FMR No. 8

Issue 8: In our cover story, Roger Caillois and Detlef Heikamp explore the exquisitely unintentional art of stones (also Sgarbi and Mercogliano). Richard Meyer and William Saroyan recall the dreamlike paintings of Morris Hirshfield, the misunderstood, humble visionary who had a brief but brilliant career in 1940s New York. The Masone Labyrinth presents Orhan Pamuk’s notebooks, hybrid works of art and text that reveal the evocative inner life of this Nobel laureate and visual artist manqué (Stefano Salis). Giorgio Villani writes on 17th-c. Sicilian altar frontals in which inset marble, jasper, and other semiprecious stones evoke otherworldly holy scenes. And Rui Galopim de Carvalho explores the remarkable transformation in the culture of jewelry-making in Portugal with the sudden influx of diamonds and gems from 18th-c. Brazil. Also a few Hors-d’Oeuvres: Mariotti explores the ephemeral and the FMR-al, Antei revisits the reasons that the Gestapo didn’t steal a statue in WWII, and Navoni tells of a sleeping Rubens.