In the years since I moved to Paris, I have walked past it countless times. I have visited its art collection, returned for its temporary exhibitions, and met friends for coffee at the café across the way. Not long ago, I was inside the Rotunda, absorbed in Pierre Huyghe’s Camata (2024), a video projected on a large screen. It’s part of an ongoing series, edited in real time by artificial intelligence, in which robots investigate and perform funeral rites while the human species is buried by machines. Huyghe explores our relationship to space, time, and memory, centring on human bones unearthed in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Perhaps something in that video prompted me to think about obdurate materials: concrete, stone, brick. And sand.

Afternoon light was filtering through the upper windows and the distant dome, casting shadows across the ring-shaped floor from high above. The room felt improbably exposed, and strangely beautiful for it. As it happened, there I was, thinking, of all things, about architecture. What, exactly, is architecture?

It is not a question architects often ask, just as artists rarely concern themselves with defining art while they make it. Surrounded by both, I found the question returning again and again.

It is, it turns out, a hall of mirrors.

Architecture in History

History books tell us that architecture dates back to around 3000 BCE, to the age of the pyramids, when the first human ambitions were documented in stone. Some of the oldest standing monuments on earth were built not to be inhabited, but to endure, indifferent to weather and witness alike. The material mattered, of course. Dead kings were buried in vast rectangular edifices made of mudbrick and known as mastabas. The building’s purpose was to preserve the king’s soul intact for the long passage into the afterlife. Its structure had to be solid; the walls had to be thick.

A few hundred years later, considerable advances in construction techniques, along with the use of massive blocks of cut stone, provided the soul with a much swifter ramp by which to ascend to the heavens, should it wish to climb. Archaeologists continue to complicate this story, pushing the horizon further back: Stonehenge, Göbekli Tepe, and then further still, into the long shadow of the Palaeolithic. With each reconsideration, and the further back we look, the question becomes whether there was ever a moment when architecture began at all, or whether it has simply been the condition of our being on earth. Architecture may, then, just as well have begun with a piece of fabric stretched between two branches: the first wall.

The oldest surviving architectural drawing might give us some clues. In the Louvre, we find a headless statue in dark stone of the Sumerian ruler Gudea, carved around 2110 BCE. He has a floor plan spread across his knees and a stylus in his hand. What does this gesture, this act of delimiting space, accomplish? It translates thought into form. Conceived for construction, architecture is at once earthy and engineered. It relates ideas and materials, imagined space and inhabited space, people to one another and to nature. The plan on Gudea’s knees announces, four millennia in advance, that architecture is, at its core, a way of thinking the future together: a way of constructing environments in synergy with nature and assembling worlds we have not yet entered.

The Romans gave us the first theory

The Romans were the first to theorise architecture, and their formulation has proved almost embarrassingly durable. Writing in the first century BCE for the Emperor Augustus, Vitruvius proposed his famous triad — firmitas, utilitas, venustas (solidity, utility, beauty).

Fifteen centuries later, Leon Battista Alberti, the Renaissance figure who effectively established architecture as an autonomous intellectual discipline in the Western tradition, was still wrestling with the same three terms. He translated and extended Vitruvius while writing his own magnum opus, De Re Aedificatoria. The great French urbanist Françoise Choay described that treatise as a meditation on the meaning underlying what she called “the transformative deployment of human beings in the natural world.” Architecture, on this reading, is the primary act by which humanity negotiates its presence on earth, the first and most continuous form of that negotiation.

Definitions proliferated as modernism, and then postmodernism, pushed the discipline to interrogate its pre-existing assumptions: not just how buildings were made, but what they meant, who they were for, and whether history was a resource, a burden, or something else entirely. Le Corbusier, who was constitutionally incapable of understatement, declared architecture to be “the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of masses assembled in light,” emphasising how light and shade reveal form to the eye. For Louis Kahn, architecture begins, as he put it, with the making of a room, returning the question to the human scale. Mies van der Rohe compressed an entire worldview into three words: less is more. Rem Koolhaas, unwilling to be cornered, called it “a way of thinking about the world,” which is either a profound observation or an elegant evasion, and possibly both. Each definition was, implicitly, a critique: an architect’s way of measuring the distance between what architecture had been and what, in their hands, it might yet become.

What I was after, I think, was less a definition than an account of the interaction among art, architecture, and the people who move through them. At the Bourse, this interplay is magnificently composed; the space alters with each new work on display and with each new way of seeing it. Each time one enters, the building is at once familiar and fresh. I still remember the delight of seeing the Korean artist Kimsooja turn the rotunda floor into a mirror-lake and pull the sky down to earth. Her interactive piece To Breathe – Constellation cast the building’s glass dome into a mirroring abyss, distorting and fragmenting, multiplying and unsettling its architecture. More playful, or perhaps more contemplative, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’s clinamen reorganised the space by installing a wide basin of water in which porcelain bowls floated across a reflected sky. As a light current nudged them into one another, they produced soft, melodious vibrations that filled the space.

What is striking is that the word space itself entered architectural vocabulary only in the late nineteenth century. The Austrian architect Adolf Loos announced, with characteristic bluntness, that he did not conceive of plans or façades or sections — he conceived of spaces. He shifted the entire conversation from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional, from drawn representation to lived experience. Space is what we move through, and what moves through us. It acts on us as we act on it.

I was moving up and down the circular walkway at the top of the concrete structure, observing, ever more closely, the nineteenth-century murals of the cupola. But the experience of the building does not end above. It unfolds downwards, into the underground amphitheatre, where light gives way to projection. There, I recently watched Saodat Ismailova’s Melted into the Sun (2024), which explores fractures in post-Soviet Central Asia, from medieval Bukhara to Soviet solar furnaces, through the story of the eighth-century agitator Al-Muqanna. She draws on the grey areas of history and on repressed ancestral knowledge to think through the visible and invisible worlds embedded in landscapes, ancient architecture, ruins, and other zones of collective memory.

In the adjacent gallery, Philippe Parreno’s La Quinta del Sordo (2021) is still on view. Parreno returned to the house in which Goya, deafened and ageing, painted directly onto the walls the hallucinatory works that would come to be known as the Black Paintings. The piece proceeds from a conviction Parreno shares with Merleau-Ponty: that the visible is always lined with the invisible, that what we see is informed by what we do not. Parreno’s piece reminds us that a painting can belong to a wall. After all, the wall was the first canvas and remains a reliable support for the display of art. At the Bourse, art is moved, rotated, replaced, and projected.

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Architecture, more than any other art, is never quite finished. A building continues to evolve long after the architect has gone, and its completion perhaps occurs only when it is demolished. The Bourse de Commerce is almost unrecognisable from its origins, and yet it remains continuous with them. It has been, in the most literal sense, the same building all along. Its history confirms as much. In the eighteenth century, Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières conceived the edifice in response to an urgent civic need: the storage of grain in the very heart of Paris.

Designed with an eye turned towards antiquity, the Halle au Blé was a circular grain depot, topped first by a wooden dome, which Victor Hugo memorably dismissed as resembling an oversized English jockey’s cap.

After fire destroyed the wooden dome in 1802, an iron-ribbed structure was raised in its place between 1809 and 1811, originally covered in copper and subsequently glazed in 1838. The building’s circular plan, with its central oculus, drew on the Roman Pantheon. The architect Henri Blondel converted the building into the Bourse de Commerce just in time for the 1889 Universal Exposition, its façades and interiors reworked for a new mercantile life. For decades, commodities traders sold sugar, coffee, and cocoa beneath the dome, enriching France’s colonial fortunes. More than a hundred years later, that world is not entirely gone. Its traces can still be read in the painted frieze that loops above, an imagined geography of empire. Now, the contemporary works shown in this room engage with the building’s history as much as with its present, and that dialogue carries aesthetic and political meanings, subtle or otherwise.

For three years, Tadao Ando — working alongside NeM Architectes and Pierre-Antoine Gatier, chief architect for historical monuments — laboured to rejuvenate the building once again. The brief was simple: to preserve the city’s memory inscribed in these walls while inserting into them an altogether different order. The structure’s several incarnations, all of which remain visible, seem to converse across time. Just outside, the so-called Medici Column, commissioned by Catherine de’ Medici, still stands, erected in the sixteenth century so that the queen’s astrologer, Cosimo Ruggieri, could read the stars on her behalf. Inside, Ando’s spare concrete walls turn the edifice into a vibrant stage for contemporary art.

When you step into the exhibition space, you find no threshold to cross. The ticket counter has been relocated outside the building. The galleries circle the central rotunda; most are punctuated by windows on both the inner and outer walls, letting in soft, natural light. It is a space organised less by separation than by continuity, intended to blur the boundaries between inside and outside.

In Japanese, the space between two things has its own name. Ma is the interval, the charged emptiness between two presences, that conditions their meaning. Much of Japanese aesthetic life has been organised around it: the engawa that mediates between house and garden, the translucent paper screen, the elongated roof structure that gathers shadow before the rooms begin. Ando’s long-standing preoccupation has been the interval between inside and outside, and at the Bourse, ma is what the light does: it inflects every surface it touches.

Ando, however, shared an ambition older than himself. Henri Focillon, writing in 1930, phrased it with aphoristic elegance:

“Architecture is the creator of unpredictable environments. It satisfies needs, it propagates others, it invents a world.”

Architecture, then, transforms the real. It passes from necessity into the invention of worlds.

Knowingly or not, we all participate in this creation of worlds. Consider how often each of us has arranged or rearranged a room. At some point in our lives, we have moved furniture, taken down a partition, repainted a wall, or enlarged a window to let in more light. Behind every small decision lies a long sequence of others: ours, the landlord’s, the developer’s, the city’s, the architect’s, and the masons’ — decisions laid into the foundation a hundred years before any of us were born.

Thinking about architecture calls to mind the poet Paul Valéry, who, in his dialogue Eupalinos, compared it to music. Both arts, he wrote, do not represent the world, but envelop you within one of their own making. You are inside the work. You cannot step back from it. This is what makes architecture so singular among the arts, and so easy to take for granted or overlook: its inescapability. You are always already within it. Valéry hoped an architect might one day “petrify and fix in the durable order of his materials the celestial clarity” of music: a building that would rise as a kind of symphony in stone.

What is architecture, then? If architecture resists definition, it is because it is not an object held before us, but a condition we are held within. It is everything we have ever been: our bodies, our histories, our weather, our language, the world we inhabit. To attend to it is to hear space breathing, and to recognise, in its visual silence, the long form of our being.

As always, thank you for reading—

A.

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A few books I have enjoyed recently:

How do artists choose?

I began thinking about this while reading Georges Perec’s Portrait of a Man, a strange and compelling novel centred on Gaspard Winckler, an artist and master forger. Winckler harbours grand artistic ambitions, such as painting like the Renaissance artist Antonello da Messina. He wants to paint so convincingly that any distinction between his hand and Antonello’s simply vanishes.

Antonello da Messina left behind a few remarkable paintings, but we know relatively little about his life. As a reader, I am drawn to these gaps in the historical record, and I am curious about how writers navigate them—how they invent, speculate, and imagine possibilities. As a writer and art historian, I am equally interested in the process of making: how do artists choose? Artistic practice, much like life, is shaped by a series of choices. These range from the smallest, almost microscopic decisions, concerning questions of method and subject—from when to how and who—to the larger milestones that define a creative practice, and ultimately a life.

While reading the book, I paused over the following passage:

“Go back to square one and start again. Understand. Two or three times in the course of your life it was necessary for you to make a choice, and you probably made the wrong one, and now it is perhaps possible for you to avoid making mistakes about yourself, not to repent but to accept yourself, to concentrate on only the essential fact, to rub out… With stylet, scalpel, graving tool or indeed a chisel…”

Are there foundational rules that must be mastered before making any artistic choice? Although I am sceptical of absolute imperatives, I often return to this question: how do artists choose? A choice is a decision between what to keep and what to eliminate, between action and non-action. To my mind, choosing begins not with certainty, but with understanding. Regardless of whether we write, paint, or create in other forms, we are never isolated; we are always situated within the world and continually responding to it, both consciously and unconsciously. Attentiveness—genuine attentiveness—is integral to any artistic practice. It involves observing what works and what fails, what appears fragile, and what seems stable.

On Choosing I – There Are No Rules

Gaspard Winckler, Perec’s protagonist, does not adhere to any fixed rule when selecting his subject, and why should he? Frankly, there are no universal rules for choosing a subject. Artists may explore any theme, ranging from the most mundane to the sublime. Winckler has the capacity to bring the entire artistic world back to life, to revive Vermeer or Pisanello just as convincingly as he could revive Greek craftsmen, Roman goldsmiths, Celtic coppersmiths, or Kyrgyz silversmiths. Yet, as Perec prompts us to consider: so what? What significance does this hold?

Ultimately, Winckler is only imitating what other artists and craftsmen accomplished. However, this observation raises a more interesting question, since most art originates in imitation. Portraiture, according to Pliny the Elder, began with a shadow, an absence. While the Egyptians might dispute the origin of portraiture, asserting that it began with them six thousand years before it passed into Greece, they would concur that it originated in tracing the contours of human shadows. But even a negative space, formed by the absence of paint, demonstrates that decisions about inclusion and exclusion are central to artistic creation. In fact, much of the artistic process lies in deciding what to omit.

Ah, but how did Georges Perec choose his subject? For Perec, writing is inseparable from the autobiographical. Most lived experience functions as fragments, so the writer decides what to extract, how to order it, and how to recompose meaning. What’s often remarked upon, rightly, I think, is his experimental attitude towards play.

For him, play and a playful attitude are not merely enjoyable; they are essential to his method of thinking. There’s humour in it, of course, a humour that emerges from taking something “minor” or “silly” seriously enough that it begins to reveal its depth. It reminds me of François Rabelais, who also insisted that literature can be built on play and can restore a kind of dignity to what might otherwise be dismissed as frivolous. For Perec, the choice has always been to seek something akin to childlike simplicity, and to work through it deliberately, like a craftsman.

On Choosing II: Cooking

Imagine walking into a gallery expecting paintings, only to be mesmerised by the fragrance of lime, ginger, and lemongrass.

In the early 1990s, the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija did precisely this. Inside Paula Allen’s Gallery in New York, he set up a small cooking station and began cooking and serving visitors plates of pad thai. At first glance, it looked more like hospitality than art. But that distinction is exactly what the work destabilises. Tiravanija draws on the universal language of cooking while reminding viewers of its cultural specificity: Thai food being served in a New York gallery. The gesture, and the choices behind it, are utterly significant.

Cooking, like artmaking, creates the conditions for experience. Or perhaps, more precisely, it gathers the materials of daily life and subjects them to the kind of attention that allows them to become something else. Artists and cooks alike work with what’s already at hand—fresh ingredients, images, fragments—and, through a series of choices, bring them into relation until new flavour, texture, and meaning begin to emerge.

