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Looking at Pictures

Looking at Pictures

Looking at Pictures

By Robert Walser
Translated by Susan Bernofsky, Lydia Davis, and Christopher Middleton

"This jeweled box of a book… float[s], wonderfully, somewhere in a land between short story and criticism."—Randy Kennedy, The New York Times

"There is living flight to Walser’s art. His thinking moves shoulder to shoulder with his writing, one rarely outpacing the other. He enacts, rather than presents, his consumption of pictures."—Esther Yi, Los Angeles Review of Books

"He was the most courageous kind of eccentric, daydreaming at some doomed remove from the world yet able to conjure it up in his work, where it attains a warm and puzzling glow."—Charlie Fox, Frieze

Much can be learned by looking at pictures with Robert Walser. Studded with gorgeous full-color images, Looking at Pictures presents a little-known facet of the work of the eccentric Swiss genius: his writings on art. His essays consider Van Gogh, Cezanne, Rembrandt, Cranach, Watteau, Fragonard, Brueghel and his own brother Karl. With his signature asides, jokes, and "great goings-astray," Walser also discusses topics such as the character of the artist and of the dilettante as well as the differences between painters and poets. Every piece is marked by Walser’s unique eye, his delicate, intoxicating perceptiveness, and his very particular sensibilities―and all are touched by his magic screwball wit.

Hardcover
143 pages
Christine Burgin and New Directions, 2015
5 x 0.8 x 7.4 inches
ISBN 9780811224246
Art, Essay, Criticism 

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