My review of Whitney Chadwick's very interesting book The Militant Muse: Love, War, and the Women of Surrealism is in this week's issue of Britain's Literary Review.  The opening can be read here: https://literaryreview. co. uk/current-issue/459 [...] read more

Radio Producer Will Duchon presents a program called "Words & Music" on Friday Evening Classics on WMNR Fine Arts Radio. A few weeks ago the segment grew out of my essay "Lost Cities," and includes excerpts of that essay, together with poems by Fernando Pessoa and Constantine Cavafy and Duchon's selection of music. https://beta. prx. org/stories/206072 [...] read more

A couple of years ago, when my biography of Bernard Berenson came out, I had a long chat with Robert Birnbaum of Our Man in Boston and Identity Theory.  The conversation was recently transcribed and posted here: https://ourmaninboston. wordpress. com/2016/01/25/not-a-chance-meeting-me-and-rachel-cohen/ [...] read more

The Virginia Quarterly Review invited a group of writers to post fragments of things seen and iphotoed on their instagram feed #VQRTrueStory.  I posted recently on photographs of hands, details from a painting by Edgar Degas and from a photograph of Sojourner Truth. To read the posts: https://www. instagram. com/vqreview/ To read the complete piece on vqronline: http://www. vqronline. org/articles/2016/01/details-fogg-museum I'm on instagram at: rachelcohennotebook [...] read more

I have a piece in the September 2015 issue of Apollo Magazine on the collections of J. P. Morgan, called "The Man Who Bought the World. " https://www. apollo-magazine. com/j-p-morgan-the-man-who-bought-the-world/ The essay is also featured among an interesting group of pieces in the weekly art newsletter, The Easel: http://the-easel. com/ I wrote about Morgan on the occasion of the reopening of the Morgan Memorial Building at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut.   The new building and the reinstallation will have their unveiling on September 19th [...] read more

Lorin Stein, editor of the Paris Review, chose Bernard Berenson as a staff pick, calling it "an engrossing capsule biography. . . a sympathetic portrait of a self-seeking but passionate lover of art. " Here is the full citation: Like many gifted people, connoisseurs are often bad at explaining what they do. At the turn of the last century, Bernard Berenson was the most influential and successful connoisseur of Italian Renaissance art. With a superhuman visual memory, an old-fashioned belief in beauty for its own sake, and rapacious personal charm, this son of working-class Jewish immigrants climbed [...] read more

Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade has been longlisted for Britain's JQ Wingate Prize, hosted by the Jewish Quarterly . Others on the long list this year include Simon Schama, Gary Shteyngart, Maxim Leo and Hanna Krall.  The prize is awarded to "the best book to translate the idea of Jewishness to the general reader. "   The judges were Devorah Baum, Eva Hoffman, Gabriel Josipovici and George Szirtes. More information about the prize can be found here: http://jewishquarterly. org/2014/11/simon-schama-gary-shteyngart-maxim-leo-2015-wingate-longlist/ [...] read more

The Fall 2014 issue of the Threepenny Review has a lovely symposium on libraries, with contributions from Oliver Sacks, Francine Prose, Alberto Manguel and many others. My own short piece begins: O ne way to organize my thoughts about libraries would be to begin with childhood. The public library in Ann Arbor. Metal bins outside into which one could slide books, like letters. Then the dim interior, and mazes of shelves. Dry smell, display cases— [...] read more

I'm delighted to be one of the 2014 Guggenheim fellows in General Nonfiction alongside Deborah Baker, Emily Fox Gordon, Joy Harjo, Yunte Huang, Jamie James, D. T. Max, Meghan O'Rourke, Susan Orlean and Victoria Sweet. The entire list of new fellows is here: http://www. gf. org/fellows/current/ [...] read more

I'll be speaking as part of a panel on James Baldwin and painter Beauford Delaney in a wonderful festival celebrating James Baldwin in New York City on April 24th.  And I'll be giving a talk on July 21st on Bernard Berenson, the Gilded Age art market, and Berenson's long friendship with Edith Wharton at The Mount, Wharton's home in Lenox, Mass. (Look under events for all details. )   [...] read more

I'll be giving a talk called "Questions of Collecting: Berenson, Gardner and the Market for Italian Pictures in America," at the Gardner Museum on January 25th at 3:30 pm.  The talk is free, but for Gardner members only.  Further details are at: http://www. gardnermuseum. org/calendar/events/5625 [...] read more

