In the winter of 2015, Ben Lerner wrote a short story, “The Polish Rider,” incorporating fictionalized elements of the life and work of the artist Anna Ostoya, who had recently lost two of her canvases in the back of an Uber. As the narrator of the story helps the artist search for the missing canvases, he fantasizes about “recuperating the lost paintings through prose,” about how the verbal might take the place of the visual. After the story was published in The New Yorker, Ostoya painted the painting Lerner had invented based on her earlier work, transforming the fiction without changing any of the words. Ostoya went on to produce a series of compositions that respond to the story she’d helped inspire. In the essay below, Lerner describes how Ostoya’s actual body of work catalyzed the fiction.

View of “Slaying,” Anna Ostoya, 2016, Bortolami Gallery, New York.

That winter, a small pneumonia bloomed in his left lung. He’d embarked on a second course of antibiotics, the first having proved insufficient. He was getting better but was weak, and by about eight o’clock each night, profoundly so. Still, he wanted to see Anna and her opening in Chelsea. They made a plan to meet for an early drink downtown; they could catch up a little, then head to the opening together in a cab. He would look quickly around the gallery and rush back to bed in Brooklyn—another cab. (As long as he had an infection in his lung, it seemed, he could pay for private transportation without guilt. Taxis were on his mind; maybe he wouldn’t have otherwise written “The Polish Rider.”) But he’d take the B train into Manhattan.

Stepping out of his apartment was like stepping out of a darkened theater; he had that feeling of supersensitivity that attends a reemergence into public after a period of seclusion, streetlights startlingly bright, a nearby siren startlingly loud. Would he have written the story if he hadn’t met Anna in that condition? Over his soda water and her wine, he asked Anna how the installation of her show had gone, how she’d ultimately decided to hang the sequence of paintings she’d composed based on Artemisia Gentileschi’s monumental Judith Slaying Holofernes. He’d seen a few early versions of these paintings in her apartment (and studio) at 203 Rivington, on the Lower East Side. (The first few times he visited Anna’s place, he had a sense of déjà vu; finally he remembered that he and his wife had spent a couple nights at 203 Rivington—in a friend of a friend’s apartment, whose layout was identical to Anna’s—some years before. If not for this coincidence, he might not have, et cetera). Read More