Sienese painting and financial crisis, an old essay on a current topic, briefly available at the Believer magazine. Painters and bankers have a long double history. Through the ages, in Siena, Florence, France and New York. It’s not just that they exchanged things of value. Painters and bankers discovered similar representations, especially of time, new ways of seeing that allowed them to create value. I wrote an essay about this 12 years ago called ‘Gold, Golden, Gilded, Glittering,’ that took me more than a year and 1,000 rabbit [...] read more

Essay on Ja'Tovia Gary and Claude Monet in the gardens at Giverny for The Yale Review. This extended essay considers the ways artists fold experiences of time, industry, and violence into more tranquil landscapes and gardens from the time of Claude Monet standing in his gardens and hearing the shells of World War I falling, to our own time, when film and installation maker Ja'Tovia Gary stood in those same gardens listening to violent repercussions. Gary's The Giverny Suite was up at the Museum of Modern Art for much [...] read more

An essay of mine on lines from Jane Austen and Gwendolyn Brooks that keep me company on walking days in quarantine and during Black Lives Matter is up at Lit Hub today. https://lithub. com/on-jane-austens-politics-of-walking/ In the piece I've continued to think about the wonderful sculpture of Gwendolyn Brooks by Margot McMahon, with the collaboration of Nora Brooks Blakely that is here in our neighborhood. A entry of mine about the sculpture is in my art notebook at: https://rachelecohen. com/blog/The_Frederick_Project/c/851 [...] read more

An excerpt from my book Austen Years is at the New Yorker Online and can be reached here: Living Through Turbulent Times with Jane Austen: How six unexpectedly far-ranging novels carried me through eight years, two births, one death, and a changing world [...] read more

An essay I wrote for the New Yorker online, about missing museums, and making my own remembered museum in the time of quarantine. With paintings by Nicolas Poussin, Berthe Morisot, and William Walker. From the essay: "Museums know the desires of our hands. That is why they have so many “Do Not Touch” signs, so many guards to caution us back. The special presence of paintings comes from their being at once untouchable and viscerally evocative of touch. . . " [...] read more

This is an essay I wrote on the paintings of Beauford Delaney, reflecting on a recent exhibition at the Knoxville Museum of Art. The exhibition was titled, Through the Unusual Door: Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin. The essay is in Apollo Magazine, April, 2020 under the title "Here is a man who could do whatever interested him in paint -- on the paintings of Beauford Delaney. " [...] read more

This is an essay on the painter Berthe Morisot and an important retrospective of her work in 2018 that originated in  Québec at the MNBAQ, and traveled to the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.  The essay appeared in Apollo Magazine in October, 2018. [...] read more

This essay, on the occasion of the Metropolitan Museum's Poussin Exhibition, "Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions," February 12-May 11, 2008, appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of The Threepenny Review . [...] read more

This essay on the ruptured friendship of Émil Zola and Paul Cézanne appeared in The New Yorker in 2005 and is available to subscribers. [...] read more