The process diverges, of course. Art often demands a longer dwelling, returns, and reconsiderations that extend well beyond the moment of making. Presumably, the underlying intentionality remains aligned. Both practices reflect a way of moving through the world: a care for others, an attentiveness to what is available, a desire to shape experience so that it might be shared.

And both are, inevitably, constrained: by time, by means, by environment, by what happens to be within reach. But constraint is not merely a limitation to be overcome. It is a necessary condition that sharpens perception. Indeed, for an artist, constraint is a way of thinking, a generative principle.

To understand Tiravanija’s work as art, then, requires consideration of its context. It emerges during the rise of relational aesthetics, a movement that redirects focus from the art object to the interactions it produces between people. The artwork is no longer something to look at and admire from a distance, but something in which to participate.

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In Tiravanija’s installation, the gallery becomes a temporary kitchen, a space of gathering. Visitors assembled, ate, and conversed, fostering connection. The traditional art object—be it the painting or the sculpture, something to be owned—is displaced in the process, replaced instead by a shared experience, a shift that is central to the work’s provocation.

This is where cooking and art converge most fully: in their inherent capacity to bring people into a communal field of attention, shaped through acts of mixing, combination, and adjustment. To cook is to decide: what to include, what to omit, when it is ready, what it needs to have more (or less) oomph—gestures that are integral to art as much as to life, writing, and philosophy. We need both cooking and art in our lives.

Roland Barthes once wrote that in both painting and cooking, “something must be allowed to drop somewhere.” The act of falling is significant; it produces a deformation. A drop spreads, matter softens, and something new emerges. As Barthes states, “movement makes matter.”

I thought of this when I looked at Anna Weyant’s painting: a knife pierces the bread, as if it had just fallen there; eggs are laid out, one on top of the other, resting in folded cloth; while two fish lie side by side on the plate. These ingredients appear to have been placed intentionally, or almost dropped, onto the table. The composition is minimal, set against a dark background, with the objects illuminated by a reverent light. The scene feels suspended, a still life capturing an in-between moment that is, at the same time, unsettling and contemplative.

On Choosing III – On Originality

Gaspard Winckler copies, imitates, reproduces, tracing the hands of modern artists and old masters, from Giotto to Modigliani, from Fra Angelico to Braque. According to Perec, Winckler possesses the qualifications one might expect of an artist. He trained at the École du Louvre and earned a diploma in painting conservation from New York University. He is a technical expert, skilled in restoration and scholarly analysis. Yet what he wanted most was to be an artist. Put simply, to be an artist means producing original work that bears the artist’s signature. We might ask, then, why he sought to paint like Antonello. Could he resuscitate a ghost?

For twelve years, Winckler worked as a forger for a patron whom he ultimately kills, a radical gesture that oddly reminds me of a familiar piece of advice in creative writing workshops: kill your darlings. To become an artist, it is often said, one must develop a style, a recognisable voice. However, this style is never fixed; it is dynamic, fluid, and continually evolving.

Haruki Murakami, in Novelist as a Vocation, suggests that originality relies on three conditions: a style emerges as unmistakably individual, then acquires the capacity for evolution, and finally becomes influential enough to serve as a resource for subsequent generations of artists.

But if originality is the goal, what choices do we need to make to achieve it? Three methods come to mind.

First, there is experimentation. Artists test various elements—light, composition, colour, or language—observing the effects of incremental changes. It’s a bit like play, but self-directed. As far as I am concerned, when I experiment with a new form, I like to keep my expectations modest, allowing the real excitement to come from the gradual development of skill. It feels more spontaneous and enjoyable precisely because it lacks the stricture of goal-oriented work.

Another path is repetition. Sometimes we return to the same subject again and again. Monet depicted Rouen Cathedral numerous times, each version testing the limits of perception and, with it, our perceptual capacity to feel the heart ambushed by rushes of emotion.

Agnes Martin did not worry that her work’s repetitive formulas, from grids to stripes, might produce aesthetic fatigue. Instead, through repetition, she intensified the singular power of her work. The gesture is reiterated so that variations of tone, texture, and interval can be sensed by the viewer as steadily refined.

And finally, though my list is far from exhaustive, I would add subversion. What happens when, instead of placing fried eggs on a plate, one places them on one’s chest, as Sarah Lucas does in her 1996 work Self-Portrait with Fried Eggs?

The gesture scandalised polite society, but that is beside the point. More crucially, it functions as a strategy for problematising the predatory male gaze and reversing the traditional construction of women as passive and submissive. The subsequent formal choices reinforce this position: Lucas adopts a relaxed, legs-apart posture—a kind of manspreading pose—and maintains direct eye contact with the viewer, in an attitude that might be glossed, à la Perec, as: “Yeah. And?”

Ultimately, the central practice of artists is the act of choosing. What an artist attends to, what they bring forward, what they leave behind, what they subvert, what they refuse, and what they affirm—these decisions constitute ways of seeing and being in the world. Through choices of subject, material, point of view, and relation, artists shape their works, as well as our engagement with the world as it is, and as it might be otherwise.

As always, thank you for reading—

A.

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The portrait depicts an elegant young woman with her head turned slightly towards the viewer. She wears a white Empire-style dress with a high waistline and a softly pleated bodice. Her dark eyes, beneath perfectly arched brows, dazzle me. Mademoiselle Rivière’s enigmatic smile, together with her full lips, bare neck and long brown gloves, lends the portrait a sensual, theatrical quality. Seen up close, the painting possesses an unforgettable mystery, something almost impossible to pin down. Even now, I still find it difficult to write about.

One might argue that portraits rendered in paint are fundamentally different from those described in words. But what is a painted portrait, exactly? The trace of a sitter’s presence? A likeness, or an artistic construction? Layers of brushstrokes and colour on a flat surface? Perhaps all of these, in varying degrees. Caroline was only fifteen when Ingres painted her portrait. It was later exhibited at the Salon of 1806 alongside his portraits of her parents. When I look at Mademoiselle Rivière, I can only imagine the life she might have lived and the character she might have possessed. Born into a wealthy family, she is placed, in Ingres’s composition, before a serene landscape whose stillness might suggest the eerie calm of her inner world. Yet one may wonder whether, beneath that calm surface, she harboured a rebellious spirit that the painter ignored. What if Ingres saw only what he wished to see: the ravishing beauty of the daughter, as he once described her? We can only speculate. Paintings exist outside time, which is why we can relate to painted figures differently from the way the artist related to the model while creating the picture.

Marcel Proust, in À la recherche du temps perdu, recounts a curious episode in which Charles Swann, a cultivated aesthete, ennobles the woman with whom he is infatuated by perceiving in her a resemblance to the women of Sandro Botticelli.

In his eyes, Odette de Crécy becomes beautiful because he imagines her as one of the daughters of Jethro in a Botticelli fresco. Swann goes further still: instead of keeping a photograph of Odette on his desk, he places there a reproduction of Botticelli’s painting. Proust writes:

“He looked at her; a fragment of the fresco appeared in her smile and in her body... and although no doubt he only thought of the Florentine masterpiece because he discovered it in her, nevertheless, this resemblance gave her in turn a beauty that made her more precious. Swann reproached himself for having underestimated the value of a creature who might have been seen as adorable by the great Sandro.

The words ‘Florentine masterpiece’ were beneficial to Swann. They made it possible for him, as a kind of password, to open, for the image of Odette, an entrance into a world of dreams from which she had so far been barred, where she took on a nobility.”

Swann is not the first to idealise the woman he loves by merging her image with the great art of the past. Virginia Woolf did something similar while writing Orlando: A Biography, her fictional portrait of Vita Sackville-West. She took Vita to London to be photographed and asked the photographer Lenare to immortalise her as a Baroque beauty in the manner of the seventeenth-century painter Peter Lely, renowned for his voluptuous, sensual portrayals of aristocratic women at the court of Charles II.

As Hermione Lee, Woolf’s biographer, writes:

“Virginia made Vita pose as a voluptuous Lely for the photographer Lenare (I was miserable, draped in an inadequate bit of pink satin with all my clothes slipping off, but V was delighted and kept diving under the black cloth of the camera to peep at the effect). Vanessa and Duncan then decided to join in, and Vita, even more miserable, and feeling like ‘an unfortunate victim,’ ‘was made to sit inside a huge frame while they took endless photographs’… Vita was indeed being framed.”

The relationship between seeing and saying is neither neutral nor straightforward. Do words come from the work, or are we responding to what we perceive in the image? The Greek term ekphrasis suggests that speech arises from the image. It is neither commentary, analysis nor evaluation, but rather a way of establishing a relationship with the work of art by responding to questions such as: What is given to be seen? What does it say at first glance? Ultimately, it implies a return to the image. Just as writing is largely rewriting, seeing is re-seeing.

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One of the oldest examples of ekphrasis comes from Book 18 of the Iliad, where Homer describes the armour crafted by Hephaestus for Achilles. What is so striking about this passage is that, although it describes a shield, its surface resembles that of a painting. Within the fictive surface of Achilles’ shield, the entire world appears in miniature. The description unfolds as a vast cosmic and human panorama: first the natural universe, earth and sky, sea, sun, moon and constellations; then scenes of human life. A peaceful city follows, animated by a wedding procession and a law court, and this is set against a city at war, depicted through siege, ambush and battle. The narrative then turns to a sequence of agricultural scenes: ploughing, harvesting, a vineyard, the herding of cattle and a sheepfold, all evoking the rhythms of rural labour. This progression culminates in a moment of communal joy, represented by a dance, before the description closes with the encircling river of Ocean that forms the shield’s outer rim, returning the reader to the primordial image of the sea. The poem describes a visual object, the shield, yet that object contains multiple images and scenes. The result is a layered representation in which verbal and visual media—words and images that depict objects and actions—stand in tension as they attempt to represent reality.

In absentia, as readers, we can imagine the shield, or any other object for that matter, as we wish. The difficulty arises when we read about a painting whose image is not publicly available. Admittedly, this situation is now quite rare, since a wide range of media offers multiple reproductions of works of art. As Walter Benjamin famously argued in his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, works of art were, until the middle of the nineteenth century, accessible only to those fortunate enough to see them in person. Before that, the experience of art was limited to a small group of private collectors, wealthy travellers and renowned scholars. Art critics such as Denis Diderot visited the Salons and described what they saw. In one text, for instance, Diderot praises Jean-Siméon Chardin’s use of colour and his effects of air and light in The Jar of Olives.

Diderot writes:

“This is the man who is truly a painter; this is the man who is a colourist.

There are several small paintings by Chardin at the Salon; nearly all depict fruit with the accoutrements of a meal. It is nature itself. The objects seem to stand outside the canvas and possess a truth capable of deceiving the eye.

The one you see as you go up the staircase especially deserves attention. The artist has placed on a table an old Chinese porcelain vase, two biscuits, a jar filled with olives, a basket of fruit, two glasses half-filled with wine, a bitter orange, along with a pâté.

To look at the paintings of others, it seems that I need to give myself new eyes; but to see those of Chardin, I only need to keep the eyes nature has given me and use them well.

If I were to dedicate my child to painting, this is the painting I would buy. “Copy this,” I would say to him. “Copy this again and again.” But perhaps nature itself is no more difficult to copy.

For that porcelain vase is truly porcelain; those olives are really separated from the eye by the water in which they float; one only has to take those biscuits and eat them; open and squeeze that bitter orange; take that glass of wine and drink it; peel those fruits; and put a knife into that pâté.

This is the man who understands the harmony of colours and their reflections. Oh, Chardin! It is not white, red, and black that you grind on your palette — it is the very substance of things, the air and the light that you take with the tip of your brush and fasten onto the canvas.”

- Diderot, Le Bocal d’Olives, salon 1763.

Diderot was clearly immersed in the delights of painting, and he writes about it with genuine enthusiasm. He was, after all, a precursor of art criticism, the literary form through which he invited readers to imagine vividly what was being depicted.

The connections between literature and painting are rich and numerous. Many, if not all, writers and poets are deeply responsive to images. Sometimes it is difficult to write about an artwork; sometimes words arrive more easily. Proust’s oeuvre is rich in reflections on art, and some passages are unforgettable, such as the one in which he describes the death of the writer Bergotte before the “little patch of yellow wall” in Vermeer’s View of Delft.

I am drawn to examples of ekphrasis partly because I find some paintings more troubling than others, more mysterious, as it were. There are images to which we keep returning, and each time we notice some new detail or experience some new feeling before the canvas. This is not only a matter of slow looking, though attention is certainly essential. It is also a matter of how we ourselves change, and of how we later come to understand or perceive things differently. Sometimes the moment has simply not yet arrived when a certain experience can be fully articulated. I remember, many years ago, being assigned to write about Goya’s The Third of May 1808. That painter still strikes me as true. He lived in an age of spiralling unreason, and so do we. In Goya’s art, the horrors of war, the madness that runs through the long history of human hostility, the barbarity of killing the innocent, and the monstrous pool of blood that drenches the earth all insist that hope is grim. Despite returning to the Museo del Prado on repeated occasions, I could not write about the painting for a long time, so overwhelmed was I by the emotion it provoked.

Fortunately, many works of art invite contemplation and can offer solace in turbulent times. Literature, too, gives us passages we can cherish. One of my favourite texts is this passage by Heinrich von Kleist, written when he encountered The Monk by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich, having previously seen sketches of it in the painter’s studio:

“It is marvellous, in infinite solitude on the seashore beneath a cloudy sky, to gaze upon a limitless desert of water. Yet one must have gone there, have to return, wish to cross to the other side and be unable to be deprived of everything that sustains life, and yet still hear the voice of life in the roaring of the waves, the breath of the air, the passing clouds, the solitary cry of birds. This requires a demand of the heart and the disappointment that, so to speak, nature inflicts upon you. But all this is impossible before the painting; what I should have found in the painting itself I found only between myself and the painting—namely, a demand addressed by my heart to the painting and a disappointment inflicted on me by the painting. Thus, I myself became the Capuchin monk, the painting became the dune; but the expanse toward which my melancholy gaze should have turned—the sea—was entirely absent.”

— Heinrich von Kleist, Feelings Before Friedrich’s Seascape

Absence, in art as in life, presupposes that something or someone was once present. Within an image, the deliberate omission of certain elements can carry as much significance as their inclusion, just as silence in literature often structures and deepens dialogue. Absence also signifies the disappearance of a real or imagined person, someone who no longer exists, just as Anna Karenina’s life and death may still stir our emotions.

Caroline died one year after the canvas was completed. Paradoxically, her absence remains a persistent presence in my life, even now as I write about her. Mademoiselle Rivière’s absence gave rise to new presences, of the kind we often encounter throughout art history. In Caroline’s pallor and posture, I sense a reminiscence of Parmigianino’s Portrait of a Young Woman (Antea).