Sam Leith writes in the Spectator that: "Rachel Cohen’s unobtrusively and thoroughly well written short volume skilfully negotiates the contradictory sides of Berenson’s character — the aesthete and the huckster; the man who lived only for art and the man who very much liked to surround himself with the appurtenances of wealth. " Read the full review here: http://www. spectator. co. uk/books/books-feature/9097392/bernard-berenson-by-rachel-cohen-review/ In the Sunday Telegraph: "Martin Gayford enjoys an elegant biography of a chameleon-like art historian. " Read the full review here: http://www. telegraph. co. uk/culture/books/bookreviews/10494326/Bernard-Berenson-by-Rachel-Cohen-review. [...] read more

In Bookforum , Thomas Micchelli writes that Bernard Berenson is "luminous" and concludes: "In her remarkable biography, Cohen approaches Berenson's life as a panorama full of artifice and profundity, whose brilliant flashes of color are inextricable from its substrates of shadow. The book leaves an indelible impression, not merely in the way it catalogues Berenson's accomplishments and failings, but also in its dissection of the struggle between desire and alienation that characterizes American art—and life—to this day. " The full review is here: http://www. bookforum. com/review/12507 In the current issue of [...] read more

Recent press for Bernard Berenson: a Life in the Picture Trade , includes this starred review by Donna Seaman in Booklist: 
Cohen (A Chance Meeting, 2004) presents the most dynamic biography yet of the groundbreaking art historian Bernard Berenson. Strung between the Old World and the New, scholarly pursuits and the marketplace, Berenson was influential, controversial, and conflicted. Born Bernhard Valvrojenski in Lithuania, in 1865, he immigrated with his poor Jewish family to Boston and by dint of his ardent reading, passion for beauty, acute intelligence, and incessant ambition turned himself into a Harvard-educated Episcopalian, then a [...] read more

In the current issue of the New York Review of Books , Walter Kaiser writes that Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade is: "Written with intelligence and understanding and often with impressive psychological insight…A thoughtful, short biography. ” If you are a subscriber to the New York Review you can read the full review here: http://www. nybooks. com/articles/archives/2013/nov/21/passions-bernard-berenson/ [...] read more

My second book, Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade , has just been published in the Yale University Press Jewish Lives Series.  The press describes the book: "This brilliant new biography of the leading art connoisseur of the Gilded Age explores his accomplishments, his painful disappointments, the historical forces that affected his life, and the women who were central to his achievements. " “A highly sympathetic and graceful portrait of Bernard Berenson, the art connoisseur and dealer who remade himself into work of art, priced and priceless, which he protected, cultivated, and even at time [...] read more

An article I wrote on the way American art critics helped to shape a new taste for Italian Renaissance pictures is featured in this month's Art in America .  The piece is part of Art in America's celebration of a century of publication.  One of its important early contributors was Bernard Berenson, and this piece grew out of research I did for Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade .   [...] read more

I had the pleasure of recommending five books about writing about visual experience for the website Five Books, a place where I've discovered many interesting things to read. The books I chose are ones I've recently been engaged with that have been helping me to think about how language comes into contact with art, and with images in the mind -- it was a pleasure to talk that over with interviewer / editor Sophie Roell. The interview is here: http://fivebooks. com/interviews/rachel-cohen-on-writing-about-art [...] read more

I'll be reading with Vijay Seshadri in the DoubleTake Series curated by Albert Mobilio at Apex Art Gallery October 1, at 7 pm. The gallery is at 291 Church St and details about the reading are to be found here: apexart. org/double-take-reading-series. php . Vijay's wonderful book 3 Sections is out this month from Graywolf.  For the reading, he and I [...] read more

I've edited a symposium in tribute to the wonderful work of Lawrence Weschler, author of Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder , and Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing That One Sees , and Everything That Rises .  The symposium appears as part of McSweeney's issue 44, and is to be published September 20, 2013.   Here is McSweeney's description of the issue: With a stunning set of stories from some of the finest writers toiling away today—including breathtaking new work from Rebecca Curtis, Stuart Dybek, and Jim Shepard, and the Southeast Asian prison novella the world [...] read more

A new collaboration with artist Tara Geer has taken the shape of a book called Carrying Silence , published by Glenn Horowitz in conjunction with Geer's show at the Glenn Horowitz Gallery in August, 2013.  One section of my essay for the book can be read on the blog here.  The link to an essay I wrote some years ago about Tara and the drawing classes she teaches to André Gregory is below.   [...] read more

I've heard from a wonderful variety of artists, curators, poets, rhetoricians and accountants about this piece, "Gold, Golden, Gilded, Glittering," that appeared in November 2012 in The Believer .   Excerpt: "In fact, we have long entrusted the task of representing our ideas of value to members of two professions that might seem to have little in common: banking and art. And, in the last seven hundred years or so, it has happened more than once that visual and financial inventors have come up with strikingly similar representations. There is more than a shadow of resemblance [...] read more