The Reading Room/4:
writing of the moment
 

Issue Four

THE STORY OF AN OBSESSION: MARCEL DUCHAMP, THE PESKY BODY THING AND ETANT DONNÉS -- Barbara Probst Solomon

"Larry River's painting Seventy Five Years Later, where the figure of a naked young woman is ambling down the abstract staircase of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase is prescient. The question Rivers seems to be asking himself -- how far can you go with abstraction? With modernism? -- must have been troubling Duchamp. For the last twenty years of his life Duchamp worked in secret on his Etant Donnés...The installation contains a stuffed leather form of a naked woman lying on the grass...which can be seen through two peep holes in a wooden door."

The portrait of Joseph Roth on the cover
of The Reading Room/4 is one of, if not the
last, works of Larry Rivers before his death
this August. It came out of his fascination
and identification with Roth, and gives this
issue a special historic poignancy.

ARTISTS AT A SLANT: ART'S WAGER: RICHARD ARTSCHWAGER AND THE NEW YORK ART WORLD IN THE '60S -- Judith Stein. THE GANG'S ALL HERE: Satires of Nudes of Balthus, Hockney, Koralik, Lichtenstein and Picasso by William Anthony.

EUROPE, THEN AND NOW: Fiction by Joseph Roth, Juan Goytisolo, Thomas McGonigle, Mark Axelrod and Erik Raschke. KENYA, INDIA AND CUBA: Fiction by Julie Obaso, Murzban Fali Shroff and Michele Arango.

REFLECTIONS ON MODERN TERRORISM by Gerald Holton, HOW I BECAME BLACK by Clifford Thompson, THAT NIGHT AT ELAINE'S by Stuart Schneiderman. POETRY by Don Maggin and Malcolm Farley. NEW VOICES IN AMERICAN FICTION: Burton Melnick, J. Schwartman, Anthony Schneider, Toby Talbot, Howie Kahn, and Scott Snyder.