Encounters · No. 2 The House That Light Built Carl Larsson painted the same home, the same wife, the same children, hundreds of times. The result was not repetition. It was an argument — about beauty, about Sweden, about what a life is allowed to look like. By Bergotte There is a house in Sundborn,Continue reading “Carl Larsson”
Category Archives: Essay
The Reel Argument: Carl Theodor Dreyer
By Bergotte There is a filmmaker most people have never seen whose work contains some of the most powerful images in the history of cinema, and his name is Carl Theodor Dreyer. He made fewer than a dozen surviving features across forty years, worked in almost complete opposition to every commercial instinct the film industryContinue reading “The Reel Argument: Carl Theodor Dreyer”
The Human Condition According to Pushkin
By Bergotte To understand Russian literature is, in the end, to understand Pushkin — which is to say that it cannot be fully done from the outside. Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin is the writer whom every Russian author who followed him claimed as a father, a standard, and an impossibility: the source from which a wholeContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Pushkin”
Poul Henningsen
Makers & Rooms — Essay I The Light He Couldn’t Stop Arguing About Poul Henningsen designed the most beloved lamp in the world. He also wrote cabaret songs, picked fights with the bourgeoisie, and fled to Sweden ahead of the Gestapo. The lamp was almost the least interesting thing about him. By Bergotte There isContinue reading “Poul Henningsen”
The Self That Must Be Chosen: Who We Are According to Søren Kierkegaard
He wrote under false names, spoke in riddles, and refused to give answers. He died at forty-two having produced, in a little over a decade, the most searching account of what it means to be a human being that Western philosophy has ever attempted. Kierkegaard did not want to make things easy for you. HeContinue reading “The Self That Must Be Chosen: Who We Are According to Søren Kierkegaard”
Sophie Calle
Encounters · No. 1 The Art of Following Someone Sophie Calle has spent forty years turning other people’s lives — and her own grief — into something that looks, uncomfortably, like art. By Bergotte In January 1980, Sophie Calle followed a stranger to Venice. She had met him briefly at a party in Paris, notContinue reading “Sophie Calle”
The Reel Argument: Ingmar Bergman
By Bergotte Ingmar Bergman made films about the things we cannot say to each other, and he made them with a directness that is almost unbearable. He is routinely described as a difficult filmmaker — demanding, austere, heavy — and this reputation has kept more people from him than it has drawn in, which isContinue reading “The Reel Argument: Ingmar Bergman”
The Human Condition According to Tolstoy
By Bergotte Leo Tolstoy is the writer who makes other great writers feel provincial. Not because his books are the longest, though two of them are among the longest ever written, and not because his range is the widest, though it extends from the ballrooms of Moscow to the battlefields of Austerlitz to the peasantContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Tolstoy”
Issey Miyake
Encounters · No. 6 A Piece of Cloth Issey Miyake survived the atomic bomb at seven years old and spent the rest of his life making clothes that felt like freedom. These two facts are not unrelated. By Bergotte On the morning of August 6, 1945, Issey Miyake was seven years old and standing closeContinue reading “Issey Miyake”
Outline by Rachel Cusk — Review
Author: Rachel CuskTitle: OutlineFirst published: 2014Genre: Literary fictionLength: approximately 250 pages (256 pages in the Picador paperback edition)Series: Outline Trilogy, Book OneRating: ★★☆☆☆ What It Is Rachel Cusk’s Outline is a novel constructed largely through ten conversations. Its narrator, Faye, is a writer who travels to Athens to teach a summer creative-writing course. During herContinue reading “Outline by Rachel Cusk — Review”
My World of Interiors 