Series: Ekphrasis

Long overlooked in Proust's posthumously published writings, Chardin and Rembrandt, written when he was only twenty-four years old, not only reemphasizes the importance of visual art to his development, but contains the seeds of his later work. Proposed in 1895 by Proust to the newspaper Revue hebdomadaire (it was rejected), this essay is much more than a straightforward piece of...

This seminal 1929 surrealist novel by the painter Giorgio de Chirico merges the realms of dream and reality. In the artist's only novel, de Chirico invites the reader into a world where language, time, space, and meaning are fluid, highlighting themes of mystery, myth, and the uncanny. Following the titular character Hebdomeros as he embarks on a series of philosophical...

A selection from the memoir of Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, the renowned eighteenth-century French portraitist and one of the most important women painters in art history. In her memoir, Souvenirs: From a Memoir, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun offers a candid and thoroughly enjoyable account of her life and art. She relates her encounters among the royalty and aristocracy...

The newest volume in the beloved ekphrasis series focuses on dance and poetry through the eyes of one of the twentieth century's greatest critics. "I am interested at the moment in recalling to you how it looks when one sees dancing as non-professionals do, in the way you yourselves I suppose look at pictures, at buildings, at political history or...

An intimate testament to the power of friendship between two creative forces-available again in English after more than a century."I exaggerate, I sometimes make changes to the subject, but I still don't invent the whole of painting; on the contrary, I find it ready-made, but to be untangled, in the real world." - Vincent van GoghThe painter and poet Émile...

A comprehensive and inspiring collection of essays by Larry Neal, a founder of the seminal Black Arts Movement. "The Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community. Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. As such, it envisions an art that speaks directly to...

A teacher to Jacques Lacan, André Breton, and Albert Camus, Kojève defined art as the act of extracting the beautiful from objective reality. His poetic text, The Concrete Paintings of Kandinsky, endorses nonrepresentational art as uniquely manifesting beauty. Taking the paintings of his renowned uncle, Wassily Kandinsky, as his inspiration, Kojève suggests that in creating (rather than replicating) beauty, the...

Best known for his iconic print Under the Wave off Kanagawa, also known as the Great Wave, Katsushika Hokusai was a revolutionary printmaker. His mastery of ukiyo-e in the nineteenth century has inspired generations of artists since, and his works exposed the world to the delicate beauty and power of Japanese woodblock technique. In addition to his remarkable artistic output,...

Translated into English for the first time, On Contemporary Art, a speech by the renowned novelist César Aira, was delivered at a 2010 colloquium in Madrid dedicated to bridging the gap between writing and the visual arts. On Aira's dizzying and dazzling path, everything comes under question—from the reproducibility of artworks to the value of the written word itself. In...

Most known for her bold and darkly painted portraits, Brooks was revolutionary in her feminist renderings of women in resistance. Openly queer, she challenged conceptions of gender and sexuality in her art, which also served as her refuge. While many of her male counterparts were disfiguring and cubing their subjects—often women—Brooks gave personhood and power to the figures she painted....

Originally published in 1930 in an edition of 100 copies, Gertrude Stein's Dix Portraits pairs her singular literary style with original lithographs by Pablo Picasso and other artists in Stein's circle to create an exceptional artist's book exploring written and visual portraiture. Written between 1913 and 1929, revolutionary years in art history, Dix Portraits conveys the deep human engagement between...

Never before translated into English, Rainer Maria Rilke's fascinating Letters to a Very Young Painter, written toward the end of his life between 1920 and 1926, is a surprising companion to his infamous Letters to a Young Poet, earlier correspondence from 1902 to 1908. While the latter has become a global phenomenon, with millions of copies sold in many different...

Master sculptor Auguste Rodin's illuminating writings on cathedrals in France are especially relevant and significant following the recent fire at Notre Dame. In this volume, the writer and Rodin scholar Rachel Corbett selects excerpts from the famous sculptor's book Cathedrals of France, first published in 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I. Cathedrals were central to the way...

