Anneka Lenssen

Anneka Lenssen is an Associate Professor in History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Beautiful Agitation: Modern Painting and Politics in Syria (University of California Press, 2020) and the coeditor of Modern Art in the Arab World: Primary Documents (New York: MoMA, 2018).

Contributions

Judging by its Cover, Part 1

On October 26, 1936, T. S. Eliot wrote a letter to American writer and host of an influential Parisian literary salon, Natalie Barney. In it he admitted with discernible embarrassment that his most recent author at Faber & Faber, Djuna Barnes—whose Ladies Almanack (1928) was about Barney’s salon and featured her as the character Dame Evangeline Musset—did not approve of the design for the first edition of Nightwood. “I must explain,” he writes,

Surviving Fascism? “Art and Liberty” in Egypt, 1938-1948

“Well this exhibition feels a little too timely,” my colleague Clare Davies posted to Facebook during a November 21, 2016 visit to Art et liberté: Rupture, guerre et surréalisme en Egypte (1938-1948) at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The exhibit—a major contribution to contemporary