“Taking something very specific—in each case, a painting: a painting by Rubens, a painting by Franz Marc, a painting by Joan Mitchell—this physical thing, it has a place and a time, and it sits in the world somewhere. But then you can spiral out from that into the bigger context that each painting sits in historically, intellectually. But it’s spiraling inward a little, isn’t it, too? Because you’re going deeper into the painting.”

 

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with essayist and critic Morgan Meis, author of a trilogy of books about the history of art, civilization, war, and much else. In The Drunken Silenus: On Gods, Goats, and the Cracks in Reality (2020), Meis investigates a painting by Peter Paul Rubens. In The Fate of the Animals: On Horses, the Apocalypse, and Painting as Prophecy (2022), he turns to a masterpiece Franz Marc painted in 1913, three years before his death during the Battle of Verdun. And in The Grand Valley: On Going to Hell, to France, and Back to Childhood (2025), Meis explores Joan Mitchell’s The Grand Valley, a series of twenty-one paintings that Mitchell made between 1983 and 1984. Like the books, the conversation spirals outward into history and inward into the paintings under examination, all the while putting these three artists into conversation with other artists, writers, and philosophers—Friedrich Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, Degas, Klee, and Monet, among others.

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WORKS CITED

(In order of mention.)

 

Morgan Meis. The Drunken Silenus: On Gods, Goats, and the Cracks in Reality. Seattle: Slant Books, 2020.

 

Morgan Meis. The Fate of the Animals: On Horses, the Apocalypse, and Painting as Prophecy. Seattle: Slant Books, 2022.

 

Morgan Meis. The Grand Valley: On Going to Hell, to France, and Back to Childhood. Seattle: Slant Books, 2025.

 

Dave Hickey. The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty and Other Matters. Edited by Gary Kornblau. Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 2023.

 

Guy Davenport. The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays. Introduced by John Jeremiah Sullivan. Boston: Nonpareil Books, 2024.

 

Walter Benjamin. The Arcades Project. Translated and edited by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002.

 

Gertrude Stein. The Making of Americans. Foreword by William H. Gass and introduced by Steven Meyer. Dallas: Dalkey Archive Press, 2025.

 

Vladimir Nabokov. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

 

Peter Paul Rubens. The Drunken Silenus. ca. 1616-17. Oil on panel. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Wikimedia Commons.

 

Friedrich Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy. Edited and translated by Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

 

Titian. The Death of Actaeon. ca. 1559-75. Oil on canvas. The National Gallery, London.

 

Titian. Bacchus and Ariadne. ca. 1520-3. Oil on canvas. The National Gallery, London.

 

Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated and introduced by Stephanie McCarter. New York: Penguin Books, 2023.

 

Euripides. The Bacchae and Other Plays. Translated and introduced by John Davie. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.

 

Herman Melville. Moby-Dick: A Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Hershel Parker. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2017.

 

Franz Marc. The Fate of the Animals. ca. 1913. Color on canvas. Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel. Wikimedia Commons.

 

D.H. Lawrence. Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Edited by Michael Squires and introduced by Doris Lessing. London: Penguin Classics, 2008. 

 

Edgar Degas. Race Horses. ca. 1885-88. Pastel on wood. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

 

Franz Marc. Letters from the War: New Edition by Klaus Lankheit and Uwe Steffen. Translated by Liselotte Dieckmann. Lausanne: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers, 1992.

 

Franz Marc. Yellow Cow. ca. 1911. Oil on canvas. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

 

D.H. Lawrence. Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation. Edited by Mara Kalnins and James T. Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

 

Edgar Degas. Ballet Dancers. ca. 1890-1900. Oil on canvas (unlined). The National Gallery, London.

 

Michel Foucault. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge. London: Penguin Classics, 2020.

 

Joan Mitchell. La Grande Vallée. ca. 1983. Oil on canvas. Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris. Joan Mitchell Foundation.

 

John Ashbery. “Grand Galop.” In Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: Poems. New York: Penguin Books, 1990.

 

Claude Monet. The Two Willows. ca. 1914-1926. Four oil paintings “panels” placed side by side on canvas mounted on the wall. Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris.

 

C.G. Jung. The Red Book, Liber Novus: A Reader’s Edition. Edited and introduced by Sonu Shamdasani. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013.

 

Maurice Ravel. Maurice Ravel Plays Ravel. New York: Legacy International, 1965.