Art Becomes Writing Becomes Art with Rachel Cohen

A hybrid talk and interview with writer and critic Rachel Cohen on how writers and artists including Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Rainer Maria Rilke, Frank O’Hara and Joan Mitchell borrow from, respond to, and spark each other’s work. Filmed on 04/08/2026 with a live audience both in person and on Zoom. In this hybrid talk and interview, writer and critic Rachel Cohen traces patterns of influence between visual artists and writers, drawing on her 2004 book A Chance Meeting and her current research. Moving between figures from modernism to the present, she explores how ideas pass back and forth across forms. About the speaker: Rachel Cohen is the author of Austen Years: A Memoir in Five Novels, Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade, and A Chance Meeting: American Encounters, reissued by New York Review of Books Classics in 2024. Her essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the NYRB, the Believer, The Yale Review, and Best American Essays, among others. A recipient of the Berlin Prize, Cohen is a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2026, researching her next book Time in Pieces: Artists at Work. She is Professor of Practice in the Arts at the University of Chicago. This event was part of Ways of Seeing, a special series exploring the connections between storytelling, creativity, and the visual world. Evenings with an Author is generously sponsored by GRoW @ Annenberg.