Welcome to After the Art’s twenty-second issue.
We hope you enjoy these three essays:
“Beautiful Thinking” by Lucille Lorenz
“L’Origine” by Linda Lappin
“Violent, Dark Revolts of Being” by Wes Jamison
After the Art – Issue 22 – December 2023
Beautiful Thinking
by Lucille Lorenz
What does it mean to be able to think beautifully? What does it mean to not be able to live?
I discovered Hemingway for the first time when I was 16. It was during one of the worst periods of my life. Continue reading “Beautiful Thinking”
L’Origine
by Linda Lappin
The Musée d’Orsay is packed as usual over the holidays, with visitors swarming in and out of rooms displaying the spellbinding animal portraits of Rosa Bonheur, the nineteenth century artist who captured the wild gaze of beasts and deflected them to the viewer. My goal today, instead, is a little red room on the ground floor, Salle 6, which holds one of the most notorious if rarely viewed paintings in the world: L’Origine du monde, by Gustave Courbet, created in 1866. Continue reading “L’Origine”
Violent, Dark Revolts of Being
by Wes Jamison
Portraiture used to be mimetic, representative of the actual human stuff sitting before the painter. The belief was that a person’s essence, their subject, the spirit correlated directly to the uniqueness of their face. We believed in physiognomy and phrenology: Chaucer’s Summoner’s narrow eyes, black scabby brows, and whelks of knobby white or Whitman’s animal will and large philoprogenetiveness and size. Continue reading “Violent, Dark Revolts of Being”
After the Art 