Was there Transgressive Old Master Art in Venice?

David Carrier

April 10, 2026


The Persian Women by Flemish artist Otto van Veen, created between approximately 1597 and 1599.

Viewing a pictorial scene that you didn’t think possible is a startling, often revealing experience. You ask yourself, should you believe your eyes. Maybe, you conclude, you are having a hallucination. A few years ago, in Venice, I went to review an exhibition, “Corpi Moderni: The Making of the Body in Renaissance Venice” at the Academy. And there I found Otto van Veen’s large history painting, Persian Women (1597–99), which shows a group of young women raising their skirts to show their naked bottoms to the men, who are terrified. Had I found this picture in a show of contemporary artworks, I would not have blinked. Our artists love to deal in erotic shock. But in a pre-modern art world where Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) defined the ideals of decorum in his history paintings, Persian Women was surprising indeed. What, indeed, would he have made of this picture. And while any well trained old master had the skill required to paint this picture, the subject seems in that culture unimaginable. That’s why the picture looks surprising. We can readily imagine some minor follower of the modernist Surrealist Paul Delvaux painting this fantasy scene. But how surprising to learn that it’s a late seventeenth-century work.

In our visual culture, which is permeated by psychoanalytic thinking, everyone can easily explain the Freudian implications of this picture. Whatever you think about Sigmund Freud, even if you haven’t read Three Essays on Sexuality, you cannot help knowing in a general way about his accounts of gender. And, I hasten to add, nowadays also to know also at least in a vague way the many feminist critiques of his analysis. That means that it’s impossible nowadays not to look at Persian Women without a certain self-conscious irony. That the man in the foreground and his horse appear to be shocked by the genitals of the women, what are we to made of that? The people I asked said that the picture was funny, as if the artist was oddly naive.

It can be revealing to discover what artists choose not to do, for that reveals the implicit rules of their art world. Often, Venetians hung carpets from their window. Venetians admired Islamic textiles, and as a great trading culture with Muslims, they had ready access to these artifacts, which were often collected. The Venetians used these precious rugs without concern for their role in Islamic culture. And so a painter who loved color would naturally take an interest in them. Indeed, Lorenzo Lotto sometimes depicted carpets in his altarpieces, rugs dubbed ‘Lottos’ in his honor. St Antoninus giving Alms (1542) shows a splendid carpet in the center. And so, these Islamic carpets were often depicted in their paintings of domestic interiors. But the Venetian artists were not inspired to model their own paintings on these carpets. Not until the time of Henri Matisse, when Western art had evolved dramatically, did European artists do that. Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Averroes’s Search” (1947) imagines an Arab translator of Aristotle who puzzles over that writer’s description of the theater. In a culture without theaters, that analysis seems incomprehensible. And yet, Borges observes with fine irony, the Muslim children are play-acting games which, had the translator only observed, would resolve his puzzles. We are very familiar with political protest paintings, with subjects that were never found in Venetian old regime paintings. In old regime Venice, painting had to serve the political goals of the state. Just as it would be hard to translate Aristotle’s Poetics in a society without theater performances, so it’s difficult to imagine history painting playing with Freudian concepts of gender in a pre-modern culture.

One additional bit of information may change how you see Persian Women. In fact, this artist, Otto van Veen, was not especially imaginative. Not when we learn that, like most old master history paintings, his images were based upon classical literature. And this painting is based upon a text from Plutarch. By frightening the men, the women inspire them to fight. Like Poussin, van Veen thus was a literary history painter. Only he chose an odd, relatively unfamiliar text. Now, of course, after Surrealism, Persian Women look different. But it would never had occurred to any Venetian artist to paint such a Surrealist scene. No more than gay Venetians would have marched to protest their lack of rights. Or Venetian feminists would have demanded a female doge. There were no movements for Venetian Jews or Muslims seeking political rights. Such ideas, so familiar nowadays, were simply over the horizon. And although there were some Black people, most of them slaves, in Venice, as we can see in Titian’s Diana surprised by Actaeon and in Tiepolo’s frescoes, there was no movement to liberate them. The Venetian Republic had moral problems, but no significant art was devoted to criticizing its institutions. Van Veen, I should add, was a very minor artist.

Imagine that in 1550 some unusually imaginative pupil of Titian was called upon to make an artwork that would, so it is demanded, ‘catch the public’s eye’. And she was given a church in which to display her work. Knowing the recent paintings by her master, and recalling the great earlier works by Giorgione and the Bellinis, this young woman faces a very demanding situation. What can she do to rival Tempest or one of the ‘sacred conversations’ of Giovanni Bellini? Inspired, she boldly breaks the church’s delicate floor tiling and labels the piles of rubble The Consequences of Sin.

In fact, there is a real Venetian work just like this, but it’s recent. In 1993, at the Biennale, Hans Haacke’s Germania trashed the floor of the German pavilion, leaving it smashed to pieces. And he included a photograph of Adolf Hitler meeting Benito Mussolini in 1934, at an earlier iteration of that institution. Look it up online! Haacke drew on a long tradition of politically critical installation art. But in Titian’s era such a gesture would be thought the act of a madman. Philip II, an historian of Venetian painting, remarks, was a patron of discernment, who was prepared to support his chosen painter (Titian) “even into the strange pictorial explorations of his old age.” But not this far! The Consequences of Sin would have been incomprehensible in 1550.

Note:

On carpets in Venetian art see Patricia Fortini Brown, Private Lives in Renaissance Venice: Art, Architecture, and the Family (2004), 59-67

A more general analysis of carpets in paintings appears in Joseph Masheck, The Carpet Paradigm ( 2010).

The source of examples like The Consequences of Sin is Arthur Danto’s aesthetics.


David Carrier is a philosopher who writes art criticism. His Aesthetic Theory, Abstract Art and Lawrence Carroll (Bloomsbury) and with Joachim Pissarro, Aesthetics of the Margins/ The Margins of Aesthetics: Wild Art Explained (Penn State University Press) were published in 2018. He is writing a book about the historic center of Naples, and with Pissarro he conducted a sequence of interviews with museum directors for Brooklyn Rail. He is a regular contributor to Hyperallergic.

Interview

Robin D. G. Kelley: It’s Not Enough to Abolish ICE — We Have to Abolish the Police


“What’s happening now has happened before,” Kelley said, underscoring the anti-Blackness foundational to US fascism.

By George Yancy , 

Truthout

PublishedFebruary 26, 2026

A protester holds a sign reading "Black Lives Matter Fuera ICE. 2 Struggles 1 Fight."

Sarah-Ji via Flickr

Under Donald Trump, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has started appearing ever more like a private militia, unleashing brutal violence against families and displaying sycophantic loyalty to Trump as he mandates the dehumanizing treatment of immigrants.

In the days since January, when federal immigration agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota, killed 37-year-old Alex Pretti and 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, it’s not surprising that ICE has begun drawing even more frequent comparison to Hitler’s fascist Brownshirts, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.

