Adam Thirlwell

Nov 13, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Yoko Tawada |Margaret Mitsutani |Susan Bernofsky |Adam Thirlwell

In the era​ of the cosmopolitan languages of power, like Arabic or Latin, it might have seemed obvious that someone would choose to write in a second language. It only became something to be thought about, to be argued over and interpreted, in the era when vernaculars became nationalist instruments, and a writer was bound to their first language not just pragmatically but politically. But still: was Adelbert von Chamisso anguished by his move from French to German after the French Revolution?

Nov 10, 2024 | washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com | Adam Thirlwell

The story concerns Celine, a 19-year-old woman in 18th-century Paris. She’s newly married to Sasha, who is 46, the city’s chief minister’s personal secretary, and a “minor but murderous fascist.”Celine’s life has been the subject of a series of pornographic pamphlets written by men and printed in the avant-garde cities of London, Antwerp, and Geneva. Though the pamphlets are fiction, their contents and the unauthorized use of Celine’s name are understandably distressing, even terrifying for her.

Jul 25, 2024 | nybooks.com | Adam Thirlwell

On entering “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty” at the Met last year, I was at first reduced to nouns and adjectives. I was overcome with description. An ensemble of an overdress and underdress for Chanel Autumn/Winter 2002–2003. The overdress, in a dark gray cashmere knit, is as formally cinched as a suit jacket. The underdress is made from a lighter gray silk satin with ivory, beige, and gray silk tulle and embroidered with iridescent gold, pink, gray, black, and white bugle beads and sequins.

May 1, 2024 | artreview.com | Adam Thirlwell

What aesthetic strategies can make sense of an unstable present? Adam Thirlwell looks to forms of art with a strong theoretical componentIn the Royal Academy’s current show, Entangled Pasts, you can see John Akomfrah’s video installation Vertigo Sea (2015) – a three-channel work that uses the sea of the Middle Passage to think about the destruction of human and nonhuman life, while also practising a kind of multiple richness of presentation.

Mar 27, 2024 | artreview.com | Adam Thirlwell

Is paint the ideal medium for portraiture, or does it take words to convey something as abstract as the self? The show that ran this winter at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, on Picasso and Gertrude Stein has kept me thinking, not so much for its overt attempt to link what the two of them were up to – because, really, is it possible to make so much of a friendship? – but more because it helped put pressure on the idea of the portrait, by which I mean the portrait as literature and as art.