Grimms' Fairy Tales by David Hockney, 1969

In 1993 the South Bank Centre in London mounted a touring exhibition of David Hockney's lithographs which he created in 1969 to illustrate six fairy tales by the Grimm brothers. The booklet which accompanied the exhibition is small, short (31 pages) and cleverly executed and includes just enough information and reproductions to pique the interest of those who favour new interpretations of old works.

The middle part of the booklet is especially good, consisting of notes made by Hockney to explain the rationale as well as the sources for the various lithographs.

It is clear from the start that he takes liberties with the narratives, adding psychological dimensions to some of the stories that would have seemed bizarre to the Grimm brothers and their audience but which ring true to us.

Hockney also tells us which artists or paintings served as models for some of the images, citing among others, Hieronymus Bosch, Leonardo da Vinci, Vittore Carpaccio and Rene Magritte. In the lithograph entitled "The Enchantress with the baby Rapunzel", for instance, the figures are positioned in the classical Renaissance manner of religious paintings. Hockney explains, "so the only way she (the ugly Enchantress) could get a child would be to get it from somebody else, so I thought she was probably a virgin, an old virgin. So this is based on a Virgin and Child motif, and it's done from a Hieronymus Bosch. But of course the face is altered and made deliberately ugly, and the trees are done from Leonardo da Vinci."

Revelations of inspirations abound. There's a lithograph from the tale "The Boy who Left Home to Learn Fear" showing a sexton disguised as a ghost trying to frighten a boy where the sheeted man was "drawn from simply sticking a handkerchief on top of a pencil and watching the folds, so I could draw the correct shadow on the folds". The proportions of the man are wrong — but knowing the source for the image changes the viewer's reaction to the composition. We go from confusion to amusement.

Hockney mines popular culture too — the front and back cover illustrations are taken from old horror movie stills and the inside back cover consists of a four-part panel series showing somewhat grotesque yet comical (and comic book style) images of Rumpelstilzchen tearing himself into pieces, ending with eyes, hair and nose flying around, above a dismembered belly and limbs.

This reimagining of fairy tales is complex and original and having the artist discuss process makes these decidedly odd lithographs memorable.

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Paul Auster, Winter Journal, 2012

If Paul Auster had read reviews of his book Winter Journal, he might have been disappointed with a number of them, several of which called this effort an essentially prosaic, episodic, arc-less piece of writing. I think they didn't get the point.

It is true that this book lacks the classic linear temporal structure that autobiographies commonly follow, but this is Paul Auster writing. One critic whose review departs from the expectation of a diachronic trajectory suggests that the book is "a literary composition — similar to music — composed of autobiographical fragments". That's getting closer.

Auster himself tells us that he will "try to examine what it felt like to live inside this body from the first day that you can remember being alive until this one. A catalogue of sensory data. What one might call a phenomenology of breathing."

A "phenomenology of breathing" — a way to collect and structure experience and consciousness via breath, that is, through the senses, the body. Yes, that's what Auster does: he writes his life, told in fragments, episodes, through lists of things like childhood games played, places travelled to, scars left behind from youthful mishaps, addresses lived at over a lifetime.

The unconnectedness, the varied lengths of the recollections, the poetic texture of the book also informs the rhythm of the reading: sometimes we slow down to think about something that's being recounted, prompting us, too, to remember and list our own childhood candies (feeling again their stickiness on our hands). Sometimes we speed up to find out what that terrible car accident did to himself and his family.

Winter Journal is in turn jubilant and melancholy, deep and light, and always carefully and beautifully written.

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