Peter M. Sacks

Peter M. Sacks (born 1950) is an expatriate South African painter and poet living and working in the United States.

Life

Sacks was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, and grew up in Durban, where he was educated at Clifton School (Durban) and Durban High School. His father was an obstetrician and taught at a black medical school. Sacks also studied medicine before transferring to the political science program at the University of Natal. As a student he gave speeches and organized anti-apartheid demonstrations. Sacks served a few months in the military, which was compulsory at the time, before receiving a scholarship to Princeton University.Joshua Rothman
"An Artist's Archeology of the Mind,"
''The New Yorker'', March 18, 2019. After Princeton (B.A. 1973), he attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar (M.Phil. 1976), and Yale University (PhD 1980). Sacks taught English at Johns Hopkins University between 1980 and 1996, being promoted to full professor in 1989. Since 1996, he has been a professor of English and American literature and language at Harvard University.

His first wife wa
Barbara Kassel
a painter and teacher of painting. Sacks married Pulitzer-prize winning poet Jorie Graham in 2000.

In 1999, during a residency at Marfa, Texas, Sacks began painting over photographs using thick white acrylic. Although he had been making small scale paintings in notebooks for many years, which he had chosen to keep private, this led to an interest in working on canvas and a decision to exhibit. He now shows his work in New York and around the world.

Art

Sacks' first two solo shows were in Paris, at Galerie Pièce Unique, in 2004 an
2007
The first U.S. solo show in 2009 of his finely textured paintings a
Paul Rodgers/9W Gallery
in New York City received a review in Artforum (November 2009) by Rosalind Krauss. Following that show, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston acquired large triptychs. In 2010, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts acquired another triptych from a
exhibition
at th
Wade Wilson Gallery.
A show o
"New Paintings"
a
Paul Rogers/9W Gallery
from October 2012 to January 2013 elicited considerable critical reaction.In 2014
while represented by th
Robert Miller Gallery
he exhibited show of large scale works, th
''Aftermath Series''
The show featured
catalogue by Christopher Bedford
Besides the introduction of stronger color in works focused around Mandela and Gandhi, the show also revealed a new emphasis on works on paper. In February 2015 th
Ivorypress Gallery in Madrid
exhibited 66 works on cardboard--"pages" of a book titled "The Kafka Series." In these, wherever typed and handwritten text appeared, it was mostly drawn from Kafka's ''The Trial.'' Many of those paintings are on cardboard taken from used and labeled FedEx boxes. Sacks was until recently represented by th
Marlborough Gallery
New York. An April 2017 solo show
Peter Sacks: New Works
featured his Township Series and was accompanied b
a catalogue
introduced by Sebastian Smee. A subsequent show
Peter Sacks: Migrations
at Marlborough Fine Art, London in 2018, featured a new body of work and an essay introduction to the catalogue by Paul Keegan. In March 2019 a show of new works title
“Repair”
was exhibited at Marlborough Gallery, New York with a catalogue b
Leora-Maltz Leca
Of his work, Sacks has said, "I see my paintings as a cross between cave paintings, medieval frescoes, illuminated manuscripts, and late 20th-century abstract paintings....The show is about survival. It is about what endures."

A profile in The New Yorker Magazine in April 2019
"An Artist's Archeology of the Mind"
examined his practice and the new work.

He is currently represented b
Sperone Westwater Gallery
in NYC.

Poetry

The ''Library Journal'', reviewing ''In These Mountains'', said, "This first volume of poetry by a South African living in America is a quiet, understated, and complex work, ranging in subject from travel to homelessness; in feeling, from celebrations of beauty to painful recollection. Weaving together myth, memory, and history to narrate the fate of South African Bushmen, the long title poem expresses Sacks's complex feelings—sorrow, outrage, loss toward his homeland. Sacks is a visual poet – an image maker rather than an abstract or discursive one – and his images, like his feelings about South Africa, are double-edged.”

Regarding ''Promised Lands'', J. M. Coetzee described Peter Sacks as "a poet whose sense of history lies deep in his bones." Others have praised his ability to communicate passion, pain, and the desire for redress, side by side with submission to the fact of mortality.