As I’ve borne witness to these tragedies, I’ve often thought about how Black people meet this moment with an already-acute sense of what it means to live and die under the U.S.’s fascistic logics. For Black people, there were no killers in brown shirts, but there were plenty of killers in white sheets sanctioned through the support, encouragement, and participation of white law enforcement officers. The depth and complexity of what I’m feeling and thinking about this brutal historical resonance cries out for clarity and truth-telling. It is for this reason that I reached out to Robin D. G. Kelley, who is the Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and author of several renowned books, including his newest and forthcoming book, Making a Killing: Capitalism, Cops, and the War on Black Life.

George Yancy: Robin, it is always an honor. As you said to Amy Goodman, “Jim Crow itself is a system of fascism, when you think about the denial of basic rights for whole groups of people, the way in which race is operating as a kind of nationalism against some kind of enemy threat, the corralling of human beings in ghettos. I mean, this is what we’ve been facing for a long time.” The point here is that this isn’t new. And we mustn’t forget. In The Black Antifascist Tradition: Fighting Back from Anti-Lynching to Abolition, Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen write, “On December 17, 1951, the US Civil Rights Congress, headed by Communist attorney William Patterson, presented a 240-page petition to the United Nations general assembly, entitled ‘We Charge Genocide.’” The charge of genocide was necessary, as it continues to be, because of the terror of anti-Blackness in this country, a form of terror that renders Black life fundamentally precarious and vulnerable to the forces of gratuitous state violence. I often fail to find the discourse to frame the ongoing history of anti-Blackness in this country. We’re not just talking about anti-Black beliefs and attitudes; it’s anti-Black fascism. I would like for you to talk about how war is an apt concept for critically thinking about the meaning and reality of anti-Blackness in the past and in the present.

Robin D. G. Kelley: Absolutely! No question! Anti-Blackness is foundational to U.S. fascism, which as you acknowledged, not only precedes the so-called “classical” fascism in Italy and Germany, but for Hitler and the Third Reich, a model for the racist and antisemitic Nuremberg laws. By the way, Robyn Maynard, a brilliant scholar/organizer, has an essay coming out in the Boston Review that maps out the history of anti-Blackness in U.S. immigration policies.

“Anti-Blackness is foundational to U.S. fascism.”

To your question, there are so many examples. Beginning in the present, we must never forget that the primary target of the Department of Homeland Security’s “Operation Metro Surge” in Minneapolis and St. Paul was the Somali population, Africans. It didn’t matter that the vast majority were U.S. citizens. Trump denigrated the entire community as “garbage” and declared: “I don’t want them in our country.” If we lived in a country where laws matter, the surge of nearly 3,000 ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents would be a direct violation of the civil rights of the Somali community.

Let’s also remember that the core anti-immigrant dog whistle that both Trump and JD Vance exploited in the run-up to the elections targeted Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, who had temporary protected status. The racist lies that Haitians were eating their (white) neighbors’ dogs (a literal dog whistle!) was strategic and, apparently, it worked.


“We must never forget that the primary target of the Department of Homeland Security’s ‘Operation Metro Surge’ in Minneapolis and St. Paul was the Somali population.”

But we can’t put all of this on Trump. Besides the long, long history of political, economic, military, and discursive war against the Haitian people, I can never erase the image of Haitian asylum seekers who had taken shelter under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, being violently herded and brutalized by ICE agents on horses, as if they were fugitive slaves. It was the Biden-Harris administration, let’s not forget, that denied Haitians asylum and deported them in record numbers. More Haitians were deported under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in their first few weeks in office than under Trump during his entire first term. Now, some might argue that Biden and Harris expanded the Haitian Family Reunification Parole Program, which grants “parole” to eligible migrants waiting for visas (dig the carceral language), but all this means is that they were granted temporary protections that forced them into low-wage, precarious work since their status was contingent on having a job, any job.

Let’s come back to the present. We all learned of the horrific murder of 43-year-old Keith Porter Jr. here in Southern California on New Year’s Eve. In case readers don’t know the story, Porter stepped outside his apartment and did what a lot of people do: fired off a few celebratory rounds from his rifle into the sky. Brian Palacios, an off-duty ICE agent who had recently moved into the same complex, wasn’t having it, so he put on his tactical gear, grabbed his weapons, went outside without identifying himself, and fatally shot Porter. The LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department] officers dispatched to the scene never asked Palacios to surrender his weapon, never gave him a sobriety test, didn’t investigate anything, really. The Department of Homeland Security’s liar-in-chief, Tricia McLaughlin, spun the incident as a “brave officer” taking out an “active shooter” after an exchange of gunfire. It just wasn’t true; every eyewitness confirmed there was no “exchange” of fire or hostilities. It was murder.


“If we lived in a country where laws matter, the surge of nearly 3,000 ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents would be a direct violation of the civil rights of the Somali community.”

This happened a week before Renee Nicole Good’s death, and yet Porter’s name is not mentioned among the martyrs of the anti-ICE resistance, except when Black folks complain about it. Not to take anything away from the extraordinary sacrifice made by Good and Pretti, but Porter was not white and he was not killed in the act of trying to stop ICE and protect his neighbors. Whereas Porter, much like George Floyd, was rendered a victim whose worthiness was constantly called into question, Good and Pretti were martyrs with whom it is impossible not to empathize.

Porter’s family and friends were pressed to do what Black families always do when they lose a loved one to state violence: reclaim his character by showing that he was a loving, doting father who called his mother every day, worked hard, and made everyone laugh. They had to make him human, to inform the (white) world that his life had as much value as that of Good and Pretti. It’s tired and should be unnecessary, and to her credit, even Renee Good’s sister, Annie Ganger, felt the need to remind people that the violence that took her sister’s life “isn’t new” and that it was unfair that “the way someone looks garners more or less attention. And I’m so sorry that this is the reality.” Meanwhile, the “brave” ICE agent (whose name the LAPD initially refused to release), it turned out, had a reputation for anti-Black and anti-Latinx racism, [allegations of perpetrating] child abuse, and had once showed up at a youth sporting event armed.


“The movement demanding justice for Keith Porter not only called out the complicity between the LAPD and ICE but also refused to treat federal agents as exceptional.”

The point I’m trying to make here isn’t simply that Keith Porter needs to be acknowledged but rather the violence that stole him from his family not only “isn’t new,” it is routine. As a Black man who was native to Compton, California, he had an invisible target on his back. He knew what it is like to live in a police state. Premature death at the hands of armed agents of the state is merely a hazard of being Black in America. This is why the movement demanding justice for Keith Porter not only called out the complicity between the LAPD and ICE but also refused to treat federal agents as exceptional, insisting that they are part of a larger matrix of state violence encompassing all law enforcement and the military. It’s not enough to “abolish ICE”; we have to abolish the police force and replace it with a radically different form of public safety. With regards to Keith Porter, of course randomly shooting a gun in the air is not safe and should not be permitted, but we have to address the reasons he even owns a gun. He and so many other folks like him just don’t feel safe, and U.S. settler culture is rooted in violence as a first response and guns as the chief instrument of violence. Police simply don’t help. Abolition requires changing the culture, not just eliminating the instruments of the culture.

