Mark Dery

1 month ago | 4columns.org | Mark Dery

Caspar David Friedrich Mark Dery Finding symbolism and the self in the landscapes of nature: seventy-five works by the preeminent painter of German Romanticism. Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature, installation view. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Richard Lee.

2 months ago | washingtonpost.com | Mark Dery

Has there ever been a better time to read “Blood on Satan’s Claw”? The 1971 film of the same name, the first to be called “folk horror,” is now a novel by the movie’s screenwriter, Robert Wynne-Simmons. Folk horror is about the folk in the archetypal sense: small-town residents and rural villagers whose traditional values and old-fashioned ways, rooted in their close-knit communities, sense of place and ties to nature, are threatened by the arrival of outsiders — almost always city folk.

Oct 10, 2024 | 4columns.org | Mark Dery

Portraits in Life and Death Mark Dery Decadence and decay, freedom and friends: Peter Hujar’s 1976 photo book captures the utopia of dystopia. Portraits in Life and Death, by Peter Hujar, foreword by Benjamin Moser, introduction by Susan Sontag, Liveright, 100 pages, $75•   •   •Portraits in Life and Death is the only book Peter Hujar published in his lifetime.

Sep 28, 2024 | washingtonpost.com | Mark Dery

(Pantheon)Review by Mark DerySeptember 28, 2024 at 9:00 a.m. EDTCharles Burns draws his disquieting, darkly surreal comic books with a line so precise, so razor-edged, it looks as if it’s been cut with an X-acto knife. Like his fellow graphic novelists Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware, he’s a practitioner of the ligne claire, or “clear line,” style epitomized by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé, whose Tintin books captured Burns’s imagination when he was a kid.

Jul 15, 2024 | latimes.com | Mark Dery

The Anti-Defamation League has gotten into the defamation business. Founded in 1913 to combat anti-Jewish bigotry, the ADL was once respected for its civil-rights work. Now, amid nationwide protests over what the U.N. special rapporteur and others have called Israel’s genocide in Gaza, it’s shredding that reputation with reckless and unsupported accusations of antisemitism.