My review of the fascinating collection of the essays of Henry van de Velde, translated from the French and German by Elizabeth Tucker and edited by Katherine Kuenzli, is now available to read in Caesura's new issue:
It is about beauty, matter, ornament, shapes, craft & industry, William Morris, John Ruskin, Charles Baudelaire, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gottfried Semper, Arthur Schopenhauer, the Austrian, German, Belgian arts and crafts movements, about translation from languages and forms and media, about the relationship between shape and energy, nature, imagination, and about the central question of whether the material world in which we dwell changes who we are (answer: YES). It circles around questions that have fascinated me since the time I graduated from The Cooper Union and gave a graduation speech about uniting Utility and Beauty in the spirit of William Morris, and when I, later, wrote my Masters Thesis on Adalbert Stifter's extraordinary novel, Indian Summer, and its relationship to the Austrian and German Arts & Crafts Movements, and, more recently, these questions run through my book of essays, Portals: Reflections on the Spirit in Matter. This book of essays opened my eyes to many strands of thought and work on these subjects that I had missed, and will surely enrich and complicate my continual musings and writings on these subjects !
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