Assuming that war is an apt concept, what does this mean in terms of how we ought to respond? I ask you this question with sincerity. There are those who will say, “Oh, Yancy must believe in armed struggle on the streets of America.” This would be a non sequitur. There is too much of my mother’s Christian sensibilities in me to hold this position. Indeed, I try, I struggle, to manifest agape (the sense of unconditional neighborly love) toward all human beings. But I love my children as you love your daughter. Indeed, for me, that love refuses a form of hospitality that facilitates their harm. I can’t possibly stand by when the Brownshirts come hammering at the door with fascistic bloodlust in their eyes. Here I’m reminded of Claude McKay’s poem, “If We Must Die.” Toward the end he writes:

O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!

Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,

And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!

What though before us lies the open grave?

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

I appreciate your invocation of Claude McKay. As you know, that poem is almost always cited as an expression of the so-called New Negro, the spirit of defiance that suddenly erupts in the wake of World War I and the “Red Summer” of 1919. But this is a misnomer since Black communities had been practicing armed self-defense since they were dragged to these shores. Armed self-defense is the tradition; nonviolent civil disobedience is the rupture, the break with the past. The historical record is clear and unambiguous, as we’ve seen in the writings (memoirs and scholarship) of Robert and Mabel Williams, Akinyele Umoja, Charles E. Cobb Jr., Kellie Carter Jackson, Lance Hill, Jasmin Young, Nicholas Johnson, Simon Wendt, and many others. These writers have shown us, time and time again, that African Americans have a very long and surprisingly successful tradition of armed self-defense against mob violence. Armed self-defense has saved countless lives.


“It’s not enough to ‘abolish ICE’; we have to abolish the police force and replace it with a radically different form of public safety.”

To be fair, militant nonviolent civil disobedience also courageously faces “the murderous, cowardly pack” and is undeniably “fighting back.” But Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s first impulse to keep a pistol by his bedside during the Montgomery bus boycott to protect his family against organized, state-sanctioned mob violence made perfect sense. You can’t win the racist mob or the brownshirts over with love, certainly not in the midst of war. This is why I find those commercials featuring an ICE agent who comes home to his kids and has his conscience suddenly pricked by a child’s query so frustrating, naïve, and ineffectual. If conscience mattered, the faces and screams of the people they brutalized, the lives they took, and the loved ones who had to bear witness would have convinced most of these dudes to quit their jobs long ago.

This kind of terror is not new; ICE and Border Patrol agents have been behaving like this for decades. Stephen Miller didn’t have to tell them what to do. Restraint must come before reeducation and redemption, and imposing restraint is impossible without consequences and accountability. As Dr. King said repeatedly in various speeches, “It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also.”

War is certainly an apt concept here. It is how I frame the assault on Black people in my forthcoming book, Making a Killing: Capitalism, Cops, and the War on Black Life. As I write in the book, “Policing is war by another name…. Whether we call it a war on crime, a war on militants, a war on drugs, law enforcement at every level has turned many Black neighborhoods into killing fields and open-air prisons, stripping vulnerable residents of equal protection, habeas corpus, freedom of movement, even protection from torture.” But as the anthropologist Orisanmi Burton put it in his book, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt, this is not a war we chose. He refers to sites of incarceration as “sites of counter-war,” which can be extended to virtually all Black and Black-led resistance to injustice, mob rule, criminalization, state violence, exploitation, and the very conditions that make Black people vulnerable to premature death. This counter-war holds out the possibility of freeing everyone, including those recruited to maintain systems of domination.

That said, I think the debate over whether we’re ready to go to war is a false debate because we’re already at war. We were at war before Trump came into office, before the neoliberal turn, before Jim Crow, before all of that. It begins with the kidnapping and trafficking of our African ancestors, and the violent dispossession of our Indigenous ancestors. Both processes fall under the category of genocide. John Brown was right to call American slavery “a most barbarous, unprovoked, and unjustifiable war of one portion of its citizens upon another portion.” These wars are fundamentally about turning flesh and earth into property, and whole peoples into combatants and commodities.


“Revolutionary pessimism is accompanied by what surrealist André Breton termed ‘anticipatory optimism’ — the commitment to struggle in dark times and preparing to prevail.”

We have to consider the centuries of continuous, protracted war. Once we acknowledge the reality of protracted war and counter-war, then we have to stretch our definition of “armed struggle.” In this asymmetrical war, guns are not the only weapons. Arson has been a weapon of the enslaved in their own counter-war against Christians holding them in bondage. Minneapolis is where they burned down the police station. Civil resistance has taken on so many forms that don’t fall neatly under traditional categories of “violence” or nonviolence, and have revealed the wide arsenal of “arms” people have deployed in struggle.

Again, in Making a Killing, which is as much if not more about collective resistance (counter-war) than acts of state violence (war), I write about rebellion in Cincinnati, Chicago, Louisville, St. Louis, New York, and elsewhere, and building on the work of Akinyele Umoja, who wrote We Will Shoot Back, I chart the tradition of armed self-defense in Mississippi in light of the police-perpetrated killing of Jonathan Sanders in 2015. Once we acknowledge the long war and redefine armed struggle, we’ll recognize that we’re already in it. We have to figure out what to do, how to strategize, and what it means when casualties of war are white people — which, of course, is not a new thing. It’s a rare thing and ebbs and flows, depending on the extent to which white people see this as their fight.

Your book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination was published in 2002. That was 24 years ago. For many, it is no doubt hard to dream, and I mean this both literally and figuratively. There are times when I try to fall asleep at night and I become obsessed with a singular nightmare: the creation of private militias that have state approval to throw me in jail for writing something or for refusing to embrace Trump’s fascism or our having this discussion. I see hordes of Black people being shot in the streets with impunity. I see so many people being disappeared. I see American-style gulags. I see the complete disregard and overthrow of the Constitution where there are no checks and balances, where there is no longer a two-party system, where due process is nonexistent, and there are literally no exits out of this country. I see my neighbor turning me in because I expressed hatred toward white supremacy and shouted, “Love First!” over “America First!” In this case, perhaps all of those who care about freedom, community, their neighbors, and the importance of democracy “will find out,” as Trump said about Chicago, “why it’s called the Department of WAR.” I believe in the power of movements, but Trump is malicious and I have no doubt that he would, if given the opportunity (perhaps I should say, when given the opportunity), unleash the full might of the Department of War on us. How do we continue to dream, Robin, to have freedom dreams, when the U.S. continues to amplify the reality of dystopic nightmares?

