Solar Dance: Genius, Forgery and the Crisis of Truth in the Modern Age

[Erik T. Burns]

it hans't been posted here before, and I thank you for it. Gaddis-l
will also be interested, I imagine.

On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 10:21 PM, David Payne <dpayne1912 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Sorry if this was already posted here:
>
> http://arts.nationalpost.com/2012/02/03/book-review-solar-dance-by-modris-eksteins/
>
> "[...]Strangely enough, Modris Eksteins does not discuss _The Revenge for Love_* in his brilliant new book _Solar Dance: Genius, Forgery and the Crisis of Truth in the Modern Age_. This is an odd omission because Eckstein’s deeply researched historical study tells the story of the Van Gogh forgeries that flooded the German art market in the 1920s and the way that the counterfeiting of masterpieces was part and parcel of a larger cultural breakdown that destroyed German democracy, all themes that can be usefully linked to the Lewis novel. The pertinence of The Revenge for Love is tragically ironic because of Lewis’s own sorry record as a fascist sympathizer, something he would later regret and apologize for.
>
> The neglect of Lewis is all the more surprising because Eksteins is among the most erudite and perspicacious of scholars. In explaining the forgeries of the 1920s, he gives us an eye-opening and wide-ranging history of the Van Gogh cult, finding unexpected evidence of the painter’s spectral influence in everything from a novel written by Joseph Goebbels to the childhood of the scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer to the fall of the Berlin Wall.[...]"
>
> (* _The Revenge for Love_ is Wyndham Lewis' 1937 novel featuring "an impoverished artist who is reduced to earning money by producing fake Van Goghs")