Read more

There is a particular kind of reading I have been missing lately. The biographies and catalogues I work through each month for Slow Looking are indispensable, but what I have wanted, alongside them, is the reading of novels. Not just any novels but specifically novels from the artist’s own decade written in the same air, that in one way or another capture the zeitgeist of that time.

So I am starting something this month that I have decided to share with paid subscribers. Some Slow Looking arcs, depending on the artist, occasionally will be accompanied by a short list of novels from the artist’s world. A reading companion of novels I am keeping next to me as I deep-dive into one artist. Some I will read in full this month. Others will be summer reading, or simply kept on this list to come back to later. A commonplace in progress, made monthly.

When this idea first came to me I did not have a name for it. My own training in art history was built around the paintings and the scholarship on them; reading the period’s novels as a way into the pictures was not part of the curriculum I knew, even though interdisciplinarity has been a live and growing part of art history for decades. So it was a happy surprise, after I had already drafted this list, to find that the thing I was reaching for has a lineage and a literature of its own: the cultural history that treats a period’s fiction, painting, and thought as answers to a shared set of anxieties. For this city the founding work is Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna,1 which reads Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal in the same frame as Klimt and Freud.

For Schiele in June I have selected six novels from the Habsburg world that belong alongside his work.

Read more