April 16, 2018

David Hockney, A Bigger Interior with Blue Terrace and Garden, 2017.

David Hockney’s show of new work, currently up at Pace in New York, is an explosively energetic exploration of reverse perspective. Hockney deploys hexagonal canvases, the lower ends notched out, so as to allow the eye to bend the picture far beyond the frame. As Hockney quips, “Far from cutting corners, I was adding them.” In Lawrence Weschler’s catalogue essay, Hockney suggests what he means by reverse perspective by way of an allusion to an experience he once had coursing through the arrow-straight eighteen-kilometer St. Gotthard Pass road tunnel, the tiny pinpoint of light ahead epitomizing “the hell of one-point perspective.” “I suddenly realized,” Hockney tells Weschler, “how that is the basis of all conventional photographic perspective, that endless regress to an infinitely distant point in the middle of the image, how everything is hurtling away from you and you yourself are not even in the picture at all. But then, as we got to the end of the tunnel everything suddenly reversed with the world opening out in every direction … and I realized how that, and not its opposite, was the effect I wanted to capture.”

In one of Hockney’s first experiments in his recent series, he took Fra Angelico’s San Marco fresco The Annunciation (a masterpiece of one-point perspective)—a poster of which used to grace the upper corridor of his elementary school—and turned it inside out, offering a sense of what it might have looked like in reverse perspective.

Fra Angelico, The Annunciation, c. 1450.

David Hockney, Annunciation II, after Fra Angelico, 2017.

Weschler’s catalogue essay, from which we will be publishing two adapted excerpts this week and next, goes into further detail on the taproots and implications of Hockney’s current reverse-perspective passion. The first, below, involves an improbable recent mentor. —Nadja Spiegelman Read More

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April 16, 2018

On Poetry

I Have Wasted My Life

By Patricia Hampl

Winslow Homer, Sunlight and Shadow, 1872.

“I vant to be alone,” my mother used to say distractedly, channeling Greta Garbo, when my brother and I were wrecking havoc at home. In fact, though Garbo’s character said the line in the 1932 film Grand Hotel, Garbo herself never said it. What she said, when faced with a scrum of journalists at a press conference a few years later, was “I want to be let alone.”

But in our culture, the distinction between the two statements has been conflated. For us, “I vant to be alone” means I want to be off the grid, no iPhone, no email, the 24-7 connectivity of our lot. I want to be let alone to be alone. No wonder that, to a writer—to readers, to all overwhelmed people now—solitude suggests not loneliness but serenity, that kissing cousin of sanity. We speak of being alone to recharge our batteries—even in our reach for solitude, we seem unable to unplug from the metaphor of our connectivity.

Yet here’s the greater paradox: writing, though performed alone, is also the only absolutely declarative, meaning-beset art form we have. Its purpose is to communicate. With others. More than a painter, much more than a composer, a writer can never “be alone.” Read More

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April 13, 2018

This Week’s Reading

Staff Picks: Birds, Borders, and Broadway

By The Paris Review

Photo: Carl Fuldner and Shane DuBay.

In 2009, Edwin Rist stole hundreds of bird skins from England’s Natural History Museum at Tring, which holds one of the largest ornithological collections in the world. Among the collection were a number of specimens collected by Alfred Russel Wallace, the British naturalist whose work is often credited with goading Charles Darwin to publish On the Origin of Species. Why did Rist steal them? To tie the world’s most exotic and expensive fishing flies. So begins Kirk Wallace Johnson’s charming The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century, a truly bizarre tale that traces the history of exotic-bird collecting and the feather trade through scientific harvesting, millinery fads, the Victorian era’s fly-fishing boom, up to Rist’s caper and Johnson’s own attempts at retrieving the stolen feathers with the help of some international fly-tying elites. There’s a lot to Johnson’s book, and he ties it together well, reeling you into disparate historical subjects in a thrilling catch-and-release style. The book is The Orchid Thief for the fly-fishing and birding set: worth its weight in exotic bird feathers, which you’ll learn are very expensive. —Jeffery Gleaves Read More

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April 13, 2018

Arts & Culture

The Book I Kept for the Cover

By Anjali Enjeti

The first time I saw a picture of an Indian on the cover of a novel was in the fall of 1995. I was a twenty-two-year-old law student browsing the literature section at an independent bookstore in Clayton, Missouri. While scanning the shelves, a small photograph of a dark-skinned woman on the spine of a paperback caught my eye. The book was Jasmine, by Bharati Mukherjee, and the same photo was magnified on the cover: a woman stands in the opening of a window; her lips are full, slightly parted. What struck me most was her very brown skin. I took the book to the register and purchased it.