I might also dwell on her elongated neck, smooth skin and the overall composition, and recall the figures of Jan van Eyck, and Piero di Cosimo’s portrait of Simonetta Vespucci, encircled by a serpent. Or perhaps I might simply choose to imagine a story in which the main character resembles her and goes on living, eternally young and beautiful.

As always, thank you for reading—

A.

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Have you ever desired to inhabit the future tense? A world in which our existence moves forward in time while holding the past within a space where we can rememorate its accomplishments and mourn its losses. To remember who we were, we must find the traces of the past within ourselves rather than look to the accumulated data stored in machines and reproduced by technology. The fullness of becoming is not grasped in externally preserved, technologically manipulated memories, nor does it emerge from an illusory vision of the human future that filters, displaces, or erases a past from which it is increasingly cut off. Forgetting a past that is no longer ours is perhaps the most painful loss. It reminds me of Rainer Maria Rilke’s struggle to retrieve something we have lost, and which remains unknown, difficult to decipher—a taint of history with the potential to make us reconsider our unexamined assumptions about human existence.

Another way to transform our subjectivity and community is to return to a slower-paced existence that allows us to make sense of who we are from what we are no longer. Art and poetry can become such spaces, where the practices of remembering and forgetting are reenacted. Two artists, Cy Twombly and Paul Celan, belonging to a post-Rilkean world, confronted and invoked the already-made of memory in Rilke’s work while opening themselves to the possibility of creating something new, reshaped within their own historical contexts. Central to this argument is the idea that the memory of an early artwork triggers a series of new works, a restructuring of experience and meaning, or, as Celan puts it, a “memory yet to come.”

There are many reasons why artists and poets, like many of us, are drawn to Rilke’s poetry. Among the most compelling is the one given by the poet Marina Tsvetaeva, who, in a letter from 1926 to Rilke, writes:

“You are not my dearest poet (‘dearest’ – a level), you are a phenomenon of nature, which cannot be mine and which one does not so much love as undergo—or (still too little) the fifth element incarnate: poetry itself—or (still too little) that whence poetry comes to be and which is greater than it (you). It isn’t a question of Rilke the person (personhood: that which is forced upon us!), but of Rilke the spirit, who is still greater than the poet and who is what really bears the name of Rilke to me, the Rilke of the day after tomorrow… across all that distance.” - Marina Tsvetaeva

The correspondence between Rilke and Tsvetaeva lasted only four months, cut short by his illness and subsequent death on 29 December 1926. The two never met in person, yet their letters express profound personal and poetic affinities. Tsvetaeva was not alone in noting that Rilke was a poet whose time had not yet come. The writer Robert Musil, speaking at Rilke’s memorial in 1927, acknowledged his remarkable poetic legacy and situated it in a future yet to come.

Throughout his life, Rilke maintained rich epistolary exchanges, manifesting a preference for relationships sustained at a distance rather than in proximity. Born in Prague on 4 December 1875, he lived in his homeland, Austria-Hungary, only briefly and remained, in many ways, a wanderer in exile. In the final year of his life, when Marina Tsvetaeva wrote to him, Rilke was in Switzerland, at Château de Muzot. He had just published his late works, The Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus, which represent the pinnacle of his poetic achievement. He then devoted himself to restoring the garden at Muzot, which he hoped to revive in its original splendour. Around that time, he corresponded with Antoinette de Bonstetten, a gifted horticulturist, seeking advice on restoring his cherished rose garden. Rilke’s attention to his garden is deeply connected to his poetic and existential concerns: gardening mirrors the natural cycles of growth, decay, and transition that structure human experience. His love for roses, so central to his late poems, becomes a metaphor for transformation and impermanence.

Beyond his roses and gardening, Rilke meditates in one of his letters on what it means to be human. He defines the self as “a collective being, whose innumerable elements are in a constant state of regrouping, renewing, or dying.” This dynamic composition renders human interaction complex, as both giver and receiver may wonder to whom kindness is truly directed. The unease of being ourselves, Rilke suggests, turns us toward another person; we step outside ourselves in order to know the other. Yet we can never fully know the other, since their inner life remains inaccessible. An encounter with an unknown other, he suggests, involves a kind of self-abandonment, for we attempt to understand them only through what appears externally—something ultimately unattainable. “The other,” Rilke adds, “is nothing more than a detour toward ourselves.”

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As we remember, we construct our personal identities from memories arranged, as Rilke writes, in mobile compositions. Encounters with others often reveal more about ourselves than about the other person. Yet, to settle our hearts, Rilke affirms, we need experiences that unite us—art, for instance, but also

“the curve of birds in the air; the winds, the rains, memories and the calm of a starry firmament stretching to the infinite.”

Human memory is a fragile and ephemeral language, intricately coiled and coded, requiring us, as time-bound creatures, to decipher it in all its contradictions and to recognise it.

Rilke’s impact unfolds in numerous ways, one distinguishing quality of his thought being its unifying power. The artist Dorothea Rockburne recalls how her friendship with Cy Twombly developed naturally through a shared love of ancient history and art, especially Rilke. Rilke’s inwardly turned writings expressed the conviction that the days of mimesis, or imitative art, were over, emphasising instead form and internal relations. His thought spoke directly to artists seeking modes of representation independent of external reality. Letters to a Young Poet, with its simple and direct 1908 injunction—“You must change your life”—became a touchstone for artists who felt personally addressed. Rockburne further recounts that anyone who studied at Black Mountain College loved Rilke. Situated in North Carolina, Black Mountain College was established during the Depression and centred on artmaking. Making was understood both as a way of bringing something new into presence and as a form of thinking: students negotiated meaning, shared spaces, and responsibilities. Ultimately, the process shared much with the practice of active citizenship: art is about making choices, much as democracy is.

From his formative years at Black Mountain College, Twombly recalls an atmosphere saturated with artistic experimentation, shared with fellow artists and friends Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, and Dorothea Rockburne. Twombly read avidly, and his engagement with poetry remained constant. Like Rilke before him, he encountered the work of the Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé at a pivotal moment in his artistic development. In 1957, when he moved to Rome, Twombly was questioning his place in art history. Mallarmé’s work prompted him to produce a series of small works on paper and to reconsider materiality as form embedded with history. In Twombly’s art, layers of colour, marks, erasures, and palimpsestic inscriptions retain the traces of time, echoing the workings of memory.

Many scholars have observed how memory in Twombly’s pictorial language crystallises between appearance and disappearance. This tension also characterises Rilke’s poetry, which frequently alludes to the interplay of presence and absence. Working in a visual medium, Twombly developed a method of representation in which memory and perception are intertwined, and in which personal memory intersects with collective memory.

Since 1967, when Twombly first incorporated Rilke into his work, the poet has become central to his practice. In 1984, Twombly created a plaster sculpture composed of a broken stick placed on a miniature table or pedestal, giving the assemblage a precarious stability. Its edges are rough and uneven; the materials appear eroded by time, as if slowly melting. The extremities of the stick rest on a plate inscribed with the final four lines of the Tenth Duino Elegy:

And we, who have always thought of happiness
climbing, would feel
the emotion that almost
startles when happiness
falls

A similar sculpture followed in 1987, this time cast in bronze and painted white. Inserted into his paintings and sculptures, the poetic line functions as a ready-made—an ever-unfolding voice that traverses ages and historical periods. It carries within it the history of its writing even as it bears the trace of the artist’s gesture.

From the 1960s onward, Twombly’s practice evolved toward a sustained dialogue between text and image. Although he initially experimented with chalk-like lines resembling cursive writing without semantic clarity, the writing, first abstracted into gesture, became in later canvases more legible and expansive. Twombly read and incorporated lines from poets ranging from Sappho to Homer, Virgil, Seferis, and Cavafy, and numerous fragments from Rainer Maria Rilke resonate across his canvases. In Untitled Painting (Say Goodbye, Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor) (1972–1994), for instance, he inscribed in blood-red paint lines from Rilke’s Tenth Duino Elegy (1922):

How you gaze
beyond
on bitter duration
the bitter duration
to See and end
...
our winter
our dark evergreen
our dear
duration
Our Time.

In the Green series, Untitled [A Painting in Nine Parts], two lines from Rilke’s poem “Moving Forward” appear lightly pencilled in Twombly’s cursive:

“…and in the ponds broken off from the sky, my feeling sinks as if standing on fishes.”

The words, inscribed on a white ground in scintillating tones of silver-grey, seem to float, unsettling perception. Similarly, in one version of Quattro Stagioni, Primavera (1991–1995), fragments from the Tenth Duino Elegy reappear:

and we who have always thought
of happiness flowing would feel the
emotion that almost overwhelms
when happiness falls

At times the texts are glimpsed beneath layers of paint; at others, they are barely recognisable, dissolving into the pictorial surface. From Rilke’s late period, Twombly also drew on Sonnets to Orpheus and the French poems written in Paris between 1925 and 1926.

In the penultimate painting of the pentaptych Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair (1985), Twombly inscribed Rilke’s 1925 epitaph:

Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy
of being No-one’s sleep under so many
lids.

Not long afterward, Twombly created his Rose series, now part of the collection of the Museum Brandhorst.

The reminiscence of Rilke’s text in Twombly’s art accentuates the idea that memory is, first of all, repetition and reiteration. Yet repetition, whether of a gesture or an image, is never neutral. Twombly incorporates fragments of Rilke’s poetry, traces of words sometimes barely visible, leading us into layers of memory that open onto different temporalities. Within his own practice, one can discern a shift from the earlier works, marked by bold and energetic gestures, to the late period—most notably the Rose series—where the writing appears faint, delicate, and uneven. The materiality of paint overspills, drenching the wooden panels.

For Rilke, the rose becomes a metaphor for the poem itself, set against the death of the poet—the singer Orpheus—whose song remains possible through withdrawal. For Twombly, however, the rose is reiterated in a sequence of monumental images operating on multiple levels: on the one hand, they measure the passing of time and decay; on the other, they stage the tension between the visible and the invisible, foregrounding the conditions of viewing that dislocate or articulate meaning and reenact memory. The rose, one of the most enduring and enigmatic motifs in Rilke’s poetry, is transformed by Twombly into a multiplicity of uprooted roses.

Paul Celan, too, radically transformed the image of the rose. Published in Frankfurt am Main in 1963, Die Niemandsrose (The No-One’s Rose) was his fourth collection of poems. Celan was born Paul Antschel on 23 November 1920 to middle-class, German-speaking Jewish parents in Czernowitz, Bukovina, six years before Rilke’s death. He later described this place of origin as one where “people and books lived,” a world that seems unreachable within the eternal present of the now. Bukovina was shaped by a rich coexistence of Jewish, German, Romanian, Ukrainian, and Polish communities. The rise of Nazism and antisemitism in Germany, Romania, and across Europe profoundly altered the memory of this world and irreversibly marked Celan’s life. In 1942 he lost both his parents—his mother was shot in a camp—and he himself was sent to a forced labour camp, from which he emerged a few years later before moving to France in July 1948.

Like Rilke, Celan wrote in German and later also in French; unlike Rilke, he became a French poet writing in the German language. Having survived the Shoah, Celan continued to write in German—a heavy burden, since it was also the language of his parents’ murderers. For Celan, death was not a metaphysical or existential limit that opened onto creation; it was a firsthand experience of persecution and annihilation, a constant menace to existence. Like Twombly, Celan found himself in a world in which something fundamental had gone wrong, in which the other, human or nonhuman, could be exploited, marginalised, or destroyed, and in which memory itself was wounded and language had become weaponised.

Celan had been reading Rilke since his youth in Bukovina. Like Twombly, he was drawn to the Rilkean rose, a recurring motif in his poetry. Rilke’s “no one’s sleep” of the rose becomes, for Celan, “no one’s rose.” In No -One’s Rose, the specifically Jewish condition of displacement and uprootedness is transformed into a broader human condition characteristic of victims of genocide and war. Rootedness is displaced into another realm:

In the air, there your root lives on, there
in the air.

This image implies worldly dispossession, the intractable presence of the enemy, and a dislocation of time; escape becomes possible only in speech, in a language that acquires a voice capable of being heard. “Only one thing,” Celan once said, “remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language.”

What matters for Celan is language’s capacity to say again without merely reiterating previously formed systems of speech. His response to Rilke becomes evident in what the scholar Christoph König calls Celan’s “re-semantisation” of poetic language—a work, ultimately, on memory and remembrance. König has written extensively about Celan’s involvement with Group 47, a platform for German literature after World War II, comparing the ways in which Günter Eich and Paul Celan reworked Rilke’s poetic inheritance. Motifs drawn from Rilke, such as silence, roses, song, or the harmonious nocturne, are reconstituted in Celan’s poetry within a newly forged vocabulary. Operating within a Rilkean aesthetic horizon, Celan deploys strategies such as fragmentation, historical density, and linguistic compression to reframe his early poems (1938–1944), first offered to Ruth Kraft and later reissued in Der Sand aus den Urnen, as part of his ongoing poetic endeavour.

In one of his rare interviews, Celan remarked:

“Poems are indeed somewhere also a remembrance, something even a memory yet to come. In this memory yet to come, if you will allow the expression, one in a certain way relives the poems. So that they remain true.”

Truth, then, “is spoken by whoever speaks the shadows,” as Celan writes, detached from transparent representation or stable meaning. To reach this truth, he had to break language down to its origins and imagine a language that could still be spoken after Auschwitz. Language can begin anew when the poem gathers within itself a plurality of meanings. The condition for the poem’s existence is that it be heard. Poems, like works of art, are relational; yet this relationality does not guarantee comprehension, nor does it presume a fully formed message awaiting transmission. Meaning is not fixed or predetermined; it emerges alongside the interlocutor, whether present or absent. Each reader forms a meaning that remains open, unstable, and provisional.

Poetry, like art, awaits future readers and viewers. To engage with the work of Paul Celan or Cy Twombly, or to return again and again to Rilke, is to acknowledge that memory does not remain bound to what has been. It moves forward. The poem and the image do not simply record or preserve the past; they create the conditions under which meaning may once again be formed and recognised. A work of art is true only insofar as it unfolds layer upon layer of shifting perspectives, evoking a “memory yet to come,” an anticipation. To remember the future, then, is to grant that art lives on insofar as it continues to weave threads of meaning, each encounter reopening the possibility of experience. To remember the future is to prepare ourselves for a life of action—to bring into being the world we wish to inhabit.

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As always, thank you for reading—

A.

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“How do you like my drawing?” Franz Kafka wrote to his fiancée, Felice Bauer, in February 1913. He told her that he had once been a great draughtsman, but that he had taken lessons from a painter he considered bad, who had ruined his talent. “But wait,” he added, “one of these days I’ll send you a few of my old drawings, to give you something to laugh at. These drawings gave me greater satisfaction in those days [...] than anything else.” More than writing? one might ask. Kafka, who often complained that he could not write satisfactorily, or felt exhausted by what he called “the impossibility to write, the impossibility not to write,” continued to do so until the end of his life. Drawing, on the other hand, was a practice he slowly abandoned after 1913, though his most active period occurred between 1901 and 1907, when he was studying law and training to become a writer. During those years, he produced about 150 sketches, in pencil or India ink, on all kinds of paper, from wrapping paper to loose sheets and the covers of paperbacks.

