Siri Hustvedt - Living, Thinking, Looking - Essays

“Duccio di Buoninsegna at the Met.” “La Vierge et l’Enfant” in Nouvel Observateur (Aug. 18, 2005).

“Kiki Smith: Bound and Unbound,” catalogue essay for Kiki Smith: Wellspring, Repères, Cahiers d’ art contemporain, no. 139, Galerie Lelong, Paris (2007).

“This Living Hand” as “The Writer Siri Hustvedt on the Experience of Drawing” in The Guardian (Sept. 19, 2009).

“Truth and Rightness: Gerhard Richter,” catalogue essay for Gerhard Richter: Overpainted Photographs . Museum Morsbrich, Leverkusen, Centre de la photographie Genève (2009).

“Annette Messager: Hers and Mine,” published as “Puppet Master” in The Guardian (Feb. 21, 2009).

“Necessary Leaps: Richard Allen Morris,” catalogue essay for Richard Allen Morris Retrospective: 1958–2004 at the Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany, and Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2005).

“Margaret Bowland’s Theatrum Mundi ,” catalogue essay for Excerpts from the Great American Songbook, Babcock Galleries, New York, and the Greenville County Museum of Art (2011).

“Why Goya?” Delivered as a lecture at the Prado Museum in Madrid for Lecture Series sponsored by Fundacion Amigos Museo del Prado (Feb. 20, 2007); published in Spanish as “Francisco de Goya o los equivos,” by Fundacion Amigos Museo del Prado (2008).

“Embodied Visions: What Does It Mean to Look at a Work of Art?” Delivered as the third annual Schelling Lecture at the Academie der Bildenen Künste in Munich (Feb. 27, 2010); published as a bilingual book by Deutscher Kunst Verlag (2010); published in The Yale Review : 98, no. 4 (2010).

Siri Hustvedt was born in 1955 in Northfield, Minnesota. She has a Ph.D. from Columbia University in English literature and is the author of five novels, The Sorrows of an American, What I Loved, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, The Blindfold, and The Summer Without Men, as well as two collections of essays, A Plea for Eros and Mysteries of the Rectangle, and an interdisciplinary investigation of the body and mind in The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. She lives in Brooklyn.

Dagerman was born in 1923 to working-class parents outside the village of Älvksrleby. Dagerman’s mother abandoned him when he was still a baby, and he was raised by his grandparents. At twelve, he moved to Stockholm to live with his father and became active in the youth organization of the Syndicalist Union. When he was sixteen, a lunatic murdered his beloved grandfather, and his grandmother died not long after. Between the ages of twenty and twenty-six, Dagerman wrote four novels, four plays, a collection of stories, articles, essays, and poems. In 1946, he traveled in Germany and wrote German Autumn, a strikingly human portrait of the country after the war. His prolific abilities, however, began to wane, and he suffered from writer’s block. In 1954, at age thirty-one, suffering from depression and perhaps schizophrenia, he committed suicide. Although his work has been translated into English and is admired by many writers in England and America, Dagerman’s fame has been mostly confined to Europe. This is sad because he is a writer of uncommon urgency and power.