A Bengali Hindu, Mukherjee was born in 1940 in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and was educated in England and Switzerland before emigrating to the U.S. in 1961 to study at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She was a true pioneer. At the time of her arrival, only some twelve thousand Indian Americans were living in the United States. This was four years before the institution of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 (also known as the Hart-Celler Act), which abolished discriminatory quotas, thereby eliminating race, ancestry, and national origin as barriers to entry and enabling the resettlement of thousands of immigrants from the subcontinent.

Though I didn’t discover Mukherjee’s work until I was twenty-two, her prolific career began the year before I was born. Her debut novel, The Tiger’s Daughter (1972), tells the story of a woman named Tara who returns to Calcutta after establishing herself in the United States, only to feel unsettled by how much her hometown has changed in her absence. In 1975, Mukherjee published her second novel, Wife, and a decade later the short-story collection Darkness (1985), followed by The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction. Jasmine hit the shelves in 1989, at about the middle of Mukherjee’s long literary career. Several novels—including Holder of the World (1993) and the trilogy Desirable Daughters, Tree Bride, and Miss India—followed. Read More

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April 13, 2018

Arts & Culture

Ten Superstitions of Writers and Artists

By Ellen Weinstein

On days like today, we need all the tips, tricks, and good omens we can get. This Friday the thirteenth, we’re presenting you with the superstitions of ten artists and writers who (mostly) managed to avoid bad luck.

Charles Dickens
Slept Facing North

Charles Dickens (1812–1870) carried a navigational compass with him at all times and always faced north while he slept—a practice he believed improved his creativity and writing.

Audrey Hepburn
Lucky Number Fifty-Five

The screen legend, humanitarian, and fashion icon Audrey Hepburn (1929–1993) had a fascination with the number fifty-five. She is known to have requested the number for her dressing room—as it had also been her dressing-room number for both of the now classic films Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Read More

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April 12, 2018

In Memoriam

What Do Poets Talk About?

By Chris Ware

J. D. McClatchy with his husband, Chip Kidd.

J. D. McClatchy, one of America’s foremost men of letters, died in his home Tuesday at the age of seventy-two. He was the author of eight volumes of poetry and a string of acclaimed opera librettos. He also was a prolific editor, anthologist, translator, critic, the longtime editor of The Yale Review, and the president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He won too many awards and fellowships to list with brevity here. His poems appeared frequently in The Paris Review, and his Art of Poetry interview appeared in our Fall 2002 issue. I first met him when I was twelve or thirteen years old. He sat down next to me on my parents’ couch and complimented my dress, pinching the fabric between his fingers to feel it. I jumped up, ran to the kitchen, and breathlessly told my mother that one of her friends was being inappropriate with me. She laughed warmly—Sandy, as his friends called him, was both very gentle and very gay. I last saw him two years ago at the Miami Book Festival. A mutual friend asked if, now that I had published a book, I considered myself a writer. I found myself flustered, unsure how to respond. Luckily, Sandy stepped in. “A writer is only a writer when they are writing,” he said firmly, then winked at me. It’s an answer, an understanding, a confidence that I have carried around in my pocket ever since. —Nadja Spiegelman

As the spouse of one of my closest friends, Chip Kidd, I got to know Sandy McClatchy as one might know, well, a friend’s spouse. Chip and Sandy met in the early nineties, Chip and I having been friends for a few years before and I first learning of Chip’s infatuation when he mailed me a color-xeroxed eight-by-ten-inch publicity photo of Sandy with the words PROPERTY OF C.K. written diagonally in red across its lower quadrant like bubble letters on a school spiral notebook. Though I felt like I’d been passed a secret note in math class, I offered up my heartiest of congratulations because Chip had been single for a while. Privately, however, I was worried: Chip and I really only talked about comics and dumb stuff; this guy was a poet and opera librettist. What do poets and opera librettists talk about? What was I going to talk about if I ever met him? Read More

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On Art

David Hockney’s Improbable Inspirations

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On Poetry

I Have Wasted My Life

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This Week’s Reading

Staff Picks: Birds, Borders, and Broadway

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Arts & Culture

The Book I Kept for the Cover

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Arts & Culture

Ten Superstitions of Writers and Artists

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In Memoriam

What Do Poets Talk About?

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