The Vollard Suite

“You see this truculent character here, with the curly hair and mustache?” Picasso asked about the Vollard Suite, “That’s Rembrandt. Or maybe it’s Balzac; I’m not sure. It’s a compromise, I suppose. It doesn’t really matter. They’re only two of the people to haunt me. Every human being is a whole colony.”

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Criticism, Reflections, Reviews Patrick Zapien Criticism, Reflections, Reviews Patrick Zapien

“With eyes like ripening fruit”: Manoucher Yektai at Karma

It’s not true that the world is ending — if anything, it already has. And yet life continues, alive in its death. These thoughts — speculations — give a perfunctory account of the work of the late painter and poet Manoucher Yektai, a member of the New York School whose first solo show in the city since 1984 opened at Karma two weeks ago.

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Apocalyptic Vision: Poems by Ronnie Burk

He was not a literary artist in the sense that his work doesn’t seem to wrestle with questions of form; he’s not attempting to reinvent the surrealist modes at his disposal but rather making use of them as vehicles for his insurgent imagination and apocalyptic vision, the fury of which elevates his writing above and beyond the mere assemblage of irrational word combinations.

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Criticism, Essays, Reflections Chloe Julius Criticism, Essays, Reflections Chloe Julius

When the Critics Saw

A work of art has never graced the cover of the journal October. Since the first issue was published in 1976, the front cover has only ever carried the journal’s allusive title, spelled out in large capitalised letters underneath the smaller italicised headings of ‘art’, ‘theory’, ‘criticism’ and ‘politics’ (in that order).

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