Abstraktion und Einfühlung is Percival Everett's collection of seventeen poems on modern art, first published in 2008, moving among the work of Picasso, Manet, Gauguin, and Van Gogh and the museums that house it. Everett treats each work as a philosophical problem, weighing originality against borrowing, the ritual of making against the finished object, and pure form against content, with a logician's wit that drives each argument through riff and refrain until it breaks apart into homophone and pun. Presiding over the book is the gaze itself, unreliable and indispensable, on which every picture, and every word, depends for its existence.
 
ABOUT Percival Everett:
Percival Everett is a distinguished professor of English at the University of Southern California. His most recent novels include James (Pulitzer Prize winner, number one New York Times bestseller, National Book Award winner, Kirkus Prize winner), Dr. No (winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award), The Trees (finalist for the Booker Prize), and Telephone (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize). American Fiction, the feature film based on his novel Erasure, won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2024. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the writer Danzy Senna, and their children.