A selection of texts on art and artists by the Belgian French novelist and essayist Marguerite Yourcenar Best known for her seminal novel Memoirs of Hadrian (1951), an imagined autobiography of the Roman emperor, Yourcenar brings the same depth of inquiry and inventive speculation to her lyric prose on art and artists in this newest title in the ekphrasis series....

Derek Jarman's Blue weaves a sensory tapestry that serves as both a political call to action and a meditation on illness, dying, and love. "For Blue there are no boundaries or solutions." — Derek Jarman Originally released as a feature film in 1993, the year before the acclaimed artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman's death due to an AIDS-related illness, Blue...

An intimate and unique collection of the work of John Ashbery—a prolific poet and art critic—pairing poetry and art writings with playlists of music from his personal library. Something Close to Music places poetry by Ashbery (1927-2017), gathered from his later collections, in conversation with a selection of contemporaneous art writing. In addition, as Ashbery loved music and listened to...

In The Critic as Artist, arguably the most complete exploration of his aesthetic thinking, and certainly the most entertaining, Oscar Wilde harnesses his famous wit to demolish the supposed boundary between art and criticism. Subtitled Upon the Importance of Doing Nothing and Discussing Everything, the essay takes the form of a leisurely dialogue between two characters: Ernest, who insists upon...

Virginia Woolf's collection of writings on visual arts offers a whole new perspective on the revolutionary author. Despite wide interest in Woolf's writings, her circle, and her relationship with the visual arts, there is no accessible edition or selection of essays dedicated to her writings on art. This newest edition in David Zwirner Books's ekphrasis series collects such essays, including...

In this exploration of contemporary photography, David Levi Strauss questions the concept that "seeing is believing." Identifying a recent shift in the dominance of photography, Strauss looks at the power of the medium in the age of Photoshop, smartphones, and the internet, asking important questions about how we look and what we trust. In the first ekphrasis title on photography,...

In his introduction to Charles Baudelaire's The Salon of 1846, the renowned art historian Michael Fried presents a new take on the French poet and critic's ideas on art, criticism, romanticism, and the paintings of Delacroix. Charles Baudelaire, considered a father of modern poetry, wrote some of the most daring and influential prose of the nineteenth century. Prior to publishing...

28 Paradises is a rare book: it reveals not only the individual talents of the authors, Modiano and Zehrfuss, but also the depth of the couple's creative union. Sensitively translated into English for the first time by Damion Searls, 28 Paradises captures the exquisite sadness of waking from a beautiful dream. There are twenty-eight dreams in this book, or perhaps...

The Arena Chapel in Padua was completed in 1303; Giotto, then considered the preeminent painter in Italy, was commissioned to paint it in 1306. The resulting fresco cycle, detailing the history, birth, life, and death of Christ, ranks among the greatest artworks ever created. John Ruskin helped redefine art criticism in the nineteenth century through his attention to detail, his...

Lebensztejn is one of France's best-kept secrets. A world-class art historian who has lectured and taught at major universities in the United States, his work has remained almost entirely in French, his American audience limited to a small but dedicated group of cognoscenti. First introducing the Manneken Pis—the iconic little boy whose stream of urine supplies water to this famous...

"Criticism is our censorship..." So begins one of the greatest invectives against criticism ever written by an artist. Paul Gauguin wrote Racontars de rapin only months before he died in 1903, but the essay remained unpublished until 1951. Through discussions of numerous artists, both his contemporaries and predecessors, Gauguin unpacks what he viewed as the mistakes and misjudgments behind much...

H.D.'s poetry continues to inspire generations of readers. Bringing together a number of never-before-published essays, this new collection of writings introduces H.D.'s compelling perspectives on art, myth, and the creative process. While H.D. is best known for her elemental poetry, which draws heavily on the imagery of natural and ancient worlds, her critical writings remain a largely underexplored and unpublished...