I feel you. I also know we’ve been through worse. A “private militia” (read: mob and police) with “state approval to throw me in jail for writing something” or challenging the status quo by, say, trying to vote, or “hordes of Black people being shot in the streets with impunity,” and “American-style gulags” (keeping in mind how many gulags were actually modeled on U.S. convict labor camps) — and now we’re talking about Meridian, Mississippi (1871), Colfax, Louisiana (1873), Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), New Orleans, Louisiana (1900), Atlanta, Georgia (1906), Springfield, Illinois (1908), East St. Louis, Illinois (1917), Elaine, Arkansas (1919), and, as you and I discussed at length back in 2021, Tulsa, Oklahoma (1921). We have been here. But I understand that to say what’s happening now has happened before, sometimes worse, gives us little comfort.

I do want to make a case for the value of “freedom dreams” in times like these. I’m always reminding readers that what I called the Black radical imagination is not wishful thinking, not an escape from reality, not some kind of dream state conjured and nurtured independent of the day-to-day struggles on the ground. The main point of the book is that the radical visions animating social movements are forged in collective resistance and a critical, clear-eyed analysis of the social order. In fact, in the 20th-anniversary edition which came out in 2022, I underscore this point, writing, “The book does not prioritize ‘freedom dreams’ to the exclusion of ‘fascist nightmares.’ If anything, I show that freedom dreams are born of fascist nightmares, or, better yet, born against fascist nightmares.” The context in which I wrote it, the early Bush years, was decidedly an era of dystopic nightmares: a wave of police killings, culminating in the massive response to the murder of Amadou Diallo, 9/11, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, accelerating neoliberalism, and so forth. Moreover, the movements I explore imagined freedom in the darkest of times: Black Exodus out of an Egyptland of lynching, disfranchisement, new forms of slavery, and segregation; Black embrace of socialist revolution at the height of fascism, global economic crisis, and anti-communism; and Black radical feminism in a moment of heightened sexual violence, femicide, carceral expansion, and an increasingly masculinist Black freedom movement.

In other words, all of these movements were fueled not by false optimism but by a deep understanding of the death-dealing structures of gendered racial capitalism. Freedom dreaming, as it were, is not a luxury; our survival as a people depends on envisioning a radically different future for all and fighting to bring it into existence. The fight or the struggle is precisely how visions of the future are forged, clarified, revised, or discarded.

I just mentioned the power of movements. Coming back to Freedom Dreams, you argue that that there is more that is needed to fight for freedom than organized protest, marches, sit-ins, strikes, and slowdowns. For you, surrealism is also necessary. You write, “Surrealism recognizes that any revolution must begin with thought, with how we imagine a New World, with how we reconstruct our social and individual relationships, with unleashing our desire and building a new future on the basis of love and creativity rather than rationality (which is like rationalization, the same word they use for improving capitalist production and limiting people’s needs).” When I read that passage again, I thought of the power of poiesis — that sense of creation or that sense of bringing something that is radically new into being. Speak to how surrealism continues to inform your understanding of liberation and perhaps even hope amid so much fear, pain, anger, and perhaps, like for me, nightmarishness.

Really great question, one I continued to ponder after writing Freedom Dreams. A critical argument I make in that chapter and elsewhere is that the Africans across the diaspora had been practicing or living surrealism long before Europeans named it. I gave examples, one being the blues. I left it undeveloped in the book, but since then have been thinking about the blues alongside Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Hazel Carby, Fred Moten, Daphne Brooks, the brilliant geographer Clyde Woods, and French surrealist whom I don’t mention in Freedom Dreams, Pierre Naville. The blues, not just as music but epistemology, can be defined as a clear-eyed way of knowing and revealing the world that recognizes the tragedy and humor in everyday life, as well as the capacity of people to survive, think, and resist in the face of adversity — or, in your words, so much fear, pain, anger, and nightmarishness. True, rising nationalism, xenophobia, authoritarianism, militarism, neoliberalism, and the relative weakness of contemporary mass movements offers little reassurance that a liberated future is on the horizon. But the blues, as with the Black radical imagination, resists fatalism and inevitability. It demands and narrates action.


“We need to be abolition communist feminists. We are not only demolishers of worlds, we are builders.”

This is where I find Pierre Naville helpful. A founding member of the Paris Surrealist group and one of the first to join the Communist Party, in 1926 he published a pamphlet titled “The Revolution and Intellectuals,” which argued, among other things, that pessimism was not a reason for despair, withdrawal, melancholy, or bitterness. What he called the “richness of a genuine pessimism” (which he traced to Hegel’s philosophy and “Marx’s revolutionary method”) requires action and must take political form. Naville’s revolutionary pessimism was a critique of the optimism of Stalinist assertions about the inevitable triumph of socialism in the Soviet Union and the imminent fall of capitalism. It was also a critique of the “shallow optimism” of social democrats who believed that they could eventually vote their way into creating a socialist commonwealth. His revolutionary pessimism was not fatalistic resignation or an obsession with the “decline” of elites or nations or Western civilization. Rather, it was a call for collective revolutionary action by, and on behalf of, the oppressed classes. Revolutions are not inevitable, nor do they correspond with particular objective conditions. People just don’t have the luxury to wait for the “right conditions.” Instead, movements must interrupt historical processes leading to catastrophe, by any means necessary. It is not enough to “hope,” we must be determined.

Revolutionary pessimism, therefore, is accompanied by what surrealist André Breton termed “anticipatory optimism” — the commitment to struggle in dark times and preparing to prevail. I am hesitant to say “win” because, as I’ve written elsewhere, assessing movements only in terms of wins and losses obscures the power of movements to inform and transform us. Here is the power of poiesis, of making new worlds and new relationships — not from nothing but from love — rather than reforming or bandaging old systems. So we come full circle. It is not enough to be anti-capitalist and/or anti-prisons and police, to beat back a half-millennium of catastrophe. We need to be abolition communist feminists. We are not only demolishers of worlds, we are builders. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore once told an interviewer, “Abolition is figuring out how to work with people to make something rather than figuring out how to erase something…. Abolition is a theory of change, it’s a theory of social life. It’s about making things.”

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

George Yancy

George Yancy is the Samuel Candler Dobbs professor of philosophy at Emory University and a Montgomery fellow at Dartmouth College. He is also the University of Pennsylvania’s inaugural fellow in the Provost’s Distinguished Faculty Fellowship Program (2019-2020 academic year). He is the author, editor and co-editor of over 25 books, including Black Bodies, White Gazes; Look, A White; Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America; and Across Black Spaces: Essays and Interviews from an American Philosopher published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2020. His most recent books include a collection of critical interviews entitled, Until Our Lungs Give Out: Conversations on Race, Justice, and the Future (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), and a coedited book (with philosopher Bill Bywater) entitled, In Sheep’s Clothing: The Idolatry of White Christian Nationalism (Roman & Littlefield, 2024).

Robert Wyatt, Red Eccentric

By David Hobbs
01.29.2026


English eccentricity has historically functioned as a conservative idea, but experimental musician Robert Wyatt shows it can be repurposed in the service of Marxism.

