The journey of souls

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate 3 NEW YORK - Whenever I see the word "identity" in an exhibition title, I have an urge to vanish into the soothing nebulousness of a steamed-up bathroom. On the other hand, I am interested in how artists respond to national defeat and disaster. So I recommend "Beyond the Light: Identity and Place in Nineteenth-Century Danish Art." The show, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sounds unprepossessing. Danish art from the early 19th century? "Identity and place"? Unless you are a big fan of "Borgen" and eager to know what Birgitte Nyborg meant when she said, in the current season's final episode, that "modern day Denmark was born of defeat," you might be inclined to give it a pass. Reconsider. A lot of terrific art emerges from national trauma. Impressionism would not have taken the form it did without the Franco-Prussian War and the civil war inside Paris of 1870-71. Dada and art deco … [Read more...] about Scarred by defeat, they gave birth to a golden age of Danish art

Stephanie Seymour‘s greatest fashion muse is her late son, Harry Brant. The veteran supermodel recently opened up to the Wall Street Journal about loss and healing in her first interview since the death of her youngest son with businessman and publisher Peter Brant . Harry Brant, a rising model and socialite who frequented New York’s art and style scenes, died in January 2021 after struggling with addiction and accidentally overdosing on prescription drugs. He was 24. “If I think that Harry would love something, I do it, and it does help me with my grief,” Seymour told the Journal. Entertainment & Arts Harry Brant, New York socialite and son of model Stephanie Seymour, dies at 24 Harry Brant, son of supermodel Stephanie Seymour and businessman Peter Brant, has died of a prescription drug overdose. He was 24. Advertisement One way Seymour has been able to cope with the loss of her son is by wearing his favorite outfits. … [Read more...] about Stephanie Seymour pays homage to late son Harry Brant by modeling his clothes

See the article in its original context from February 9, 1986 Section Page Buy Reprints View on timesmachine TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. THE ENGLISH department at Yale used to resemble a sort of English country estate. It included a great house of many wings and rooms (the Elizabethan Pavilion, the Metaphysical Poets Billiard Parlor, the T. S. Eliot Chapel and so forth) and, normally, one entered this house via certain well-marked paths and avenues that ran through a spacious park. The park looked as though Nature had … [Read more...] about THE TYRANNY OF THE YALE CRITICS

See the article in its original context from August 28, 1988 Section Page Buy Reprints View on timesmachine TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. THE BAR IN THE AUDITORIUM lobby at the University of Antwerp was crowded with scholars in baggy suits, itinerant students, assorted hangers-on. There were also a few prosperous-looking older men, who turned out to be childhood friends of Paul de Man - the focus of an international conference held last June at the university. You wouldn't have known from the sessions listed in the … [Read more...] about The Case of Paul De Man

Geoffrey H. Hartman, a literary critic whose work took in the Romantic poets, Judaic sacred texts, Holocaust studies, deconstruction and the workings of memory — and took on the very function of criticism itself — died on March 14 at his home in Hamden, Conn. He was 86. His death was announced by Yale University, where he was the Sterling professor emeritus of English and comparative literature. Considered one of the world’s foremost scholars of literature, Professor Hartman was associated with the “Yale School,” a cohort of literary theorists that included Harold Bloom, J. Hillis Miller and Paul de Man. Their work was rooted in deconstruction, the approach to analyzing the multilayered relationship between a text and its meaning that was advanced by the 20th-century French philosopher Jacques Derrida . Professor Hartman was renowned for his vast Continental erudition. His scholarly attention ranged over Wordsworth, to whom he was long devoted; the poetry of Gerard Manley … [Read more...] about Geoffrey H. Hartman, Scholar Who Saw Literary Criticism as Art, Dies at 86

See the article in its original context from June 20, 1982 Section Page Buy Reprints View on timesmachine TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. EMERSON IN HIS JOURNALS Selected and Edited by Joel Porte. Illustrated. 588 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. $25. EMERSON'S FALL A New Interpretation of the Major Essays. By B. L. Packer. 244 pp. New York: Continuum. $14.95. IN 1820, in the middle of his junior year at Harvard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was not yet 17, began to write in a commonplace book … [Read more...] about A YOUTH OF THE UNIVERSE