A few weeks ago, in January, I shared one of Kafka’s drawings on Substack. In no time, the image garnered over 100,000 views, around 5,500 likes, and almost 400 reshares. Beyond the statistics, these numbers pointed to a level of interest that made me wonder, on the one hand, what it was about this image that resonated so strongly with viewers today and, on the other, what place this drawing occupied in Kafka’s universe.

The overall composition is rather simple, albeit expressive. It shows a single figure, isolated and depicted with a thick black line, executed in pencil or black India ink, on plain paper, without a background. The elongated figure is drawn crouching, with its back bent forward and its head tilted downwards. Its long arms extend towards its legs, one of which is bent, forming an inverted V. The round head is only schematically outlined: we can see an eye and an eyebrow and guess the shape of a nose, but the mouth is invisible. The posture suggests fatigue, sorrow, or a feeling of being overwhelmed by external circumstances.

There are no external clues that allow us to place this figure in a specific space. It reminds me of the question Judith Butler poses in relation to Kafka’s work: whether it is, in fact, possible to touch the ground, and whether the representation of a body can negate the need for a background. The impossibility of touching the ground is a recurring motif in Kafka. Why? The figure is so abstracted that it seems reduced to mere proportions: weightless, suspended in mid-air, contoured by lines that cannot contain the body whose place they seek to occupy. Devoid of any relations, either with other humans or with non-humans, the figure stands alone.

Similar solitary figures appear in five other sketches from this series, but this time each anonymous silhouette is accompanied by some form of prop: a walking stick, a sword-like line, a structure reminiscent of a gate or a fence, or folded ladders.

What characterises these sketches is the disproportion between the small, oval head and the elongated arms and legs. Most are faceless, isolated, reduced to line-like figures.

One of the most grounded and, at the same time, recognisable figures in the series shows a person sitting on a chair in a posture of reflection: one arm is stretched across the back of the chair, and the other is bent into a V, with the hand supporting the figure’s head.

We can think here of other renowned depictions of contemplation within the register of art history, such as Albrecht Dürer’s Melancholia I or Rodin’s The Thinker. Both Dürer’s engraving and Rodin’s sculpture represent solitary figures immersed in thought, each marked by a strong physical presence. In Kafka, however, the figure is reduced to an almost abstract form with minimal detail, conveying a sense of fragility and loneliness rather than the material weight of the body. I am suggesting one way Kafka’s drawings might be read in relation to art history, without any intention of locating his sketches within the canon or associating them with an art movement, but rather to emphasise the familiarity of certain gestures depicted over centuries, solitary contemplation being one of them.

The distinction, however, lies in the fact that solitude once encompassed both pleasurable and painful forms of aloneness. By the time Kafka created this drawing, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had disintegrated, and tensions between the German-speaking minority and the Czech-speaking majority frequently escalated into riots. Kafka was fluent in both languages, but, as a Jew — a cultural affiliation he maintained without piety — his position raises questions about whether he could ever fully belong to a single community. In this context, loneliness signified a lost sense of connection, ranging from personal suffering to a more widespread condition in Western society, visible in cultural products, everyday discourse, and the structures of capitalist modernity. For Kafka, despite his need for the solitude and silence necessary for writing, loneliness was primarily a social malaise. Perhaps this is, in many ways, not so different from how we experience loneliness today. In my view, aloneness is a profound form of suffering, often reflecting imperfect living conditions or the overwhelming isolation generated by political division, apathy, and technology. More often than not, it can produce what Hannah Arendt called the “common ground of terror”: conditions that make people vulnerable to totalitarian control even in non-totalitarian societies. Reflecting on the past, Kafka found the world he inhabited unendurable, transforming it into literature as an extension of life, while seeking to evade the anxiety and senselessness it generated.

After the Nazi invasion in 1939, Max Brod, Kafka’s best friend, fled Czechoslovakia, taking with him Kafka’sunpublished writings, letters, diaries, and drawings. It is well known that most of Kafka’s legacy survived because Brod refused to comply with his explicit request that everything be destroyed after his death. These sketches, for instance, once part of Kafka’s Black Notebook, were cut out and placed in an envelope by Brod.

Kafka and Brod met at the University of Prague, where they studied from 1901 to 1906. They shared not only an interest in jurisprudence and literature, but also a fascination with art and drawing. During those years, Kafka actively cultivated his interest in the visual arts: he took courses in art history, practised drawing, came into contact with artists in Prague’s artistic circles, such as The Eight, a young group associated with German-Czech Modernism that included artists such as Max Horb and Friedrich Feigl, and travelled, mostly with Brod, to visit places such as the Musée du Louvre and Milan Cathedral.

One of his early friends, Oskar Pollak—who would later become a specialist in Renaissance and Baroque art—contributed significantly, according to the art historian Andreas Kilcher, to the development of Kafka’s interest in the visual arts. At Pollak’s recommendation, Kafka read Ferdinand Avenarius’s magazine Der Kunstwart (“The Guardian of Art”), to which he subscribed for three years, between 1901 and 1904. Around the same time, he took art history courses with Professor Alwin Schultz, who covered, among other things, German art and architecture.

Another important figure for Kafka was the Prague painter and engraver Emil Orlik, who, in 1902, held an exhibition at the Rudolfinum in Prague entitled From Japan.

Orlik had travelled to Japan the previous year and had been inspired by local drawing and woodcut techniques. By the second half of the nineteenth century, Europe had become increasingly familiar with Japanese engraving and Chinese calligraphy, whose visual qualities differed radically from the illusionistic perspective of European painting. In these images, there is no sense of depth or aerial perspective, that effect by which things fade into blue or whitish tones on the horizon. Perspective becomes secondary: either the gaze falls from above on the objects below, or the scene is viewed from a lower angle. The result is a fragmentation of vision, an image that no longer depends on the human point of view over the landscape. Rather, we are invited to step into the shoes of those represented. Orlik was a prolific artist, writer, and lecturer.

Kafka knew his work and even intended to write about it. One of the comments that fuelled his enthusiasm appeared in the Prager Tagblatt (Prague Daily) in December 1901 under the title “The Art of the Japanese”:

“Yesterday Emil Orlik delivered his second lecture about Japan. Whereas his first lecture had depicted life in this old cultural nation, this lecture moved on to the culture itself and to its highest flowering: its art. Here he was very much in his element, and in his persuasive presentation he succeeded in highlighting not only the character of Japanese painting and its influence on European art but also the unique character of the famous Japanese artists Hokusai, Kori [sic], Utamara [sic], etc., whose names are familiar by now even in Europe.”

Indeed, Japanese aesthetics seems to have fascinated Kafka. In November 1908, he even sent a postcard featuring a Hiroshige print to his friend Max.

At least as far as this series of drawings is concerned, we might detect a resemblance to Japanese techniques of elegantly distorted proportions, though in a somewhat exaggerated form. We may presume that Kafka paid particular attention to the concentration of line in Japanese art—a feature reminiscent of Orlik’s observations on the process of abstraction, which he described as:

“The simpler the means, the greater the concentration of the artist at work, and thus the higher the value of the object... This technique has led to the style: the style of simplicity. Thus, the stages in the creation of an image are different for the Japanese than they generally are for us. More time is spent thinking, and less time painting. For quite often the picture consists - the most famous ones in particular! - of very few brush strokes....

The Japanese know nothing of our l’art pour l’art, because almost everyone has the ability to see something in a very rough sketch... This sensitivity to the ‘stroke’ (as we painters say!) or the line is strengthened and encouraged by the fact that the Japanese, like the Chinese, always see a close relationship between writing and painting.”

Accordingly, we can understand the tension between writing and drawing in terms of how we experience their limits: where does an image begin and where does language end? A drawing often reaches us in a form that has already hardened into something unalterable. When we look at it—whether in reproduction or in a museum gallery—it appears to us as a finished form, even though, for the artist, it may have been only onestage in a preparatory process. Yet we can imagine how everything might have begun with a dot, a line, a pencil or a pen on a sheet of paper, tracing a first mark. From that gesture, a space of attention is born, and in the signs one produces we begin to seek a rhythm, a pattern, or a meaning that slowly articulates itself as an image.

Although each drawing and each text can function independently, there is, in Kafka’s practice, a close connection between them, since both operate as forms of thought. Kafka suggests more than once that his drawings were not meant to be exhibited, considering them instead a form of private language. In the same letter to Felice Bauer from February 1913, he prefers to draw rather than write a difficult paragraph: “How on earth can I describe how we walked in my dream?” Later, he adds, “But wait, I’ll draw it.” Elsewhere, in his 1911 notebooks, Kafka writes that, before falling asleep, he “imagined a drawing of a group of people isolated like a mountain in the air, which in its drawing technique seemed to me completely new and once invented easy to execute.” But then he focuses only on one figure, as in his drawing of a young man, who had one arm resting on a table, the other over his face, with someone bending over him “worriedly or questioningly,” adding:

“The two distinct pairs of lines that bounded the legs crossed and connected lightly to the borderlines of the body. With faint corporeality the palely coloured clothes bulged between these lines. In astonishment at this beautiful drawing which produced a tension in my head that I was convinced was the same and indeed enduring tension by which, when I wanted, the pencil in my hand could be guided, I forced myself out of my twilight state to be better able to think the drawing through.”

What, then, is this attempt to “think the drawing through” in Kafka’s work? From my point of view, it represents his desire to articulate in words the immediacy of thought and his visual way of thinking. Sometimes we describe the loops, scribbles, and doodles of artists as juvenilia, yet drawing can be the first practice through which one learns to work without the interference of the eyes, without the social conditioning that comes with the act of seeing. In writing, the precision Kafka seeks can be seen in what the Austrian author Adalbert Stifter described in his short story The Forest Path: “Everything must be said with only the words necessary to it, not one more, not one less—and above all without those secondary additions that twist the thing itself.” Kafka’s precision tends towards this clarity, both possible and elusive. In sketching, the immediacy of thought is also related to Antonin Artaud’s idea that drawing belongs to a pre-linguistic language and acts as a direct intervention in the world. By drawing a sign, one acts.

Kafka drew the figure by playing with proportions in relation to the edges of the page, which gives the composition a dynamic character: it seems to move, to transform under our gaze. If we attend to this movement, we can see how Kafka’s line might embody Paul Klee’s description of the line in his 1925 Pedagogical Sketchbook: “An active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal. A walk for walk’s sake. The mobility agent is a point, shifting its position forward…” It is a form of spontaneity and immediacy that comes with free drawing. Sight is no longer aligned with a field of truth, but with one of memory and anticipation, suggestive of what Jacques Derrida called “drawing with closed eyes,” a practice close to the automatic writing of the Surrealists.

This perspective also evokes Judith Butler’s argument in the essay “But What Floor, What Wall?”, in which she notes that the sketch sometimes begins where writing ends. She adds:

“So the graphic line no longer forms words, even if it constitutes a counterpoint to what is written on a neighbouring page, or even on the same page. The sketches focus on lines, often at the expense of forms. The presence of embodied figures is suggested by the fold, the drape, and the swirls of a sketched fabric, or by an upward movement that no real body can perform.”

Butler’s points underline the limits of representation. Kafka’s figures often seem to emerge not from stable forms, but from gestures, marks, and the movement of line. Butler, much like Derrida, suggests that the boundaries between writing and drawing are fluid. We might say that Kafka’s sketches do not illustrate his texts so much as prolong the attempt to capture fleeting experiences and ambiguous states: what cannot be fully seen, what cannot be fully articulated. In her reading, Kafka’s drawings reveal an instability in the representation of the body, whose boundaries constantly shift and evade any fixed category. In many of these drawings, bodies do not assume a stable form, but appear instead as simple lines, planes, or geometric shapes that suggest arms, legs, or the supports of an object. The result is the impression that, for Kafka, the boundaries of the body are never given once and for all but remain essentially dynamic.

We might like Kafka’s drawings for different reasons, but I dare say there is one common denominator: their intensely human presence. Kafka’s drawings place us in the space of the indeterminate, where silence is both a void and a source of meaning, rendered through the improbable elasticity and elongation of bodies, with their arresting capacity to morph and extend. Much like his texts, the sketches preserve his presence through absence, bearing witness to impermanence while opening a space for projection and transformation.

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Franz Kafka, The Diaries, trans. by Ross Benjamin, (New York: Schocken Books, 2022).

Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice, ed. Erich Heller and Jürgen Born, trans. James Stern and Elisabeth Duckworth (New York: Schocken Books, 1973).

For more on Kafka’s drawings, see:

Credit Images: Drawing by Franz Kafka. The Literary Estate of Max Brod, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem.

When Igor Stravinsky met the American composer Goddard Lieberson and his young son Peter, Lieberson remarked, “Peter wants to be a composer,” to which Stravinsky responded, “It is not enough to want. You must be!” Intention and willingness alone are not sufficient in art; you have to actually do the work. We know this well, yet putting it into practice can be hard. Moreover, no one can predict how the public will respond to a work of art. At times, a piece achieves widespread acclaim; at others, it may provoke controversy or be overlooked altogether. Nevertheless, the anxieties of artistic creation are a genuine experience of even the most accomplished artists. Stravinsky was one of these, full of harsh self-criticism, as his wife Vera once noted.

However, he cultivated a form of creative resilience that we can only hope to replicate or adopt, and which was an essential quality of his artistic practice. Throughout his lifelong career, Stravinsky followed consistent principles: working methodically, ignoring both the noise surrounding the reception of his oeuvre and the diversions it created, and maintaining clear concentration and a sense of duty to the craft. While most artists care deeply about public opinion, Stravinsky learned not to. Instead, he cared about the work and about the world that could be shaped through it. How was his creative resilience formed, then? Was it a natural aptitude, or something that could be learned? Perhaps it was both—but whatever it was, it was neither straightforward nor immediate.

Stravinsky was born in Russia on June 18, 1882. With a pianist mother and a father who was principal bass at the Imperial Opera, he grew up immersed in music. His parents were remarkably cultivated, with a library of nearly twenty thousand volumes devoted mainly to Russian literature, folk songs, and legends. Igor was an avid reader and showed a predilection for music from an early age. While receiving musical training from various teachers, he was discouraged by his parents from pursuing a musical career and initially studied law, alongside the son of Rimsky-Korsakov. Through this connection, he was introduced to the composer, who would later become his teacher. Rimsky-Korsakov’s instruction was coldly technical and strictly rigorous, but Stravinsky loved that rigour. From childhood and throughout his life, he believed that even the smallest intention of a composer should not be the result of nebulous inspiration, but the fruit of methodical and conscientious craftsmanship, and that these intentions must always be completely and exactly translated through the doing, the making—in his case, by the score, and by the score alone.

