Robert Motherwell Illustrating Poetry

By Heidi Colsman-Freyberger

FEB 2023 | Critics Page

In his eulogy for Robert Motherwell the English critic Bryan Robertson remarked, “No other artist in this century could have been quite so much in love with literature, and, above all, poetry.”

Surrealist Collaboration: Poetry, Art, Literature, Ingenuity and Life Itself

By Mary Ann Caws

FEB 2022 | ArtSeen

A stupendous exhibit. I won’t put an exclamation point there, for that punctuation would be repeated, excessively. Here is a fine example of what a gallery can do in an exhibition if the focus is on a specific kind of thing, in this case on an historic collective and collaborative art-making activity, repeated differently as an off and on ritual event.

The Biography of a Great Poetry

By Ron Horning

MAY 2022 | Books

While the Collected Poems is retrospective, printing the poems Auden wanted as he wanted them by the time of his death, the Princeton Poems, exhilaratingly prospective, prints the poems as they first appeared in individual books, recreating Auden’s poetic development as it actually happened from 1928 to 1972, including many poems later eliminated, plus the poems from the posthumous Thank You, Fog.

Waking From the Dream of Mark Leidner’s Poetry

By Bianca Stone

JUNE 2021 | Books

The title of Mark Leidner’s new gorgeously made book Returning the Sword to the Stone is apt. Like a reverse Arthur Pendragon, we decide not to go for the holy grail, not to accept our righteous lineage, and maybe not to pursue a noble quest in human development but stay home and continue “whipping ourselves with Christmas lights” and theorizing about why we do it. We’re considering our crazy human condition and laughing at our own limited idea of ourselves.