Drummer Robert Wyatt performs live on stage with Matching Mole at the Roundhouse in London in 1971. (Credit: Fin Costello via Redferns.)

In April 2012, I went to see Tony Herrington interview the musician Robert Wyatt at Café Oto in Dalston. All these years later I can still remember quite a lot of what he said, for example about his admiration of Miles Davis, who he often strived to imitate (‘Would Miles be trying to flog CDs and t-shirts on the door after his concerts? Would he fuck!’), and about how his wife, the artist Alfreda Benge, had saved his life (‘That didn’t seem like a figure of speech, either,’ said my girlfriend at the time, as we made our way home). I also remember Wyatt’s bemused reaction to the tendency of some critics to describe his work as being distinctively English, despite the internationalism that is so clearly central both to his music and his outlook more generally.

As well as ‘English’ (or sometimes ‘British’), there is another term that is habitually applied to Wyatt, often at the same time and by the same people: both the Guardian and the BBC have dubbed him a ‘Great British Eccentric’. Wyatt’s musical output can be whimsical and even strange, so the epithet is not completely undeserved. At the same time, though, the term ‘eccentric’ seems vaguely dismissive, as if Wyatt was not only a highly original artist, but oddly wayward, with only a tenuous connection to the rest of us.

Exploring the eccentricity of Wyatt’s music offers a way of elucidating this concept’s broader implications. This is worth doing because the idea of English eccentricity is profoundly political. By understanding it, we on the British Left can gain a new perspective on our predicament, including both the difficulties that we face and the resources that remain available to us. At the same time, though, the aim of this article is to clarify the significance of Wyatt’s contribution. By thinking seriously about him, and by using him to think about the world, I mean to pay tribute to someone whose career has combined political commitment and integrity with creativity in a way that is extremely rare.
Blues in Bob Minor

Wyatt was born in Bristol in 1945, but grew up in London and Canterbury. His parents were middle-class, bohemian types: Honor Wyatt was a BBC journalist and radio broadcaster from a prominent artistic family; George Ellidge was a music critic and a classical pianist. When they met in Majorca during the early 1930s, as participants in the island’s expatriate literary scene, Honor and George were both married to other people, and for the first six years of his life Wyatt was raised by his mother alone. By the time he and his father were reunited, George had retrained as an industrial psychologist.

It was through him that Wyatt was first exposed to Jazz. George favoured the music of Fats Waller and Duke Ellington, in particular, but this influence was both compounded and counterbalanced by that of Wyatt’s half-brother Mark, George’s son from his previous marriage, whose tastes were more modern. Wyatt began learning the trumpet and then graduated to percussion. Meanwhile, other young beatniks were appearing all over the country. Canterbury, in fact, was a hotspot, and in 1966 Wyatt formed the band Soft Machine, named after the novel by William Burroughs, with three fellow Jazz fans: Mike Ratledge, Daevid Allen, and Kevin Ayers.

The group soon found themselves at the hedonistic forefront of the British counterculture. As with the Grateful Dead in the US, their semi-improvised, exploratory performances resonated strongly in the era of high psychedelia. In 1968, at the crest of the hippy wave, they joined the Jimi Hendrix Experience on two North American tours. By now, though, Wyatt was drinking heavily, and this eventually led to him being sacked from the band. More serious still, he suffered a life changing injury, a fall from a fourth story window in which he was paralysed from the waist down.

Wyatt’s career as a progressive rock drummer was over, but this was also the start of a new chapter. With no band anymore, Benge became his key collaborator. While occasionally referenced in Wyatt’s songs, she was far more than just a muse, contributing both lyrics and artwork for his releases, playfully surrealist work that is now hard to conceive of separately from the music, and vice versa. Wyatt’s later output was also strongly shaped by his political commitments, which grew in depth and coherence after the accident. This marked the beginning of what might be called his ‘red period’, something which was to last for the rest of his creative life.

It was in 1979 that Wyatt officially became a communist. In some ways this was the logical conclusion of his leftist upbringing, followed by his exposure to politically radical elements within the counterculture. Still, Wyatt stands out among his generation of post-war left-wingers because of his decision to join the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), rather than one of the Trotskysist groups that were generally more popular with this cohort. His anti-racist and internationalist commitments seem to have played a key part in this decision: he was particularly inspired by the prominence of Communist leaders like Joe Slovo in Umkhonto we Sizwe (‘Spear of the Nation’), the armed wing of the African National Congress.

With Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party mere months from taking power, though, Wyatt was out of step with the times. ‘It was certainly a lost cause,’ he remembered to his biographer Marcus O’Dair, ‘The Party, I mean, not the aspiration or the analysis. But it was a lost cause for a reason. By then, the CP, like the Labour Party — like the entire left, in fact — was either trying to deny its past or, in a Blairish way, dressing to the left while fighting tooth and nail for the Right.’

Wyatt himself was certainly no revisionist. In ‘The Age of Self’, a track from the album Old Rottenhat (1985), he refutes the arguments of the influential circle around Marxism Today to insist on the continued relevance of a politics centred on class struggle: ‘It seems to me if we forget our roots and where we stand,’ runs the chorus, ‘the movement will disintegrate like castles built on sand.’ One of the verses singles out Martin Jacques, the editor of Marxism Today, for playing with ‘printer’s ink’, even as ‘the workers round the world still die for Rio Tinto Zinc’ (a British-Australian mining company).

If this approach to songwriting seems hectoring or dogmatic, it combines with the other aspects of Wyatt’s style, especially his restless experimentalism, to great effect. For a sympathetic or even just an open-minded listener, Wyatt’s most explicitly political work has much to offer. Indeed, while his solo career was punctuated by periods of depression, its peaks included several highly acclaimed records, notably Rock Bottom (1974), Cuckooland (2003), and Comicopera (2007). He retired from music in 2014.
The Peculiarity of the English

The Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács supplies the starting point for a theory of eccentricity in his book on the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Less than a hundred pages long, Solzhenitsyn (1969) comprises two essays, one focussing on A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962), and the other comparing The Cancer Ward (1966) with The First Circle (1968). Lukács, one of the twentieth century’s most prominent Marxists, might be expected to treat the right-wing Solzehnitsyn with some hostility, but in fact he was full of praise, presenting him as the inheritor of a ‘critical realism’ whose most successful exponent, fifteen years dead by the time of writing, was Thomas Mann.

The discussion of eccentricity here is incidental to Lukács’ main argument, a brief aside prompted by his close reading of The First Circle. Nevertheless, his insistence on this concept’s wider social significance is arresting:


… [O]ne is used to regarding eccentricity, or the making of unimportant whims into the point around which life revolves, as a psychic peculiarity of certain people. This approach is wrong […] For eccentricity is a certain attitude on the part of the subject which arises from the specific nature of reality and the potentiality of his own social praxis. More precisely, it arises from the fact that a character may well be inwardly capable of denying certain forms of the society in which he is forced to live […] in such a way that his inner integrity (which they threaten) remains intact; however, the conversion of this rejection into a really individual praxis […] is rendered impossible by society and therefore he must remain enmeshed in a more or less abstractly distorted inwardness. In this process his character acquires crochety eccentricity.