But beyond this discipline, there was something else: remarkable concentration. Jean Cocteau, the French poet and writer who worked with Stravinsky on numerous occasions, said:

“Stravinsky knows that distraction is a crime against the mind, that the distracted artist or spectator cannot trap beauty.”

Beauty unfolds in a time that is simultaneously infinite and momentary, and can only be grasped through present attentiveness. Such focused attention demands stamina, an intensity cultivated through real presence and embodied action. Stravinsky, like many artists, was dedicated to composition, finding purpose in the process, yet rarely full satisfaction. He favoured constant activity and effort, welcoming constraints as a necessity for inner freedom. Over time, he sought to ignore both the noise of failure and that of success, staying focused instead on the practice of composing, on the effort of making music, and on finding reward in the act itself. But was this as simple as it sounds?

When Stravinsky arrived in Paris in 1910, he was a relatively unknown young Russian composer. By then, he was married to Vera and had two children. The Ballets Russes had already achieved significant acclaim in Paris since 1909, led by impresario Serge Diaghilev and choreographer Michel Fokine, with prominent dancers such as Nijinsky, Pavlova, and Karsavina. Stravinsky collaborated with Diaghilev, and on the evening of June25, 1910, he achieved critical success with The Firebird. Esteemed composers such as Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and Florent Schmitt welcomed him enthusiastically. His subsequent work, Petrushka, also enjoyed triumphant success the following year.

However, on May 29, 1913, The Rite of Spring premiered in Paris at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and resulted in one of the most significant scandals in music history. The ballet, described as “pictures of pagan Russia in two parts,” was presented by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, sets and costumes by Nicholas Roerich, and conducted by Pierre Monteux. Le Figaro’s critic Henri Quittard described the piece as one of “puerile barbarity,” while Puccini reportedly called it the work of a “madman.” The thumping impact of “crash, clash, bing, bang” was disconcerting for a public unaccustomed to such startling noises. Of course, at first, Stravinsky was heartbroken. But he found a wiser way forward.

When later asked whether his music was better understood than at the time of The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky replied:

“Scandals are no longer in fashion. People still do not understand my music; they would need to listen to it more. (…) Good reviews do not make me happy; bad ones do not distress me very much.” And so, he kept going.

Stravinsky’s attitude toward artistic practice anticipates a sense of duty to art and to the world. For Cocteau, Stravinsky cast a “voracious gaze upon the world,” leaving nothing unsaid and fixating on the smallest details and slightest gestures of daily life. Indeed, Stravinsky sought to capture beauty—an endeavour Cocteau described as an attempt to tame a mysterious animal, “this unicorn, nearly impossible to approach.” To do so, it was paramount to maintain a state of constant activity and to cultivate concentration. In Stravinsky’s own words:

“The Spirit blows where it wills (…) What concerns us is the direction taken by the breath of the Spirit, not the correctness of the craftsman’s work.”

To better comprehend Stravinsky’s method, one may turn to his lectures Poetics of Music, recently reissued in the Norton Lectures Centenary Edition.

Uprooted by war in Europe, Stravinsky arrived in the United States, where he delivered six monthly lectures at Harvard from October 1939 to April 1940. In preparing these lectures, he collaborated with the Russian musicologist Pierre Souvtchinsky and the critic Alexis Roland-Manuel. Although the lectures primarily address the making and composition of music, they also offer broader reflections on the creative process. Stravinsky asserted, “We cannot observe the creative phenomenon independently of the form in which it is made manifest,” emphasising that formal processes arise from the study of principles.

The first lesson—well known to artists who disrupt the canon—reminds us that many works of undeniablemerit were misunderstood when they were new. Stravinsky knew this firsthand, yet he chose to speak of Charles Gounod’s Faust, an opera whose earliest critics refused to acknowledge its melodic inventiveness. Quoting phrases from the press that described Gounod at the time as “a symphonist astray in the theatre” or “a severe musician,” critics reproached him for the many “questionable aspects of his style”—traits that today we admire as the dominant features of his talent.

The second lesson addresses music as a “form of speculation in terms of sound and time.” Here, Stravinsky discusses a dialectical principle that unites contrast and similarity. This principle, familiar in poetry and the visual arts, is, as Stravinsky cautions, difficult to grasp:

“Contrast is everywhere. One has only to take note of it. Similarity is hidden; it must be sought out, and it is found only after the most exhaustive efforts.”

Every work of art seeks unity, and for this purpose similarity serves as the foundation that precedes variation and difference. As Stravinsky notes, “One precedes the Many.”

Stravinsky then turns to rhythm, which is fundamental to music and often closely associated with it. He refers to dictionary definitions of consonance—the combination of several tones into a harmonious unit—and dissonance, which results from introducing a tone foreign to the established harmony. While listeners may instinctively accept these juxtapositions, Stravinsky argues that the ear must be trained to appreciate them, thereby shaping musical form. Similarly, the more one reads and listens to good poetry and literature, the more attuned one becomes to recognising their excellence, as overall tonality guides perception toward both divergence and convergence. Through experiencing works of art, we learn to notice both how they differ and how they cohere. The creative process, then, is about finding the form, contrast, and rhythm that best express one’s ideas.

Astoundingly, other composers attempted to imitate Stravinsky’s method of composing, only to fail. Jean Cocteau, in an interview, remarked: “Many imitators have used these methods, but they can only produce a noise resembling his, like a parrot imitating the human voice. Stravinsky no longer scandalises in the bad sense of the word. He reigns by the sole privilege of beauty. I suppose he inspires respect in a youth searching for its voice along Schoenberg’s paths. He inspires respect in everyone. No longer the ears—now it is the hearts that listen to him.” To speak to one’s heart was the highest form of praise an artist could receive. But how did Stravinsky achieve this? According to Cocteau, his imitators lacked the inner discipline that gives Stravinsky’s music its authority. He was neither the first nor the last composer to compose for the piano or to write vibrant orchestral works. Yet his singularity stems from a devotion to the appetite for creating, pursued in a meticulous way; he embodied a mode of thought, as Vijay Iyer aptly describes.

Stravinsky faced ongoing aesthetic struggles, both with himself and with his contemporaries. Like many artists, he underwent multiple transformations, and, again like many artists, he was not always easy to work with. Some collaborators described him as precise, others as emotionally reserved, while still others saw him as a fervent intellectual capable of producing outstanding compositions. At the risk of oversimplification, his artistic development is typically divided into three principal stylistic phases: the Russian period, characterised by extensive use of Russian and Ukrainian folklore and traditional themes; the Neoclassical period, marked by a return to earlier classical forms and styles; and the Serial period, during which he adopted the twelve-tone technique. This evolution reflected his persistent “will to express”—a creative drive to experiment, disrupt, and break new ground, rarely allowing him complete satisfaction. Maurice Ravel admired this particular trait, observing:

“A musician’s true personality is not to seek a style that is immediately recognisable. The example of Stravinsky, constantly renewing himself and exploring the most varied domains, seems infinitely preferable to me.”

During the war and the Russian Revolution, Stravinsky continued to compose, producing ballets such as Apollo and The Fairy’s Kiss (based on music by Tchaikovsky), as well as piano and violin concertos and symphonies. Artists continued to paint, poets to sing new rhythms; many came together, determined to stir the world. Stravinsky collaborated with some of the most avant-garde figures of the time—artists and writersalike. Take Pulcinella, for instance: Stravinsky composed the music drawing on an eighteenth-century music album, a perfect commedia dell’arte scenario that Diaghilev had purchased in Naples; Picasso designed the stage sets and costumes, while the choreography was created by Léonide Massine, the marvellous dancer of the Ballets Russes.

Other collaborations followed, including partnerships with Jean Cocteau on Oedipus Rex and with André Gide on Proserpine. For Stravinsky, maintaining an open dialogue with fellow artists was a way of strengthening his creative resilience, during and beyond those challenging times.

Had Stravinsky ceased composing after the uproar surrounding The Rite of Spring, the trajectory of modern music might have been markedly different. Instead, he ignored both praise and criticism, setting aside the noise of the world and reaffirming his dedication to composition. Is there anything else we should consider, beyond resilience, discipline, collaboration, and innovation, in the creation of art? “In order to create,” Stravinsky would answer, “there must be a dynamic force—and what force is more potent than love?”

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Long ago, there was a distant land filled with wonder and magic, where the earth, the sun, the animals, the humans, and the divine were all united with the cosmos. On these remote shores, sorceresses, goddess-muses, and poets carried and shared stories of the divine with their communities. On this foreign soil, objects were endowed with powers, like the Golden Fleece—the wool of a magical winged ram guarded by a sleepless dragon, or so the story goes. And there was Medea, a sorceress of divine heritage with the gift of prophecy. But we may have forgotten this and remember her only for the story in which she murdered her children. That is the myth of Medea.

Euripides immortalised Medea’s myth in his tragedy, but he also laid bare the events that led to the outrageous act. Since then, Medea has become a heroine not only in Euripides’ drama but also in several modern works by Jean Anouilh, Luigi Cherubini, Darius Milhaud, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. We might wonder what we are to do with these strange ancient classics like Medea. Do they reinforce old patriarchal lies about women? Or does Medea’s story, narrated countless times in manifold ways, offer the kind of emotional release Aristotle described as catharsis?

You need to spend time with Medea’s tragedy, given its subversiveness and psychological subtlety. One of the most magnificent stage productions I’ve seen was in London at Soho Place, directed by Dominic Cooke, with the superb Sophie Okonedo as Medea and Ben Daniels as Creon, Jason, and Aegeus. In this version, Medea’s anger is full-on, preparing her to match the cruelty she faced from Jason and the male-controlled society that had demeaned her. It was as stunning as it was devastating to see a woman, Medea, trapped in a system that stripped her of all possibility of justice.

Pasolini’s Medea is similar in some ways but also markedly different. While it is based on Euripides’ play, Pasolini’s film takes a new approach, pursuing what he conceives as a “cinema of poetry,” in which film becomes another form of poetic language. The film remains a beloved classic, to be visited and revisited for its incandescent power and horrific, hidden violence. It resonates strongly with contemporary experiences of brutal exile and the arrogant discourses of colonisers.

Pasolini produced Medea in 1969. The film came after his Roman-period movies and before the “Trilogy of Life.” Along with Oedipus Rex and Notes for an African Orestes, Medea forms the “ancient trilogy” central to his oeuvre. The film explores the emblematic force of myth, which is mysterious and sacred, and contrasts it with a world ruled by progress and the rationality of logos. For Pasolini, myth was not fantasy but a way ancient peoples understood life. Their daily existence was shaped by ritual and sacrifice, including human sacrifice, cruelty, and violence. More than anything, Medea was Pasolini’s poetic “solution” to the destruction wrought by mass culture on a world he so deeply loved. He dramatises the passage from an archaic world organised around ritual and cosmic unity to a new world ruled by law, power, and hierarchy. In this transition, meaning shifts from ritual experience to historical structure.

The first part of the film focuses on Jason’s story. Raised by a Centaur, Jason is told that he must reclaim his birthright, his father’s throne, which his uncle Pelias has usurped. To do this, he must sail to Colchis and find the Golden Fleece. This is Medea’s homeland, a remote place steeped in sacred rituals, where people lived in peace until Jason and the Argonauts arrived and irrevocably changed their civilisation.

If you have seen the film, you may remember the Centaur’s recitation of Jason’s genealogy. This scene is repeated twice at different moments in Jason’s life:

“All is sacred, all is sacred, all is sacred! There is nothing natural in Nature, my lad, remember that. The day Nature seems natural to you, it means the end, and the beginning of something else. Farewell sky, farewell sea . . . Doesn’t it seem that a small piece of that sky is quite unnatural and possessed by a god? . . . Wherever your eye roams, a god is hidden. And if by chance he be not there, the signs of his sacred presence are: silence or the smell of grass, or the freshness of cool water. Yes, everything is holy, but holiness is also a malediction. The gods that love, at the same time hate.” - Excerpt from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Medea.

The Centaur describes a mythic world embodied by divine sacred forces, which Jason must leave behind once he becomes an adult. In the rational world, the sky is simply the sky, and a stone is simply a stone. Could a stone, or matter, be a manifestation of divine forces? Until this point, Jason has listened to the Centaur’s stories, which have sparked his imagination. Now, however, the Centaur changes his appearance, transforming into an ordinary man, fully dressed and ready to guide Jason on his journey to Colchis. He says:

“For ancient man, all myths and rituals are real experiences, which he understands as part of his daily, physical existence. For him, reality is an entity so perfect that the emotion he experiences, in the stillness of a summer sky, is equal to the most profound, personal experience of modern man . . . You will go to a distant land across the sea. There, you will find a world whose use of reason differs from our own. Life there is very realistic…”

Scholars have debated this scene, particularly why the Centaur changes from a mythical creature into an ordinary man. Does Jason desacralise everything that was once given to him as ontological and sacred? Pasolini’s notes suggest that he drew on thinkers such as Lévi-Strauss, Carl Jung, James Frazer, and especially Mircea Eliade’s Myth of the Eternal Return. Eliade believed that traditional societies, both ancient cultures and so-called “primitive” ones, shared a sacred, mythical worldview characterised by cyclical time and ritual. In contrast, modern industrial societies inhabit a desacralised world focused on linear, rational time, much like Jason as an adult in Pasolini’s film.

Pasolini engaged with Eliade’s work on several occasions, reviewing Myth and Reality in 1979, while ignoring, or perhaps not knowing, Eliade’s politically charged past. Eliade’s distinction between sacred and profane consciousness derives in part from Jung’s theories, with whom he worked closely. Jung believed that individual psychological development repeats humanity’s historical shift from mythic to rational thought. This mythic consciousness is not erased but repressed, persisting within modern individuals. Pasolini agreed, arguing that ancient ways of thinking remain contemporaneous with us, since nothing is ever truly lost.

The second part of the film tells Medea’s story. When Medea meets Jason, she falls madly in love with him, so much so that she kills her own brother to help Jason obtain the Golden Fleece. She sacrifices her birthright as high priestess and future queen to flee with him to Corinth. After leaving Colchis, Medea senses that her powers are fading. Before returning to Iolkos, for instance, Jason and the Argonauts camp without honouring the gods. Medea perceives this as sacrilegious, so she escapes the camp and invokes the gods of Earth, Sun, and Stone:

“Earth, talk to me! Let me hear your voice! Sun, talk to me! You, grass, talk to me! You, rock talk to me! Let me hear your voice! Sun, talk to me! Where is the bond that joined you to the sun? You, grass, talk to me! You, rock, talk to me!”

