellatif Kechiche

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A POEM

Self Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson

HENCEFORTH, please God, forever I forego
The yoke of men’s opinions. I will be
Light-hearted as a bird, and live with God.
I find him in the bottom of my heart,
I hear continually his voice therein.
horizontal dotted line
The little needle always knows the North,
The little bird remembereth his note,
And this wise Seer within me never errs.
I never taught it what it teaches me;
I only follow, when I act aright.

Auction Highlights

1. A House by Jacques Grange: it’s a small lot, only 137 pieces, to know Jacques Grange took part in choosing (and making) some of them makes this entire auction precious. In Paris at Sotheby’s on October 14 at 2:30pm.

2. Photographs: Nobuyoshi Araki, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Francesca Woodman, Martin Parr, William Wegman, Dan Graham, Scott McFarland (to name a few!). In Milan at Finarte on October 16 at 3pm.

3. Hermès Jewelry Private Collection: a large lot with gold and silver jewelry at Bonhams in Paris on October 21 at 11am.

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The Round-Up

Jasper Morrison
Estimate: 2 000 € - 2 200 €
Tuesday, September 14 at Quittenbaum (Munich)

Desk Storage Element
Estimate: 1 000 € - 1 500 €
Monday, October 13 at Adam’s (Dublin)

Charlotte Perriand Desk
Estimate: 2 000 € - 3 000 €
Wednesday, October 15 at Hôtel des Ventes Nice Riviéra (Nice)

George IV Mahogany Chairs
Estimate: 300 € - 500 €
Monday, October 13 at Adam’s (Dublin)

Ostrich Egg Bowls
Estimate: 400 € - 600 €
Wednesday, October 15 at Veritas Art Auctioneers (Lisbon)

Josef Frank Lamps
Estimate: 3 000 € - 4 000 €
Tuesday, October 14 at Quittenbaum (Munich)

Mies Van Der Rohe Barcelona Daybed
Estimate: $2,000 - $3,000
Wednesday, October 22 at Bonhams (Los Angeles)

Display Case
Estimate: 200 € - 300 €
Wednesday, October 15 at Farrando - Hotel Drouot (Paris)

Agate and Stone Earrings
Estimate: 2 000 £ - 3 000 £
Wednesday, October 15 at Elmwood’s (London)

Han Dynasty Wine Recipient
Estimate: 5 000 € - 10 000 €
Thursday, October 16 at Galerie Zacke (Vienna)

Egyptian Ceramic Heads
Estimate: 300 € - 400 €
Friday, October 17 at Tessier & Sarrou (Paris)

François Lembo Mirror
Estimate: 300 € - 500 €
Thursday, October 23 at Pierre Bergé (Paris)

Josef Hoffmann
Estimate: 2 500 € - 5 000 €
Tuesday, October 21 at Im Kinsky (Vienna)

Carl Hugo Pott Six Spoons
Estimate: none
Wednesday, October 22 at Auktionshaus Wendl (Rudolstadt)

Shiro Kuramata
Estimate: 7 000 € - 9 000 €
Tuesday, October 14 at Quittenbaum (Munich)

I used to live in New York. Anyone that knew me then can attest that I was never home. I was one of those people with a bottle of sparkling water in the fridge and maybe a bag of chips. In fact, it was my job not to be home (you can read more about that here). When I wasn’t at the office from eight to eight researching stuff on my computer, I had to be out and about meeting people, going to art openings, lectures, book launches, screenings, fashion shows, beauty appointments, parties, and press dinners. I was that girl that kept shoes under her desk, vitamins in the drawer, eyebrow gel next to the office plant. I think even my checkbook lived at the office. It really felt like home.

Fast forward to today when I live in Paris, I’m married with child, and I don’t work at an office anymore. I’m writing a book, and as it turns out I spend all my time at home. The same people from New York can probably attest to this too because they never see me (and yes, many of them have moved to Paris). In the beginning staying home wasn’t easy. The part of me folding fitted sheets at eleven o’clock in the morning thought I was going to rage against this house. Now I don’t fold sheets anymore. As it turns out, if you do what you like to do it’s nice to be home. The only thing that’s really different now is that I go grocery shopping several times a week, I even buy fresh fruit.

—

If finishing the book is my main objective and I’m sitting at home doing other things, I consider myself to be stalling. I do spend time writing chronicles and doing some in-depth reading, to me that counts as writing my book, but all the other research really is procrastination at its finest. I can’t help it, it’s a part of me, I need to know what people are saying and doing. After all, it was this exact curiosity that provided me with that sparkling water and bag of chips for years on end, it would be strange to abandon it now. What’s more, I love discovering new things and sharing it with people.

For a long time I felt that writing my book and being an editor were at war with each other, doing both in parallel has brought me peace.

Rue de Chabrol is a weekly newsletter where I share a curated version of my doom scroll, so that you can doom scroll a little bit less and use your time to do those things that bring you pleasure (whatever that is really). I get into the nitty gritty to find you the gold.

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What do I research?

#1. I sift through the news to find articles, essays, and short stories I want to read. I keep bookmarked folders on my browser that I rummage through every day.

#2. I visit libraries and look through books to find photos I’ve never seen. When I need a break, I go to libraries in Paris and look at monographs.

#3. I supplement my work with readings, lectures, YouTube videos, and essays. I like to study. I enjoy picking an author and diving deep into their world. I’ve done it with Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf, Dante, Clarice Lispector, and now I’m doing it with Ralph Waldo Emerson. This means I read everything around what they wrote, I watch every public lecture, research essays, articles, papers, I read their biographies until I have a proper understanding of their work.

#4. I round-up design auctions to find objects I think are worth buying. I’ve been going to flea markets since I was a teenager. I love finding things.

And when I’m not researching?

If it’s the morning I’m probably reading something contemporary.
If it’s the evening I read to my daughter.

If it’s the weekend I’m listening to whatever my husband is playing at home.

If it’s late at night I’m watching a movie.

And when do I see other people?

When I want to connect with people, find out what they’re into, and know what they’re thinking about I invite them over to Rue de Chabrol.