Twenty-two years later – A second reading of Milan Kundera’s

The Unbearable Lightness of Being elicited considerable interest after its publication (in French in 1984, in Czech in 1985) and ultimately became Milan Kundera’s best-known novel. A major discussion took place in the exile journal Testimony, in which Milan Jungmann reproached Kundera for pandering to his readers, for dealing too loosely with the details of [...]

A First Glimpse of Documenta 12

After World War II ended, it took the Germans 10 years to rediscover modern art. The land of poets, thinkers and painters — its appreciation for art distorted by the Nazi dictatorship — gradually remembered the power of the Avant Garde, particularly abstraction.It was an experiment that began in the ruins of war. In 1955, [...]

The Venice Biennale – How art can be the counterpoint to a superficial CNN world

The Venice Biennale is an event that always galvanizes the art world. From the four corners of the globe, critics, artists, collectors and curators converge to chew on the new. Our mandate? To look. To receive a fresh avalanche of information on art. To swap opinions. To drink cheap Prosecco under the shade trees of [...]

Going Beyond Cézanne:The Development of Robert Bresson’s Film Style in Response to thePainting of Paul Cézanne

Robert Bresson began as a painter and, while he would rarely practice the art, it was a guiding force in the development of his unique film style. In a quote from a late interview with Michel Ciment after the release of his final film, L’Argent (1982), Bresson provides some interesting insight into his motivation for [...]

Chinua Achebe: The storyteller

What, Chinua Achebe once asked in an autobiographical essay, does he have in common with Queen Victoria? “They both lost their Albert!” Born in the village of Ogidi, in the Igbo region of eastern Nigeria, in 1930, Albert Chinualomugu Achebe did much more than merely lose the imperial monicker foisted on him by devoutly Christian [...]

Interview: Salman Rushdie

How did you become so interested in language, so facile with words?I think it had to do with the fact that, when I was growing up, everyone around me was fond of fooling around with words. It was certainly common in my family, but I think it is typical of Bombay, and maybe of India, [...]