Medea understands that the farther she moves from Colchis, the land of myth, the less she can connect with nature’s wisdom. This is central to the film. Modernity is born from what it later declares irrational, barbaric, or monstrous. Medea is essentially one with the cosmos and with nature, but this unity is lost once she leaves her homeland for Greece. Film critic Richard Brody notes: “The pageantry that marks daily life in her homeland is a spontaneous aesthetic expression of that unity. In Corinth, even the choreography of daily life has a more rigid, austere practical basis.” Pasolini’s story is about the birth of the modern world from chaos, with Medea embodying the primordial, mystical order that Jason seeks to discard.

Medea and Jason live together for ten years and have two children. Then Jason falls in love with a young princess, Glauce, and abandons Medea. As a foreigner facing exile, hurt and enraged after all the sacrifices she made for Jason, Medea has no one left to turn to. She gives the princess a poison-imbued wedding dress, which kills her, and then murders her own (and Jason’s) children. Brody observes that Medea’s revenge is not merely a clever plan but also a ritualistic act, “a sort of hieratic dance that synchronizes its violence.” Gesture and expression are therefore crucial in Pasolini’s film. But one question remains: why did Pasolini choose Maria Callas to play Medea?

Why Maria Callas?

In 1953, Maria Callas prepared to sing Medea for the first time in Luigi Cherubini’s eponymous opera. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, her voice had already made a powerful impression on the Italian public. Janine Reiss, the specialist in operatic training who coached Callas for over ten years, recounts how Callas approached the role: “A woman on the verge of killing her children must be terrifying — even to herself,” Callas said. “Beauty of sound is of no importance. I command my voice to be Medea.” Like her earlier roles in Bellini’s I Puritani, Rossini’s Armida, and her portrayals of great heroines such as Brünnhilde, Turandot, Aida, and Norma, Medea became one of the emblematic roles of her career.

Medea was performed at Teatro alla Scala in December 1953, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, and was a resounding success. Callas’s tragic presence, her vocal agility, and her ability to convey a wide emotional range were evident to all. The production, directed by Margherita Wallmann, was widely acclaimed. Bernstein, conducting in a major opera house for the first time, later recalled: “The audience was delirious. And as for Callas? She was pure electricity.”

When Pasolini cast Callas as Medea in 1969, her operatic career was nearly over. He chose her for her commanding presence and electric force rather than for her singing, and she speaks very little in the film. Even so, her expressivity is astonishing. This was the only time Callas allowed a film director to capture her face on camera. Her presence carried the weight of ancient tragedy more eloquently than words could. Callas, in turn, found in Pasolini a director who truly understood her dramatic realism and her soul.

Maria Callas was born Cecilia Sophia Anna Maria Kalogeropoulos in New York on December 2, 1923. Her life has since become legend, and each of us may carry a personal version of La Callas. Most recently, the film Maria by Pablo Larraín, starring Angelina Jolie and Pierfrancesco Favino, portrays the final days of her life. In September 1977, secluded in her Parisian apartment, she looks back on her past. The film, like her interviews, revisits moments from her childhood as a girl who felt unloved by her mother and grew up in a broken home among Greek immigrants in America.

At its core, Maria Callas’s life was singing. She spent hours practising songs she heard on the radio. After moving back to Greece in March 1937 with her mother and sister, she enrolled at the Athens Conservatory, where she trained with Elvira de Hidalgo in the bel canto tradition. She launched her professional career at just seventeen. Callas was a trailblazer and a barrier-breaker for women in opera. Independent and at times controversial, she was also known for her rigorous discipline, once stating: “I will always be as difficult as necessary to achieve the best.”

Callas’s marriage to Giovanni Meneghini lasted about ten years, as did her tempestuous relationship with Aristotle Onassis, who left her in 1968 to marry Jackie Kennedy. After experiencing vocal difficulties, Callas gave her last grande opera performance at Covent Garden in London in July 1965, singing Tosca under the direction of Georges Prêtre. By the time she met Pasolini, she was heartbroken both by Onassis’s marriage and by the decline of her voice. The role of Medea seems to have offered her a perfect opportunity to channel the anger and grief she had accumulated.

In Colchis, Pasolini depicts Medea as a high priestess who leads fertility rituals. The scene attempts to re-enact James Frazer’s theory of the primitive vegetation god, whose influence on Pasolini has been widely acknowledged by scholars. The film portrays the cycle of life through death and resurrection, decay and renewal, mirroring the rhythms of nature. We hear Callas say, “Give life to the seed and be reborn with the seed.” This resonates with Pasolini’s worldview. In an interview with La Stampa a few months before filming Medea, he stated that even as an atheist, his “relationship with things is full of the mysterious and sacred,”and that this sensibility had always shaped his style and technique. But what, for Pasolini, was truly sacred?

What Was Sacred for Pasolini?

For Pasolini, the sacred represented an absolute presence, perceptible to all and capable of manifesting itself in objects, in nature, and in people, indeed in anything. Poetry had the capacity to render the sacred perceptible, while also serving, in his view, as a means of communicating both rational and irrational experience. Consequently, he sought to make films that ran counter to mainstream cinema, deliberately juxtaposing the sacred and the profane in order to reconfigure their boundaries and their spatial and temporal distribution. He described this approach as “a cinema of poetry.” In a 1970 interview with Jean Duflot, Pasolini described mass media as a form of dictatorship and declared his refusal to submit to it. His critique of a mass media-driven consumer culture owes much to the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci. Pasolini consistently articulated a view of artistic expression, whether poetry, art, or cinema, as a space in which the sacred could endure, even when everything else had been profaned.

The writer Alberto Moravia, reflecting on his long friendship with Pasolini, expressed his admiration for the way Pasolini positioned himself within Italy’s poetic tradition. Moravia argued that to understand Pasolini’s poetry, one must recognise that he wrote not only about himself but also about society and Italy as a whole. In the Italian tradition, many poets, including Petrarch, Foscolo, Carducci, and D’Annunzio, wrote to praise or glorify Italy. Pasolini did the opposite. Rather than celebrating Italy, he mourned its postwar suffering, a nation humiliated, occupied, devastated, and divided between the German army and the Allies. He regarded this as the lowest moment in Italy’s recent history, and, as Moravia observed, this pain runs throughout Pasolini’s poetry.

“He had a way of writing poetry that revealed an extraordinary taste for the ancient, for antiquity,” Moravia said. “Pasolini wrote many poems using terza rima, Dante’s three-line stanza, but he completely renewed that Dantesque form. His poems always give the impression of the unfinished, of the contemporary, while retaining a very powerful poetic resonance. I consider Pasolini to be the most important poet of the second half of the twentieth century in Italy.” As may we.

Consider, for instance, the scene in the film in which Medea, dressed in sacred vestments, walks through Colchis towards the Golden Fleece. Drawing on Eliade’s theory of the axis mundi, or omphalos, Pasolini writes in his notebook:

“The Tree [on which the Golden Fleece hangs] is the Centre, the axis mundi, which repeats on a small scale, in Colchis, the archetypal beginning of the foundation of the world . . . Alone, Medea approaches the place, the Centre, the Omphalos, where the Tree of the Golden Fleece is located.”- Pasolini’s Notebook.

Medea’s power, like that of poetry, is both destructive and generative. It arises from a realm in which ordinary time is suspended and meaning is intensified and condensed. Here, the sacred is experienced as embodied and rhythmic. The Golden Fleece, in this context, symbolises the continuity of human experience.

In one final scene, Medea says:

“I am still what I was — a vessel full of knowledge that is not mine.”

This mirrors what Pasolini sought in cinema when he turned to myth, a form of knowledge that can be transmitted rather than possessed, carried through the body rather than owned. Accordingly, Pasolini’s film preserves the strangeness of myth in order to create a poetry by other means. It does so through images that resist logical explanation, gestures that precede psychology, and voices that exceed fixed logic and linear time.

Ultimately, Pasolini’s Medea stands as a refusal. It does not reconcile archaic knowledge with modern rationality. Instead, it opens a fracture in which Pasolini locates the possibility of poetic language. He believed that “the language of poetry preserves what history and progress destroy,” because poetry, like art, retains a ritual dimension of human experience that modern life has pushed aside.

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                                    I considered the earth the center of the universe,
                                        and poetry the center of the world.
                                                    - Pier Paolo Pasolini

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*The quotes are excerpts from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Medea (1969).

For more on Pier Paolo Pasolini, see:

Pasolini’s Requiem by Barth David Schwartz (2017)

L’Œuvre infinie de Pier Paolo Pasolini par Louis-José Lestocart

Scritti corsari di Pier Paolo Pasolini (1974)

Les Dernières Paroles d’un impie (entretiens avec Jean Duflot), (1981)

The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Edited and translated by Stephen Sartarelli

What does it really mean to begin (something) again? To begin is not only a point in time to which one assigns symbolic importance and gravitas; to begin also confronts us with the conditions under which perception itself might be renewed. We often frame renewal as a return to innocence, yet it can also be understood as a reconfiguration of experience structured by memory, habit, and repetition. Philip Larkin gestures toward this possibility in New Eyes Each Year; the line “old eyes renew” suggests that we need not chase novelty for its own sake. It reads almost as an instruction to approach the familiar, the bygone, with full awareness, care, and perhaps even wonder. Similar reflections appear in Picasso’s remarks that while it took him only a few years to paint like Raphael, it took a lifetime to learn to paint like a child. He added, “Every child is an artist; the problem is how to remain one once we grow up.” These observations do not idealise childhood as a lost origin; rather, they point to a tension between habit and creativity, repetition and invention, that structures how experience itself is formed. It was precisely this tension that informed Walter Benjamin’s inquiry into experience, in which childhood and play emerged as critical sites for understanding how renewal might occur under modern conditions—and whether such renewal is merely personal, or already political.

In May 1928, Walter Benjamin’s essay The Cultural History of Toys was published in the Frankfurter Zeitung. The text occupies a seemingly marginal position within his corpus, yet it condenses many of the central concerns of his philosophy of experience. This article, together with Toy and Play, draws on Karl Gröber’s study of the history of toys, Kinderspielzeug aus alter Zeit, and highlights the philosophical importance of toys as “a silent signifying dialogue” that shapes the interaction between children and the adult world, which represents the nation or the state. But why look at toys? How do they differ from other objects?

Benjamin’s interest in toys is well documented. He did not regard them as works of art, but as “tools of manufacture” (Spielzeug ist Handwerkszeug), meaning that a toy was, in a certain sense, made for the child’s hands and often handmade. Though toys and works of art are different, they share a common ground in their mode of being: they invite a kind of play or game of “make-believe” (to cite Kendall Walton). Artist and philosopher Esa Kirkkopelto shows how play, both in children’s games and in art, can generate events and experiences that require no justification beyond their appearance, have no external end or utility, and do not invite detached artistic contemplation. Benjamin’s point, however, is that toys occupy a middle zone between utility and art, insofar as they generate experiences and bring things into visibility. There is no utilitarian function attached to a wooden spinning top; yet when we spin one, we experience movement as such. The toy turns faster and faster, and through repetition it searches for a point of balance until it stops moving. Toys thus constitute a field in which experience can be enacted, interrupted, and potentially reframed.

Writing in the age of technology and in a world overflowing with merchandise, Benjamin considers toys as both material and relational objects through which to think modernity. What, then, preoccupies him? One could say that his central concern is the erosion of Erfahrung—a form of experience involving continuity, learning, and awareness—under conditions of technological reproduction, commodity culture, and historical rupture. Toys, serving multiple functions, are play-enabling objects. Play may valorise uniqueness and presence or rely on repetition and automatism. Accordingly, it can foster emancipation and development, or hinder them, carrying the risk of mechanisation. Benjamin was concerned with how a culture envisions its future and develops a materialist theory of experience capable of resisting the ways modern capitalist society organises time and perception (where everything is rushed, repetitive, and oriented toward productivity, consumption, and distraction), in favour of slow, hands-on, embodied practices such as play, making, or connecting. These activities allow people to experience time differently and reconfigure perception. Let us unpack this further.

In nineteenth-century Germany, new forms of commodity production altered the realm of signification and meaning, reshaping the relationship between object and subject. Then, as now, childhood—often framed in terms of innocence and vulnerability—provided a site through which forms of adulthood could be moulded via political and social intervention: from decisions about which books were taught or excluded from curricula, to which histories were preserved or erased, which values were promoted, and even which toys children were encouraged to play with. For Benjamin, toys, from their production to their use, offered fertile ground for thinking through the historical consciousness of an epoch. From this analysis emerged a dialectical image that brought opposing forces together—tradition and innovation, play and work, unique works of art and their mechanically reproduced counterparts—and proved formative for an entire generation of thought.

With the advent of mechanisation and large-scale manufacturing, this continuity was disrupted. Technological innovation altered not only the material form of toys but also their symbolic function. Objects saturated with exchange value flooded the market. Constant stimulation, economic pressure, and unstable social relations pulled individuals in all directions. The accelerated rhythms of the modern metropolis intruded into the home. In schools and workplaces, numbers and ranks marked value. Fragmentation, experienced by the modern subject, was reflected in challenged perception and diminished concentration. This fragmentation extended into childhood, where toys no longer mediated a shared experiential world. The dissonance of capitalist modernity destabilised meaning. Benjamin might then have asked: what kind of meaning could be passed on to an apprentice when mass-market toy production mirrored a broader crisis in historical consciousness?

In the department stores and catalogues of the nineteenth century, toys appeared alongside other consumer goods, displayed as objects of novelty, constantly replaced by newer versions. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin identifies modernité as a fixation on the “eternal recurrence of the new,” a logic that binds toys to fashion centred on standardisation and quantifiable serial production. Fashion, driven by visual uniformity, emerges as the antithesis of style in both its canny (visual uniformity) and uncanny (spiritual unity) forms. Toys became broadly available, while artisanal products that once retained the “trace of the practicing hand” were replaced by mass-produced goods that often distracted from—or destroyed—what they purported to offer. Objects became interchangeable; history collapsed into cycles of repetition yielding the same outcomes: greater profits for some, fewer rights for others. The marketplace, driven by efficiency, encouraged machinery and low-skilled labour to replace artisanship. At stake was not only the disintegration of meaning under capitalism, but also the brutality of what Foucault termed a “disciplinary society,” where rigid norms enforce compliance.

Faced with this crisis of signification, Benjamin—like the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin—turned to marginal objects, developing an investigative strategy attentive to fragments, details, and miscellaneous objects of everyday life. The alienation produced by a reified world is exposed through an aesthetic of extremes that reveals its political stakes. When everything is treated as a ‘thing’ or a product, experience becomes distancing and dehumanising, reinforcing the power structures that sustain this way of life. Politics, for Benjamin, had become an aesthetic spectacle. It is thus unsurprising that toys—seemingly insignificant artefacts—acquire such importance for him. He was concerned with the abuses of technological forms on people, and on the production of works of art.

In Toys and Play, Benjamin writes:

“The fact is that the perceptual world of the child is influenced at every point by traces of older generations, and has to take issue with them. The same applies to the child’s play activities. It is impossible to construct them as dwelling in a fantasy realm, a fairy-tale land of pure childhood or pure art. Even where they are not simply imitations of the tools of adults, toys are a site of conflict, less of the child with the adult than of the adult with the child. For who gives the child his toys if not adults?”

