Male and Female

The differences in specific emphases and styles notwithstanding, New York School artists took their subjectivity as thematic in their work, a subjectivity they imagined as “interior.” . . . The “subjects of the artist” were the artists as subjects. Michael Leja, Reframing...

IN 1945, JEAN-PAUL Sartre observed of Americans, “It is when he is acting like everyone else that he feels most reasonable and most American; it is in displaying his conformism that he feels freest. . . . The peculiarity of the American, on the other hand, is that he regards his thought as universal.” In fact, the belief that the individual is the source and the repository of all social rights and human creativity was a legacy of the great eighteenth-century revolutions in the West. To …

Once Upon a Time. When I first came across the lines by the duke of Aquitaine some years ago, naturally I imagined them in Jackson Pollock’s mouth. They put me in mind of modernism; or of one moment of modernism, which I realized I had been trying (and failing) to get in focus ever since I had read Harmonium or looked at Le Bonheur de vivre. Two things were clarified. Not just that modern artists often turned away from the detail of the world in order to revel in the work of …