''Natal Command'' chronicles the poet's despair as he watches his father die and his fatherland change. The figure of the poet as swimmer and runner, of sensual man as natural athlete, is central to the book.

''O Wheel'' is a millennial collection of poems – some of them masquerading as diary notes – celebrating the beauty of the American West and the poet's love of his African home. The work also looks back at a century of unprecedented violence and the wrenching death of his father. In "Two Mountains," the poet, recognising himself as Isaac at the place of sacrifice, becomes the invoked Muse
Powell's Books
described ''O Wheel'' as "a book of amazing delicacy, intricacy, and formal beauty that reveals terrifying truths. Its backdrop is an edgy mix of the intense violence of South Africa's recent history, the personal struggles of the human soul for the rights to speak freely and to experience justice, and the expanse of the American literary landscape. Peter Sacks employs a variety of poetic styles and approaches that break new ground formally as well as thematically. With a vision that is at once personal and public, he contends with nihilism and extracts hope from even the most barbaric aspects of human nature. ''O Wheel'' offers sensitive and striking poems that menace, overwhelm, entice, provoke, and deeply move the reader."

Sacks' relationship with Jorie Graham was briefly the subject of controversy in the poetry community when the website Foetry.com revealedFoetry.com archive
Foetry page on Jorie Graham
/ref> that she judged the University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry series contest that selected Sacks's "O Wheel" as the first-place winner. Although contest administrator Bin Ramke refused to name the judge who had selected Sacks's poems, the allegation was shown to be correct when documents were released following
Georgia Open Records Act
request. Although (according to the Los Angeles Times) Graham had not yet arrived at Harvard or married Sacks when the prize was awarded, she did not deny that she and Sacks knew each other at the time of the contest, and said that she felt awkward enough about it to ask series editor Ramke to make the call.

About his 2003 book ''Necessity'' Sacks said, "The poems make and record an unavoidable but potentially self-clarifying quest in the face of injustice, atrocity, beauty."Program announcement
, Folger Shakespeare Library

Books and awards

Peter Sacks has published five books of poetry: ''In These Mountains'' ( Macmillan 1986), ''Promised Lands'' (Penguin Books 1990), ''Natal Command'' (University of Chicago 1997), ''O Wheel'' (University of Georgia 2000), and ''Necessity'' (W.W. Norton 2002). Individual poems by Sacks have appeared in ''The New Yorker'', ''The New Republic'', ''Boulevard'', ''The Paris Review'', and other publications. He is also the author of ''The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spencer to Yeats'' (Johns Hopkins University 1985) and an art historical study, ''Woody Gwynn: An Approach to the Landscape'' (Texas Tech University 1993).

He received Phi Beta Kappa's Christian Gauss Award for ''The English Elegy'' in 1985, received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1997, and was the 1999 winner of the University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series contest.Alex Beam, "Website polices rhymes and misdemeanors," ''Boston Globe'', 31 March 2005
available here
/ref>Tomas Alex Tizon, "In Search of Poetic Justice," ''Los Angeles Times'', 17 June 2005. Available at th
LA Times
(subscription needed). Text is available a
New Poetry Review
o
SFgate
(accessed 16 March 2007) In 1999 he was a Lannan Foundation writer in residence in Marfa, Texas.

References

External links

Peter Sacks website2018 Catalogue

2017 Catalogue

2014 Catalogue

2010 CatalogueMutualArt.com Interview with Peter Sacks: 'Like Excavating In Reverse'

Studio International Interview: "Every painting has its own secret story"


* ttp://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/peter-sacks/ ''Art in America'' review: Peter Sacks
Brooklyn Rail review: "PETER SACKS New Paintings"

Art Forum review of 2010 exhibit

Art Forum review of ''Necessity 12''

2007 Catalogue

The Offending Adam review: Sampler and Sediment: The Art of Peter Sacks

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sacks, Peter M.
1950 births
American male poets
20th-century South African poets
Living people
Princeton University alumni
Alumni of New College, Oxford
Yale University alumni
Johns Hopkins University faculty
Harvard University faculty
20th-century American painters
American male painters
21st-century American painters
21st-century South African poets
South African male poets
South African Rhodes Scholars
20th-century South African male writers
21st-century American male writers
20th-century American male artists
Alumni of Durban High School