This passage reiterates that children are part of a socio-politically determined community. How we use objects is both a mimetic and linguistic activity, learned within a community and specific to each historical moment, dependent on existing technologies and social conditions. Toys may become sites of intergenerational conflict, but they can also serve as tools for peaceful resolution. Play has transformative potential when it fully engages our modes of being and perceiving.

If each epoch has its own way of seeing and perceiving the world, what tools allow us to understand it symbolically and meaningfully? For Benjamin, the answer is language, which reveals the world while preserving a human way of relating to things. Yet language, too, can be abused. As early as 1919, Benjamin found in Charles Baudelaire—whom he regarded as one of the most significant writers of the nineteenth century—responses to the galvanising slogans of fascism. His notes on Baudelaire show how central the poet’s work was for him, as his language not only reflected “childlike innocence and purity,” but also came directly “from the people”. “In “L’art pour l’art,” Benjamin writes, “the poet for the first time faces language the way the buyer faces the commodity on the open market. He has lost his familiarity with the process of its production to a particularly high degree.” This estrangement from the conditions of production led Benjamin, through allegorical reading, to transform the commodity into a poetic object, situating art and toys alike within a commodified world, while preserving their critical and symbolic potential.

Old toys, Benjamin insists, are crucial for art history because they belong to a pre-capitalist, auratic time “that found parents and children together.” Drawing again on Baudelaire, who claims that toys constitute a child’s first initiation into art, Benjamin continues his loving exploration of objects as a means of rekindling attentiveness and connection. In The Morality of Toys, Baudelaire describes the child who “turns, returns his toy, scratches it, shakes it, bangs it against walls, throws it to the ground,” seeking to discover its “soul.” While adults are drawn to novelty, children readily invest obsolete objects with meaning. A piece of cloth may become a puppet, a teacher, a general, or an animal. From such encounters, entire worldviews can be constructed or dismantled. Here, Benjamin introduces the dialectical image: toys do not belong to linear, chronological time but emerge in constellations where past and present overlap. This montage subverts linear historiography and replaces it with a materialist view of history traced “against the grain,” challenging the dominance of singular narratives.

What, then, distinguishes Erlebnis from Erfahrung? Modern life, characterised by shock, repetition, and reflexive behaviour, privileges Erlebnis: fleeting, isolated impressions. By contrast, Erfahrung unfolds through narrative, memory, and intersubjective relations embedded in shared language. In Some Motifs in Baudelaire, Benjamin compares games of chance to the repetitive gestures of industrial labour, both devoid of cumulative meaning. Such reflexive repetition lacks substantive value and generates nothing original, offering only momentary stimulation—much like contemporary doomscrolling.

Children’s play, however, is animated by repetition infused with affect and imagination. Through mimetic engagement, children assign meaning to objects, determining what becomes a toy. In doing so, they construct an ontology of the animate and inanimate, embedded in local contexts and sustained through storytelling. This enables a form of Erfahrung that is relational and intersubjective.

From individual experience, Benjamin moves to the collective through his theory of dreams. “The childhood experience of a generation,” he writes, “has much in common with dream experience.” In Dream Kitsch (Gloss on Surrealism), he describes the connection between hand, object, and meaning:

“No longer does the dream reveal a blue horizon. The dream has grown gray. The gray coating of dust on things is its best part. Dreams are now a shortcut to banality. Technology consigns the outer image of things to a long farewell, like banknotes that are bound to lose their value. It is then that the hand retrieves this outer cast in dreams and, even as they are slipping away, makes contact with familiar contours. It catches hold of objects at their most threadbare and timeworn point.”

In The Arcades Project, dream and awakening form a dialectical pair: dream corresponds to historical unconsciousness, while awakening marks the moment of political insight. Drawing on Freud, Marx, and the Surrealists, Benjamin turns to outmoded objects—the ruins of everyday life—as sites where historical truth may be restored. Toys, like everyday objects or objets trouvés, mediate between unconscious desire and historical action. For Benjamin, an epoch becomes most legible in moments of extreme concreteness, as revealed in children’s games or artistic practices. Accordingly, one of the most radical implications of his work lies in the possibility of reviving an “old world of symbols” capable of generating a collective awakening.

Awakening from a dream reclaims remembrance, much as we can retrieve or reenact childhood memories. Benjamin illustrates this dynamic by drawing on Marcel Proust, who, upon tasting a madeleine, recalls moments of childhood through mémoire involontaire. Such fragments and everyday objects, preserved in images charged with affective potential, move back and forth across time, transcending fashion and giving rise to the fully formed type of experience, Erfahrung. Experience, which incorporates ritual and recollection, resonates with Baudelaire’s Correspondances insofar as it forges a link between past and present in a harmonious unity with nature, unfolding within ahistorical time. Memory becomes spatialised when flash images erupt in moments of awakening; such moments constitute ruptures in the linear, progressive model of history.

Recollection (Gedächtnis, Eingedenken) thus underpins Benjamin’s epistemology of history: the past, conceived as a dialectical image of forgetting and remembering, is transposed into the present as a “now of recognisability.” Childhood memories, when they relate us to the world in consequential ways, can acquire political force, enabling solidarity and historical transformation. This stands in stark contrast to the aestheticised politics of fascism, which relied on monumental spectacle, shock, and grandiose language to secure obedience. Against the gigantism of propaganda and mass rallies, the miniature world of toys emerges as a quiet form of resistance, interrupting the continuum of domination.

In this sense, Benjamin’s toy imagery does more than illuminate nineteenth-century historical consciousness; it anticipates contemporary conditions in which digital commodities, algorithmic variation, and overconsumption increasingly shape subjectivity. As play is subsumed by platforms and memory by data archives, Benjamin’s insistence on toys and play as sites of experience, remembrance, and awakening remains a critical reminder that the past is continually reactivated in present moments, keeping the present open. The meaning of both past and future is realised through the present, which can still resist commodified time and reopen the possibility of collective imagination. Every creative act, however small or playful, is a form of a new beginning—an intervention into the temporal order that shapes our world.

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*This piece is a revised and adapted version of a longer paper I presented at UCL in 2015.

For more on Walter Benjamin, see:

Hannah Arendt on “Walter Benjamin 1892-1941.” Men in dark times.

Walter Benjamin, Berlin childhood around 1900.

Walter Benjamin, One-way street and other writings.

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Vol. 1, 2, 3, ed. by Jennings, Eiland and Smith, translated by Rodney Livingstone and Others.

In a recent talk, a writer discussed (among other things) Egon Schiele’s numerous self-portraits. The speaker suggested that, for Schiele, the self-portrait became a medium in its own right. By portraying himself variously as a mortal body, a divine figure, a saint, or a symbolic archetype, Schiele seemed, in their view, to make it nearly impossible to discern a stable, knowable “him” beneath these proliferating representations.

Yet this assertion is conceptually limited. It assumes that self-portraiture aims to represent a unique, authentic self and, by implication, that Schiele’s multiplicity is confusing for the viewer. Of course, such an expectation misreads the history of portraiture and the advent of modernism. The concept of likeness or “faithful” representation is slippery and difficult to define—destabilised by artists from Matisse and Kirchner at the turn of the century to Vivian Maier, Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman and Gillian Wearing, who departed from traditional conventions of self-representation and exposed its performative, constructed nature.

The comment also conflates representation with self-disclosure, as though the viewer’s task were to recover a biographical essence. It ignores the fact that portraiture—especially in expressionist practice—is not a mimetic enterprise. It is a space of invention, distortion, and symbolic projection. To insist on a definitive “him” behind the portraits imposes a mimetic paradigm that the works themselves explicitly reject.

On a deeper level, the talk made me reflect on the persistent cultural belief in a “true self,” and more broadly on the notion of authenticity and identity within creative practice. Many people search for this hidden “true self” as a sort of holy grail—something that, once discovered through an epiphany of sorts, could be fully articulated and reveal our authentic core. I reject this idea entirely. No self exists outside context, history, or relations. The “I” that speaks or writes is always situated, relational, contingent, and mediated.

Selfhood, as I see it, is co-constituted through relations (remember Derrida’s question: Who am I to you?) as much as through individual experience. As writers and poets, we understand ourselves partly by interpreting the world through the lens of our craft; we do not discover or reveal a “real” self. Instead, we co-create one as our perspectives are shaped by our experiences, our historical and political conditions, and the networks of relations that constitute us—people, books, music, works of art, and so forth. We are, in this sense, the evolving sum of these encounters.

The Self and the “I”

Each of us uses the “I” when we refer to ourselves. When we speak this way, we assume that we already possess some conception of who we are. Philosophically, this can mean that we are self-conscious—aware of ourselves as subjects—or that we can situate ourselves within a larger narrative, creating a unified account that confers coherence on our experiences (what is sometimes called ‘the unity of consciousness’).

But we never refer to ourselves in isolation. Following Descartes’ dictum, when I think of myself or conceive the idea of myself in my mind, I can say “I am, I exist.” But what am I? At the most basic level, we are human beings, biologically classified as such. We are also moral and political persons—subjects who bear responsibilities and rights (a more complex notion to which I will return).

Ludwig Wittgenstein, in The Blue Book, makes a helpful distinction about the use of I: he talks about “the use of I as Subject,” as in “I am thinking“ or “I see such and such,” and “the use of I as Object,” like “My ankle is broken.” Put more simply, when we say “I am thinking,” we are focusing on our experience or perspective as a subject. When we say “My ankle is broken,” we recognise ourselves as objects who possess body parts. This distinction helps us understand how we relate to the world—and to ourselves—differently in different contexts.

When we think of personal identity, we tend to focus on the qualities that make us who we are—qualities we feel we own and are emotionally attached to, which can feel stabilising and reassuring. The problem arises when the things that once “defined me” begin to change. From birth, we are “thrown into the world” (to borrow Heidegger’s phrase) with ascribed categories—gender, ethnicity, nationality—and with an embodied corporeality we did not choose. These form the initial conditions of our subjectivity, which is contingent and temporary.

As individuals, we share many of these categories with the larger groups or collectives to which we belong—or from which we might seek to depart, such as through changing one’s national identity. But what about the body? Does my body belong to me? Is it always true that my body belongs to me? One need only look around the world to find many countries in which this is not the case, where women’s bodies effectively belong to their families or communities. And closer to home: are all parts of your body truly yours? Is this straightforward?

Valeria Luiselli, in The Story of My Teeth, complicates the idea of possessing parts of one’s body by exploring the value attached to them. The novel follows a man named Highway, now a successful auctioneer, who buys Marilyn Monroe’s teeth to replace his own, claiming: “You don’t have to be superstitious to know that, when used correctly, certain objects can transfer their powerful qualities to us.” The tooth is simultaneously his and not his; it belongs to the body and yet resists incorporation into the ordinary sense of “I”. Later, Highway auctions off his old teeth to raise funds for the local church, proclaiming that the bicuspids he offers once belonged to Plato, Petrarch, Montaigne, and Borges—each accompanied by a story (with real quotations) he attaches to the relics. Luiselli’s piece is a meditation on what it means to have a part of one’s body removed or detached, and on how value is created through stories.

Luiselli’s book resonates with Elizabeth Bishop’s In the Waiting Room, in which the poet revisits a childhood moment when the young speaker unexpectedly becomes aware of herself as a discrete subject, an “I.” This awareness comes suddenly, when the child, able to read (“I could read,” she says), is unsettled by a magazine article on cannibals. From the adjoining dental room, she hears a cry of pain. She initially attributes the exclamation to her aunt, who is in the dentist’s chair, but the sound is, in fact, her own. This misattribution exposes how fragile and porous the boundaries of selfhood can be when a sound becomes dislocated from the body that produced it. To make sense of her bodily experience across time, the poem uses a distinct narrative structure:

I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn’t. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I—we—were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

-In the Waiting Room, Elizabeth Bishop

The momentary collapse of boundaries between her aunt’s distress and her own voice produces a sense of merging, a destabilising sense of “we,” as though their identities are slipping together.

To regain her footing, the child seizes on a biographical detail that belongs to her alone—her seventh birthday is approaching—and uses it as a marker of distinctness. Yet this strategy offers no real comfort. Instead, it deepens her perplexity: if she is an “I,” why this particular “I,” and what does it mean to be one self among countless others?

“Why should I be my aunt,

Or me, or anyone?”

- Elizabeth Bishop

I find Bishop’s poem a perfect example of what it means to perceive, create, and feel as an “I”—a first-person experience that implies embodiment, memory, and imagination—and simultaneously to adopt a third-person stance, living the world through reconstruction. Gary Ostertag, in his analysis (“You Are an I”) of this poem, speaks of alienation, arguing that once the self is objectified or externalised, we often ask how we are to become one with it again; the body I inhabit has no stronger claim to being “me” than anyone else’s. The poem captures this perpetual negotiation between the self and the other, showing that selfhood is neither obvious nor transparent, but a dynamic concept that must be confronted and interrogated in relation to others.

Of “Persons”

I often ask myself what we mean when we speak of “someone.” How does this category of “persons” arise? It is a concept that implies certain context-dependent qualities. In simple terms, person can be a matter of counting, as in “I have three persons speaking in my seminar today.”

In older usage, the word persona did not refer to an actual human being. It referred to a list of characters whose qualities were distinct from the actors embodying them—the dramatis personae. A persona was, quite literally, a mask, a device through which the performer’s voice passed. Only later did the term expand to denote the social role or public position a person occupies. Implicit in this lineage is the idea that behind every performed role lies something else—a nature or disposition not reducible to the part one happens to play. From this, one might infer that who we are cannot be reduced to what we are.

Cicero, writing in De officiis, made this distinction morally consequential. He argued that each of us owes a kind of fidelity to our persona—the role assigned or assumed—because our duties (officia) are shaped by the position we inhabit. The mask, in other words, is not merely decorative; it carries obligations.

Some of these ideas remain present in how we think today. Even if I do not cite Cicero’s theory directly, I do believe that as a writer, I incur specific obligations when representing others. First, I keep in mind that I have no direct access to their first-person experiences; I can only imagine, speculate, research, or empathise. Perception and creativity are essentially first-person experiences. The way I perceive pain cannot be experienced by you, though you may understand or relate to it through your own subjective framework. Similarly, how a person writes—whether fiction or nonfiction—is unique to them, shaped by their perceptions, imagination, creativity, abilities, and memory.

By drawing on imagination and attentive observation, a writer can create or depict characters, much as an actor uses a mask to inhabit a role. Through these characters, the writer can reflect, articulate, or give voice to others’ concerns and emotional lives—without claiming moral authority or presuming to resolve their issues. As writers, we can apprehend another person’s reality as much as we can, while acknowledging that we will never fully complete it. There will always be blind spots; we are imperfect beings, and that’s alright. In writing, we can aim to create a space where differing perspectives meet—a provisional “we-space” that accommodates a plurality of viewpoints and opens onto the possibility of deeper understanding. Such a space may, in turn, allow readers to envision new ways of engaging with the world, including forms of action.