For Lukács, eccentricity consists in a kind of inverted dissent. It is not that he politicises this concept, exactly: instead, what Lukács emphasises is the failure of eccentricity to become political, its inability to develop into ‘a really individual praxis’. While it does entail a refusal (the subject’s negation of ‘certain forms of the society in which he is forced to live’), this defiant gesture is made in a totally unconducive context, hemmed in by the overbearing reality of the status quo. The eccentric thus emerges as simultaneously heroic and pathetic, a Don Quixote figure who, unwilling or unable to accept the world as it is, must pay the price of becoming ridiculous.

Why, then, should eccentricity be so closely associated with Englishness, if only by the English themselves? To answer this question, Lukács’ theorising must be grounded in history. Indeed, to understand the deeper significance of the idea of English eccentricity requires us to confront another key component of the national ideology: the idea of Britain as a fundamentally conservative, non-revolutionary society.

This claim will already be familiar to many readers. Not only does it circulate widely in centrist and right-wing discourses, but it also echoes in some of the British Left’s foundational texts. For example, it plays an important role in ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, the 1964 article in which Perry Anderson first advanced the influential complex of ideas that has since become known as the ‘Nairn-Anderson Thesis’.

In the mid-1960s, the journal New Left Review became the venue for a highly significant reinterpretation of British history. Anderson, its lead editor, along with the Scottish theorist Tom Nairn, wanted to understand why Britain seemed to have entered a period of relative economic decline. Drawing on the theoretical perspective developed by Antonio Gramsci in his prison notebooks, they alighted on the following explanation: unlike other European countries, Britain had never fully modernised its politics and culture. More specifically, the British bourgeoisie had failed to make good on its historic task of displacing the aristocracy and thereby instituting a capitalist republic. Britain’s revolution, better known as the English Civil War, was premature and incomplete: in its wake it left a lopsided polity full of feudal atavisms that continued to frustrate historic progress.

There is not space here to account for the various criticisms that have been levelled at the Nairn-Anderson thesis, though this includes important contributions from Ellen Meiksins Wood and, more recently, David Edgerton. What matters is Anderson’s insistence that ‘capitalist hegemony in England has been the most powerful, the most durable and the most continuous anywhere in the world’. Paradoxical as it may seem, for him the failure of the bourgeoisie to become fully dominant ultimately strengthened the hand of British capitalism against its opponents. This is because this failure led to a situation in which there was no coherent liberal ideology for the working class to seize upon and transform, preventing the emergence of a revolutionary tradition alike to those of mainland Europe.

This part of Anderson’s argument, too, has been challenged, nowhere more vociferously than in E.P. Thompson’s essay ‘The Peculiarities of the English’ (1965). Among other things, Thompson takes Anderson to task for omitting the 1920s and 1930s from his account. This was the historic height of the British communist movement, which, though never strong in numbers, functionated like the ‘alter ego of the Labour and trade union Left’. To ignore this fact was, for Thompson, akin to writing Wuthering Heights without a Heathcliff, creating a version of British history that lacked an awkward and otherworldly but nonetheless central antagonist. In fact, Thompson saw the CP as just one part of a long tradition of British radicalism, seriously underplayed by Anderson, that reached back to the Social Democratic Federation and the National Council of Labour Colleges, and forward to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Anderson’s case, then, is somewhat overstated. Still, the fact that Britain’s radical left could conceivably be overlooked by him is itself symptomatic. Even Thompson was forced to admit that the passing of a motion in favour of unilateral disarmament at the Labour Party conference of 1960 was an exceptional moment of triumph in a period marked by general retreat. While 1968 saw the beginning of a resurgence in Republican politics in the north of Ireland, followed in the 1970s by a reinvigorated trade unionism and the spread of movements for Black, gay and women’s rights, it remains true that, compared to countries like France and Italy, in Britain capitalism continued to be relatively secure.

Hence the significance of English eccentricity. While other countries could muster revolt and even revolution, here, where the grip of capital was especially tight, it sometimes seemed as though the best that we could manage was to be strange. This futile form of individualised dissent was even celebrated as an amiable vice, like binge drinking or griping about the weather. The English eccentric is an avatar of enduring resistance, yes, but most of all this figure registers the confidence with which such resistance has been nullified and contained by the powers that be.
The Politics of Nonsense

One reason why Wyatt has been deemed eccentric, then, is because of his stubborn refusal to conform to this hostile political climate. From the perspective of the status quo, he appears as a quixotic ‘Yesterday Man’, or, as another of his song titles has it, an ‘Anachronist’, still espousing a revolutionary politics that even his supposed comrades in the modernising wing of the Communist Party considered outdated. Defensively, but with an assurance and ease that speaks to the immense power of British capitalism and its beneficiaries, Wyatt was rendered eccentric because of his Marxism.

But there is far more than this to Wyatt’s multi-layered oddness. Eccentricity was not only something projected onto him as a way of neutering the political tradition with which he was allied: it was also something that he actively embraced. There are various aspects of Wyatt’s creative output that might usefully be viewed through this lens, from his engagement with Jazz to the persistent theme of ‘madness’, which is especially prominent on Cuckooland. Most revealing of all, however, is his reworking and revolutionising of the literary genre of nonsense writing.

‘There has never been a strong surrealist tradition in England,’ writes the British essayist Adam Phillips, ‘but there has of course been a unique tradition of nonsense.’ Instead of the continental movement led by André Breton, whose participants volubly self-identified as revolutionaries in their proselytising manifestoes, and were often sympathetic to (or actually members of) the French Communist Party, in conservative Britain there was only Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’ and Alice in Wonderland. Indeed, Phillips’ remarks seem to echo Nairn and Anderson’s assessment of British political history as a whole: just as they positioned the English Civil War as a ‘premature’ version of the French Revolution, nonsense writing appears here as a relatively feeble anticipation of the more developed revolt against rationalism that was yet to break out in mainland Europe.

Nevertheless, while nonsense writing is not as ideologically developed as Surrealism, its political dimensions have certainly not gone unnoticed. Nonsense is often seen to embody an anarchic sensibility that rejoices in flaunting rules, inverting power relationships and generally turning the world upside down: the main antagonist in Alice in Wonderland is, after all, the Queen of Hearts, a bloodthirsty, despotic monarch (‘Off with their heads!’). The French philosopher Jean-Jacques Lecercle, on the other hand, characterises nonsense as a ‘conservative-revolutionary genre’, blending an excessively strict adherence to linguistic norms with wild negations of rationality (think of how the grammatical propriety of Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ is combined with a richly suggestive but ultimately impenetrable lexicon). In this way, Lecercle sees nonsense writing as foregrounding the same dialectic that lies at the heart of all human communication: the fact that even as we speak language into existence, this language also shapes, moulds and ‘speaks’ us in turn.

