Welcome to After the Art’s twenty-seventh issue.
We hope you enjoy these five essays:
“Inaccurate Silence” by Darryl Whetter
“Under the Tuscan Rain” by Marianne Rogoff
“The Unlikely Sublime: Fragonard’s Blindman’s Buff” by Daniel Barbiero
“Dying for Gesualdo” by Anna Baker Smith
“Thirteen Years Old” by Jennifer Anne Gordon Continue reading “After the Art – Issue 27 – March 2025”
by Darryl Whetter
Silence is so accurate.
—Mark Rothko
How do we know when it’s love? Continue reading “Inaccurate Silence”
by Marianne Rogoff
After all day and all night of buses, moving walkways, escalators, planes, and trains I woke up alone in a big bed in Arezzo, strange because I was not traveling alone. I unpacked my rain hoodie to stroll the wet grounds of the inn and found my guy already at breakfast, the cook Gabriela predicting bigger storms as dark clouds barreled through a drizzling blue-gray sky. Continue reading “Under the Tuscan Rain”
by Daniel Barbiero
I first saw, really saw, Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Blindman’s Buff by accident. Continue reading “The Unlikely Sublime: Fragonard’s Blindman’s Buff”
by Anna Baker Smith
It’s the evening of Palm Sunday, early April and cold, the sky over downtown Amherst dark. Just inside an old stone church, our little choir of twelve is seated in a circle near the heavy wooden doors. On the wall behind us is a marble plaque, with the words of a long-dead parishioner dedicating the bell tower in memory of his now also long-dead wife. Continue reading “Dying for Gesualdo”
by Jennifer Anne Gordon
“Obviously, Doctor,” she said, “you’ve never been a thirteen-year-old girl.”
It is this line that I think of often, the words of the young Cecelia from Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides. Continue reading “Thirteen Years Old”
After the Art 