Action is a political gesture, and not everyone in the world is free to self-determine. Many bodies have been historically segregated or hidden from public view, denied access to knowledge or power. Many were—and some still are—denied the status of “person.” What, then, is someone who is not a person? If bodies (and I use this word deliberately, instead of people) are denied the juridical right to exist and the right to self-determination, we can speak only of subjugation and objectification—objectification that leads to commodification, in which bodies are used as means of production and their labour devalued.

Within the liberal tradition, beginning with John Locke, the individual is said to possess his own person. Locke famously argues that although the world and its creatures are held in common, each individual nonetheless has a proprietary claim over themselves. John Stuart Mill later develops this idea by insisting that the individual is sovereign over his own body and mind. Roberto Esposito, reflecting on Mill’s formulation, notes that it effectively fuses the notion of property with that of sovereignty. The implication is that the body oscillates between two legal and conceptual statuses—at times treated as a human subject and at other times as an object. Such oscillation arises, Esposito argues, because the body was never clearly situated within the law; left without a mediating category between “person” and “thing,” it slips ambiguously between the two. Moreover, the very idea of self-ownership—an elusive concept that defies strict definition—has historically been reserved for a narrow class of privileged men, systematically excluding everyone outside that category. (I explore these reflections in an unpublished essay titled Women’s Bodies—Whose Properties?)

What I want to emphasise is that an artist—or a writer—can regard another body or person with a certain analytic or observational distance. Approaching someone objectively in this aesthetic or epistemic sense does not entail objectifying them in the economic or legal sense. To observe is not to commodify, and to describe is not to appropriate. The categories of commodity, object, and person overlap only partially. As writers, we have a duty to distinguish them to avoid confusing artistic observation with dehumanising forms of objectification.

True, one can argue that demographics and statistics flatten individuality and facilitate instrumentalisation and depersonalisation, particularly in bureaucratic contexts. But at the same time, as writers and thinkers, we use demographic knowledge to support social justice or demand protection for vulnerable groups. There is no dichotomy between demographic and personal identity: we can acknowledge, say, a 26-year-old Korean American woman (demographically described) and still fully recognise her individuality and moral standing. Demographic knowledge is limited, but it does not eliminate the possibility of ethical relations. On the contrary, it provides a basic awareness that can help us engage with someone’s marginal identity and make structures of oppression visible.

If the notion of a singular, authoritative “true self” persists, it is perhaps because it promises clarity where lived experience offers only complexity. As comforting as this promise is, it is false. What Schiele’s shifting self-portraits illuminate—and what writing itself continually demonstrates—is that the self is never something we can definitively grasp, fix, or even coherently articulate. The self is a field of ongoing construction, relation, and reinvention. Multiplicity and contradiction are not failures of authenticity; they are the conditions under which any form of authenticity becomes possible.

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For more on the concept of the “self” or “personal identity”, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/

In the images: Egon Schiele’s self-portraits, from various public and private collections.

Nusch Éluard’s eyes captivate the gaze. For a long time, I have been fascinated by this black-and-white portrait of her made by Dora Maar (born Henriette Theodora Markovitch) in 1935. The image captures her soft yet intense look, directed straight at the camera. Her face is framed by elongated fingers that lightly touch her cheeks and chin in a superbly composed picture. A large, spherical ring adorns one finger. The lighting is dramatic, creating deep shadows that accentuate her bone structure. Her eyebrows are fine and lightly defined, characteristic of 1930s fashion. Though the photograph conveys intimacy, one wonders what Nusch Éluard is thinking. And who was she?

She was born in 1906 as Maria Benz in Mulhouse, a city in eastern France near the Swiss and German borders. She travelled, worked, and lived in all three countries, making her way to Paris in the early 1930s. There, she worked as a hypnotist’s assistant, a role that combined theatre and stage performance. With a pale, round face, beautiful black hair, and arresting eyes, she possessed a quiet magnetism. One early morning, while lingering on the streets of Paris, she met by chance the Surrealist poets René Char and Paul Éluard, the latter of whom she would go on to marry a few years later.

Surrealism emerged in Paris in the 1920s, initially within literature, growing out of Dada and developing into a movement that sought to dissolve the boundaries between a person’s inner and outer worlds, challenging conventional perceptions of reality. André Breton’s main ambition was to provoke a “crisis of consciousness, both in the intellectual and moral realm”, as he stated in the Second Surrealist Manifesto (1929). Among the early participants was Paul Éluard (born Eugène Grindel), who joined the movement in 1924 before embarking on a so-called ‘journey into oblivion’ through the Antilles, Panama, and Oceania. Deeply marked by the catastrophes of his time—from the First World War to the Rif War—as well as by personal struggles, Éluard returned to Paris in 1925 and became increasingly involved in the Surrealist circle. The movement’s allure combined revolutionary political ideals with a paradoxically conservative essence, particularly regarding gender.

While Surrealists sought to subvert hierarchies, they remained constrained by their own patriarchal and homophobic assumptions. Their visual language often represented women as almost artificial, disincarnate beings or objects, mere symbols of male desire, whose bodies could be manipulated at will. Nevertheless, several female artists moved away from the Surrealist repertoire to assert autonomy and identity. Figures such as Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, and Frida Kahlo redefined their creative identities within or alongside the movement. Which brings us, inevitably, to the question: what about Nusch Éluard? Can her role be reassessed? Could she be considered a model, yes, but also an artist in her own right, and perhaps a cultural mediator between the avant-gardes?

Nusch Éluard’s life has often been associated with that of famous male artists—Picasso, Max Bill, and Man Ray—and, of course, her husband, the poet Paul Éluard. But before the Parisian avant-garde, there were formative years devoted to the performing arts. Born into a family of circus acrobats, Nusch Éluard was trained from early childhood in acrobatics and contortion. Her father’s big top toured the regions between France and Germany. The unusual and the mysterious attracted large audiences who followed the performers from show to show. It was within that world of spectacle that Nusch Éluard moved and worked, from Berlin’s theatres, where she performed in a play by Strindberg, to the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol in Paris.

However, performing and acting on stage are ephemeral gestures. We might never recover the grace of Nusch Éluard’s acts—or how much they brought her joy or sorrow—since documentation is scarce. The theatre historian Agnès Pierron shows that one of the main themes in those French theatres, like the Grand-Guignol, was madness and hysteria, with a fascination for hypnotism; even patients from the Salpêtrière Hospital appeared on stage accompanied by the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. There was pain, distorted ideas about women, and distraction for a public who wanted to forget the calamity of dying—or living.

A similar fascination with madness and “convulsion” in women can be traced in André Breton’s Nadja. As the title implies, Nadja ostensibly centres on the woman of that name, yet the text swiftly unsettles the illusion. The opening paragraph redirects the reader’s attention from Nadja to Breton’s own subjectivity, asking: “Who am I?” As the narrative unfolds, we trace Breton’s imagination, his dreamscapes, and his reflections. How does Nadja integrate into that narrative? Is she the subject, or merely an instrument? Walter Benjamin’s 1929 essay, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia”, does not address Nadja directly, but his reflections on Surrealism’s revolutionary consciousness and its pursuit of “profane illumination” help clarify her role. Nadja is a catalyst, a means through which Breton reconnects with both the collective, revolutionary memory of Paris and his own past as a wartime psychiatric intern. Her descent into madness fuels the text’s surrealist tenor but also shows the limits of Breton’s empathy, as her institutionalisation precipitates his renunciation of his muse—and of psychiatry—altogether.

Mythology was embedded in Surrealist thinking: from monolithic myths of linearity, framed into fixed categorisations, to myths around women as muses or erotic objects—the femme fatale, a seductive and voracious figure; the femme-fleur, imagined as fertile energy; the femme-enfant, imagined as an innocent, child-like being in need of protection. To be a woman intimately involved with a French Surrealist in the interwar years was, to put it mildly, a complicated affair. Tellingly, amid the vast literature on Surrealism, it is the lives of men—their friendships, alliances, rivalries, and periodic reconciliations—that have received the most meticulous attention. The dynamics grew even more complex for a female artist within such a milieu, particularly when intimacy blurred the boundaries between art and life. Consider the duos Dora Maar and Picasso, or Jacqueline Lamba and Breton. The two women negotiated differently the use of metaphor, their own ideas of femininity, and their political commitments, establishing networks of exchange and creativity not forged through domination or exploitation but through mutual assistance. Maar photographed not only Lamba but also Leonora Fini and Nusch Éluard, as more Surrealist women artists engaged with representations of their female peers. Through such reversals of perspective, they subverted the hierarchies that contained them and questioned the gaze presumed to define them.

In 1936, Dora Maar captured the face of Nusch Éluard behind the delicate geometry of a spider’s web. The image was commissioned to advertise Pétrole Hahn anti-wrinkle cream. In Paris, this was a moment when make-up and skin-care products were booming, fashion magazines were emerging, and beauty salons were opening. Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden closely competed for an international clientele, while in France Maison Guerlain expanded, opening a beauty salon on the Champs-Élysées in 1939. Women were sold the dream of flawless skin. Creams promoted perpetual youth and beauty, some under the disquieting caption: “The Years Lie in Wait.” Nusch Éluard was barely thirty, but that mattered little, as the commodification of youth—and the anxiety that sustains it—was built on the fear of ageing. Legend has it that this superbly constructed image was, for a period, erroneously attributed to Man Ray.

Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitsky) photographed the artistic moderns, from James Joyce to Djuna Barnes, from Gertrude Stein to Picasso. From an early age, he was drawn to the purity of geometric forms and the contour of the female body—naked if possible. While in Paris, he practised fashion photography and experimented with niche forms such as the rayograph. He was a central figure in the Surrealist circle and a friend of Paul Éluard. One day, they decided to collaborate on a book of poems conceived as a livre-objet, a work in which text and image merge. Éluard’s poetry explored the complexities of love and desire, and Man Ray suggested Nusch Éluard as the model. What followed was a series of nude studies: some reveal the silhouette of Nusch’s body; others are sharper in focus; some are fragmentary—without head or foot.

The act of photographing presupposes a degree of objectification: the sitter stilled, appropriated, and reframed through the lens. Facile (Easy) was published in 1935, with a design by Guy Lévis Mano. Nusch’s bare body becomes congruent with the book, merging with the surface of the page. Flesh, image, and text compose one of the era’s most iconic photopoetic works. Though the relationships between publisher, photographer, and poet were acknowledged—and praised by some critics—the model’s name was erased.

As so often happens, the posthumous narrative reduced Nusch Éluard, many times, to “poet’s wife” or “muse”. This is not an isolated case: scholarship has sometimes deepened such erasures, relegating women’s contributions to the margins of the Surrealist canon. Joana Masó, in her biography Nusch Éluard – Les femmes sous le surréalisme, brings new perspectives on her life and work, positioning Nusch as both a twentieth-century icon and an artist in her own right.

Masó’s study also sheds light on a largely overlooked chapter in Nusch Éluard’s trajectory. Fluent in German and French, Nusch lived in Zurich between 1929 and 1930. During that time, she had a liaison with the Bauhaus artist Max Bill, who studied for two years in Dessau under Josef Albers, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, László Moholy-Nagy, and Oskar Schlemmer. It emerges that she engaged with the German avant-garde by translating projects for Bill and contributing to his first exhibition, Malerei und Grafik. In a letter to his father, Bill writes:

“These past few months, Nusch has been working for me — first in France, for ZIKA, and now in Zurich. I can create fabulous designs, but it’s useless if there’s no one to promote them for me. Wherever Nusch goes, everyone loves her.”

Masó argues that Nusch Éluard’s contribution—whether as an interpreter and mediator between the two avant-gardes or through her involvement in the exhibition—has been unjustly overlooked and deserves far greater acknowledgement. Indeed, we should ask whether her role as an artist has been underestimated, and to what extent traces of her work have disappeared from the record.

Recently, a series of collages produced by Nusch Éluard between 1935 and 1937 has emerged. In some, she portrays female nudes in dynamic, off-balance postures. As Masó observes, they constitute a singular intervention within Surrealism. Here the nude is reconfigured: no longer an object of desire but a figure suspended between life and death, or caught in the tension between ascent and fall. The bodies are athletic, captured in movement—sometimes poised on a tightrope—accustomed to risk. Yet the women refuse our gaze; they seem to float in the composition, embodying the very instability that defines art.

For the Surrealists, the line between art and life was thin. They spent time together, travelled, laughed, played, juxtaposed images and texts, and collaborated. One of the most striking collective forms was the cadavre exquis—the “exquisite corpse”. Invented by André Breton in 1925, it invited participants to work sequentially on folded sections of the same sheet, drawing one after the other.

One eerie composition by Breton, Nusch Éluard, and Valentine Hugo, made in pastel on black construction paper in the 1930s, shows a spectral figure, an orange snake-like shape, and a purple bathtub-coffin with four legs, leaf-like wings, and a tiny bee. Nusch participated actively in these chance-driven acts of creation.

The group around them in Paris was fluid. Friendships came and went; the members embodied the Surrealist life they sought to express. As they travelled, they lived an existence that left space for play and creativity. In 1937, for instance, they spent the summer in Mougins, overlooking Cannes and Antibes, where Dora Maar and Picasso had found a charming place and invited their friends—Man Ray, Adrienne Fidelin, Lee Miller, Paul and Nusch Éluard.

In those cloudless days, Dora Maar and Lee Miller became the chroniclers of their communal life in Mougins. They captured the collective spirit, often choosing group portraits or couples. Even when Lee Miller snapshots Nusch Éluard in an impromptu burst of laughter, the result contrasts with the male preference for carefully constructed images. In moments of metamorphosis, Nusch Éluard and Adrienne Fidelin play with self-made costumes or pose for Man Ray; some of his photographs explore the tenderness and sensuality of sapphic love between the two women.

However, those joyful moments would soon fade. The exhilaration of freedom and artistic camaraderie could not withstand history’s darkening turn. Fascists were advancing in Spain, and Europe itself would be engulfed in war. Exile, rupture, and loss followed: Man Ray fled; Dora Maar and Picasso inevitably broke up; and, saddest of all, Nusch Éluard died suddenly, at only forty years old.

Nusch Éluard was certainly an active presence in the various coteries formed in and around the Surrealist movement. We know her through the lenses of Dora Maar, Lee Miller, and Man Ray; we know her from Picasso’s portraits; we might even know her through the verses of Éluard’s poetry. But do we really know her? Could we still discover something about her? In her art and life, she attempted to make the familiar unfamiliar, to use chance and strange juxtapositions; as a fashionable icon, she contributed to shaping the Parisian avant-garde as we know it today: radical and non-conformist.

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