Nonsense thus emerges from the same stunted and foreclosed form of opposition as eccentricity. In such an unconducive environment as late-nineteenth-century Britain, revolt degrades into whimsy. While the Surrealists wanted to bring the unconscious out onto the barricades, Alice’s battle with the Queen of Hearts is safely contained within her dream on the riverbank. Likewise, Lear’s nonsensical poetry is ultimately ordered into strict taxonomies. The ‘lands where the Jumblies live’ and the adventures of the Owl and the Pussy-Cat are pointedly confined to far off places. That’s not the way we do things here.

‘The Duchess’, a song from Wyatt’s 1997 album Shleep, serves to demonstrate the influence of nonsense on his work, though in truth this can be felt almost everywhere. Sung to the tune of ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’, its lyrics combine punning, paradox and playful opacity in a way that strongly recalls Lear’s poetry:


Oh my wife is tall and short
She won’t do what she ought
She never lies, but then again
She lies down all day long.

As in nineteenth-century nonsense writing, it is immediately clear that Wyatt’s wordplay is laden with destabilising social implications. The speaker is presumably identical with the duke of the original nursery rhyme. While his grace has no discernible difficulties taking charge of ‘ten thousand men’, though, women seem to be a different matter. The duchess is composed of contradictions (‘tall and short’, ‘old and young’, ‘sour and sweet’), and in this way she seems to lie beyond his verbal grasp. She is also contradictory in the sense of talking back to and disobeying her husband. In the second stanza she even silences him completely, if only for a moment:


Oh my wife is fat and thin
She’s generous and mean
She’s –––––, and
Her secret’s safe with me

In the recording, Wyatt mumbles and hums his way through the third line. As if to demonstrate her ‘meanness’, the duchess confiscates his words, taking control of the song’s very form. Later she is emphatically identified with the criminalised working class (‘on her evenings off she blackmails toffs’), and perhaps more specifically with sex workers (‘she hangs out down the port’). Once again, her greeting (‘hello sailor, how’s your dad?’) suggests a bold rejection of aristocratic respectability, combined with an unabashed sexual confidence.

Nor is all this counterbalanced, as in traditional nonsense writing, with more conservative elements. The most that could be said in this regard is that the duchess retains her title, and by extension her affiliation with the aristocracy. But the strict metre of ‘Jabberwocky’ is nowhere to be seen, and the delivery and instrumentation are markedly undisciplined. The song barely hangs together. Keyboards, violins, saxophone and voice all occasionally seem out of key, moving at different tempos. At the end the vocals simply tail off as the accompaniment dissolves into electronic squelching and frenetic scales on the piano. The overall effect, however, is not unpleasant. Throughout the song we grow accustomed to the dissonance, which never builds to a crescendo. Like much of Wyatt’s work, ‘The Duchess’ is radical without being alienating, combining experimentation with palpable human warmth.

The crux of Wyatt’s approach to nonsense, then, is to preserve and heighten its progressive implications, while stripping away any residual deference towards established forms. If the fact that this genre first emerged at the same time as Marxism seems to hint at a deeper radicalism, then Wyatt’s music makes good on this promise, allowing it finally to achieve its revolutionary potential. Here and elsewhere, the literary tools furnished by this tradition are unequivocally deployed by him in the service of a socialist and feminist sensibility.
Dialectics of Eccentricity

Wyatt’s music itself seems to enact the same critique of English eccentricity that I have extrapolated from Lukács, Anderson, and Thompson. His work de-sublimates the politics that underlie this concept, making explicit what is at stake in the eccentric’s denial of ‘certain forms of the society in which he lives’. Wyatt’s communist eccentricity reveals the strangeness attributed to this figure as a way of stigmatising non-alienated ways of being and ensuring that they do not become sufficiently widespread to threaten the status quo.

On the other hand, Wyatt’s engagement with the tradition of nonsense writing complicates this picture. As much as the idea of eccentricity is a way of containing his intolerably un-English politics, it also appears to offer him a set of tools that can be adapted to advance precisely the same project. Wyatt’s eccentricity, in other words, is dialectical: it is both a formidable weapon wielded against him by those who would defend the prevailing social arrangements, but also something that he succeeds in using against the system itself, in turn.

It can be risky to reduce art to a set of political lessons or a mechanism through which to develop analysis and strategy. Nevertheless, Wyatt’s music has something important to teach the British Left. While some lament our apparent inability to be ‘normal’, assimilating into the imagined style and values of working-class people, Wyatt’s example might encourage us, on the contrary, to embrace oddness. After all, collectivist politics must inevitably appear strange in a place like this, where capital has held sway for so long. Perhaps the only way to get beyond communist eccentricity is to go through it.

Contributor

David Hobbs holds a PhD from the University of Manchester on prison writing and the British New Left.

Frida Kahlo self-portrait sells for $54.7 million, sets new record for women artists


Frida Kahlo’s 1940 self-portrait “El sueno (La cama)” sold for $54.66 million in New York on Thursday, Sotheby’s said, setting a record for the most expensive painting by a woman.


Issued on: 21/11/2025
By: FRANCE 24

Auction house Sotheby's says Mexican artist Frida Kahlo's "El Sueno (La cama)" has sold for $54.6 million, a new record for a woman's painting. © Charly Triballeau, AFP

A self-portrait by legendary Mexican artist Frida Kahlo sold for $54.66 million in New York on Thursday, setting a new record for the price of a painting by a woman, the auction house Sotheby's said.

The sale of Kahlo's 1940 artwork, titled "El sueno (la cama)" – which translates to "The dream (The bed)" – breaks the previous record in this category, set by American artist Georgia O'Keeffe, whose 1932 painting "Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1," sold for $44.4 million in 2014.

Kahlo's painting is "the most valuable work by a woman artist ever sold at auction," Sotheby's said in a post on X.

The auction house said Kahlo's work was "painted in 1940 during a pivotal decade in her career, marked by her turbulent relationship with Diego Rivera".


Kahlo's self-portrait went on the auction block at Sotheby's with an estimated price ranging from $40 million to $60 million.

The buyer's name was not disclosed.

The artwork depicts the artist sleeping in a bed that appears to float among clouds in the sky, laying beneath a skeleton with legs that are wrapped with sticks of dynamite.

This painting is a "very personal" image, in which Kahlo "merges folkloric motifs from Mexican culture with European surrealism", Anna Di Stasi, head of Latin American art at Sotheby's, told AFP.

The Mexican artist, who passed away in 1954 at age of 47, "did not completely agree" with her work being associated with the surrealist movement, Di Stasi said.

However, "given this magnificent iconography, it seems entirely appropriate to include it" in this movement.

The record-setting sale came two nights the New York auction house reeled in another record sale, with a painting by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt fetching $236.4 million on the block – the second most expensive artwork ever sold at auction.

