Helen DeWitt's Artforum Top Ten Includes Frank O'Hara, Van Gogh, Berlin's Hat Palace...

Author Helen DeWitt's Top Ten for the current issue of Artforum includes the new edition of Frank O'Hara's Lunch Poems; and nine other flashes of art, architecture, literature, and residents in between. A highly readable list of recommendations from the highly readable Berlin-based writer. An excerpt:

3 LUNCH POEMS, FRANK O’HARA (CITY LIGHTS BOOKS, 1964/2014)

With an introduction by John Ashbery and facsimiles of O’Hara’s correspondence with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the fiftieth-anniversary edition of this collection is a time machine to a different New York, when the borders between art and literature were permeable, crossings were not policed, and insouciance was the name of the game.

4 VANGOGHLETTERS.ORG

Van Gogh’s letters are offered in facsimile, transcription, transcription with original line breaks, and English translation. Having treasured a Dutch edition of the letters for years, I was startled to learn that he wrote to his brother in French after moving to Arles in 1888. In September he painted a sketch of a starry night: “Sur le champ bleu vert du ciel la grande ourse a un scintillement vert et rose dont la paleur discrète contraste avec l’or brutal du gaz.” “Paleur discrète” and “l’or brutal” suggest a contrast between worldly tact and savagery largely lost in the English: “Against the green-blue field of the sky the Great Bear has a green and pink sparkle whose discrete paleness contrasts with the harsh gold of the gaslight.” I needed his words to see the painting through his eyes; it was suddenly possible to get past the grandstanding auctions, the encrustations of cliché.

[...]

7 FIONA BENNETT, HUT-PALAST (HAT PALACE), BERLIN

On a street lined with kebab takeouts and insurance offices, restaurant outfitters and a Woolworth’s—a showroom of preposterous hats. Scraps of straw and feathers and gauze are affixed to plastic heads perched on small pyramids of hatboxes. Headgear of choice, according to the Fiona Bennett website, for the German aristocracy. For passersby not noticeably surrounded by the designer’s alleged clientele, the shop is the cousin of Prada Marfa: spectacle in its purest form.

Read it all at Artforum. At top: Fiona Bennett window display, Berlin, June 20, 2014. Photo: Thierry Chervel/Flickr.