With a helping of author’s vanity, Schwartz claims to have foreseen, in two passages from his novel Bets and scams, some things from today’s news. Below the line, he wrestles with his reactions to the ongoing tragedy in Israel and Gaza.
Literature and film
378 “The mother’s eye reveals the son”
A splendid documentary on the ownership of and trade in Rembrandt paintings prompts Schwartz to ask questions not posed in the film. What went on behind the scenes in Paris to allow the Rothschild family to sell abroad a treasure of French cultural heritage? And could the Duke of Buccleuch’s painting of an old woman reading not be the mother of Jan Six?
195 Toward a theory of conspiracy
The inspiration to put this column of 2003 on the Schwartzlist in 2019 came from the excellent column on conspiracies by Ross Douthat in The New York Times, 13 August 2019. Continue reading “195 Toward a theory of conspiracy”
“Here’s not looking at you, kid: some literary uses of Vermeer”
Schwartz uncovers misappropriations of the great Dutch artist by a raft of writers and an artist. Is he sorry he didn’t write a novel about Vermeer? Maybe.
March 2001 Art in America pp. 104-07 (can be enlarged with CTRL+ for legibility)
Last paragraph and notes (all numbered i – you can link them to their place in the text if you really want to)
357 Gulley Jimson had nothing on Emanuel de Witte
If they didn’t live three centuries apart and if he were a human being instead of a fictional character, you could easily confuse Gulley Jimson with Emanuel de Witte. Both were gifted painters who insulted, bullied and stole from their patrons and were always ready for fights they couldn’t win.
Continue reading “357 Gulley Jimson had nothing on Emanuel de Witte”
336 The Camus complex at The New Yorker
In the 1950s death lost its sting in The New Yorker. As in the opening line of Albert Camus’s novel L’Etranger, mothers – and others – keep dying without anyone shedding a tear over them.
174 Shoot the piano player’s girlfriend
The source of François Truffaut’s movie Shoot the piano player has never been properly identified. In 2003 Schwartz revealed the film’s debt, via the novel by David Goodis that was Truffaut’s immediate inspiration, to Joseph Conrad’s immortal Victory. Ten years later, his discovery still ignored by the world, he sends it off once more. The P.S. predicted the onset of the debt crisis five years before the fall of Lehman Brothers. Continue reading “174 Shoot the piano player’s girlfriend”
Rembrandt’s David and Mephiboseth: a forgotten subject from Vondel
Gary Schwartz, “Rembrandt’s David and Mephiboseth: a forgotten subject from Vondel,” in Tribute to Lotte Brand Philip, art historian and detective, New York (Abaris Books) 1985, pp. 166-74
296 Spoiling Oil!
With apologies to those of you who liked There will be blood, Schwartz trashes the movie for betraying the book on which it it is fraudulently based, Upton Sinclair’s Oil!
227 Senseless sensibility
Two exhibitions of Dutch genre paintings take competing approaches to the interpretation of these irresistible depictions of everyday life. One show, in Haarlem and Hamburg, interprets them as moral warnings to the viewer; another, in Rotterdam and Frankfurt, sees them as nothing more than fun subjects. Schwartz introduces into the discussion the ideas of the literary historian René van Stipriaan, whose theories about farces for the stage open new possibilities for interpreting paintings as well.