Klimt's "Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer," which he painted between 1914 and 1916, depicts the daughter of his main patron dressed in a white imperial Chinese dress, standing before a blue tapestry with Asian-inspired motifs.

The most expensive painting ever sold at auction remains the "Salvator Mundi," attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, which was bought for $450 million in 2017.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

A Klimt portrait is now the second most expensive artwork ever auctioned

A rare full-length portrait by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt sold for $236.4 million in New York on Tuesday, becoming the second most expensive artwork ever auctioned. The fiercely contested sale underscores surging demand for museum-calibre pieces as Sotheby’s prepares to offer a major Frida Kahlo work later this week.


Issued on: 19/11/2025 - By: FRANCE 24

Gustav Klimt's “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer” exhibited by Sotheby's in New York on November 8, 2025. © Charly Triballeau, AFP

A portrait by Austrian artist Gustav Klimt fetched $236.4 million in New York on Tuesday, becoming the second most expensive artwork ever sold at auction.

Six bidders battled for 20 minutes over the “Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer,” which Klimt painted between 1914 and 1916.

The piece depicts the daughter of Klimt's main patron dressed in a white imperial Chinese dress, standing before a blue tapestry with Asian-inspired motifs.

Sotheby's, which managed the sale, did not disclose the identity of the buyer.

The most expensive painting ever sold at auction remains the “Salvator Mundi,” attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, which was bought for $450 million in 2017.

“Full-length society portraits of this impressive scale and from Klimt's pinnacle period (1912–17) are exceptionally rare; the majority in major museum collections,” Sotheby's said of Tuesday's sale.

READ MORELost Claudel sculpture found in Paris flat fetches $3 million at auction

“The painting offered this evening was one of only two such commissioned portraits remaining in private hands,” it added.

For Klimt, the past auction record for his work was held by "Lady with a Fan", which sold for 85.3 million pounds ($108.8 million) in London in 2023.

On Thursday, a self-portrait by Frida Kahlo has a strong chance of setting a record for a female artist when it goes on sale, also at Sotheby's in New York.

Kahlo painting likely to break record for most expensive work by any female

© France 24
01:22

Estimated at $40 to $60 million, the 1940 piece called "The Dream (The Bed)" shows the Mexican painter sleeping in a bed overshadowed by a large skeleton.

The most expensive painting by a female artist sold to date is a 1932 work by American Georgia O’Keeffe, which fetched $44.4 million in 2014.

The record for Frida Kahlo is another 1949 self-portrait, "Diego and I", which sold for $34.4 million in New York.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

At NatCon, an effort to make Christian nationalism a more inclusive movement

 FOR WHITE STR8 MALES 

(RNS) — Speakers and organizers alike worked to craft a vision for a Christian America that steers clear of anti-Catholicism and, especially, antisemitism.

Pastor Doug Wilson addresses the National Conservatism Conference, Sept. 4, 2025, in Washington. (RNS photo/Jack Jenkins)

Jack Jenkins
September 5, 2025

WASHINGTON (RNS) — During the “Bible and American Renewal” breakout session at this week’s National Conservatism Conference, Josh Hammer stood out as the lone Jewish person on the panel of otherwise conservative Christian activists: a pastor, the editor of an online Christian magazine and a self-described Christian nationalist.

Yet, it was Hammer who told an audience member that “America was founded as a Christian country.”

“I’ll be the first to say that,” Hammer added. “There is very little doubt in my mind about that.”

The exchange was a window into a curious dynamic that permeated “NatCon,” as attendees call the conference, where speakers and organizers alike worked to craft a vision for a stridently conservative Christian America that somehow steers clear of anti-Catholicism and, especially, antisemitism.

A right-wing gathering that was once considered fringe, NatCon now boasts among its alumni Vice President JD Vance and this year featured a number of Trump appointees and allies, including Russell Vought, Office of Management and Budget director; Kelly Loeffler, director of the Small Business Administration; and Steve Bannon, a longtime podcast host and former chief strategist for President Donald Trump.

Office and Management and Budget Director Russell Vought speaks during the National Conservatism Conference, Sept. 3, 2025, in Washington. (RNS photo/Jack Jenkins)

Hammer was hardly alone in appealing to America’s Christian roots at the three-day conference, held in downtown Washington from Sept. 2-4. Idaho Pastor Doug Wilson, a self-described Christian nationalist, declared from the main stage, “We were in fact a Christian republic at the founding.” At a breakout session on “The Threat of Islamism in America,” one panelist declared “we are a Christian nation,” and another titled his talk, “Creating Islamic Communities in Christian America.”

But those declarations were made even as speakers openly voiced concern about the potential fracturing of NatCon’s fragile right-wing coalition. In an opening plenary session, Yoram Hazony, the Jewish chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation, said early supporters of NatCon skewed heavily Catholic, so he brought in more Protestants — only for Catholics to fret that the movement had, in turn, become anti-Catholic. He has since wanted to bring in more Orthodox Jewish leaders, but is facing a problem: a rise in virulent antisemitism on the right, especially after the attack by Hamas militants on Oct. 7, 2023, in southern Israel.

“I didn’t think it would happen on the right, and I was mistaken,” Hazony said. He pleaded with the group to avoid antisemitism, noting that he is still willing to negotiate disagreement about Israel’s policies as well as have an “honorable conversation” about rethinking “the relationship between Jews and Christians in America.”

Hazony didn’t detail what that relationship looks like, exactly, but several conference speakers appeared to navigate the divide by referring to shared “Judeo-Christian” principles. Vought declared that the U.S. was founded on “Judeo-Christian worldviews.” Gene Hamilton, head of America First Legal, similarly described the U.S. as a “country based on Judeo-Christian values,” and Loeffler referred to “the moral foundations that built this country” — namely, “Judeo-Christian values.”

What’s more, Southern Baptist theologian Albert Mohler insisted that a conservatism that honors “prophets and apostles and patriarchs” can “unite Jewish conservatives and Christian conservatives, Catholic conservatives and Protestant conservatives, Eastern Orthodox conservatives, all in a shared conservatism of principle and conviction, mutual respect and mutual assistance, mutual commitment and commitment to shared conservative principles.”

The Rev. Albert Mohler speaks during the National Conservatism Conference, Sept. 4, 2025, in Washington. (RNS photo/Jack Jenkins)

But more often, NatCon attendees seemed to mitigate their differences by trying to find common cause. Asked about the dynamic, Wilson derided antisemitism but acknowledged the tension between advocating for a Christian America and holding together a coalition that includes Jewish people.

“Jesus either rose from the dead or he didn’t — I’m a Christian,” he said.

But in the “political sphere,” Wilson said, there are pathways for extreme right Christians to find commonality with Jewish conservatives.

“I think it’s good for them to see that there are Orthodox Jews who hate pornography as much as they do,” he offered by way of example.

But in practice, the common enemy that emerged to unite Christian nationalists and Jewish allies at NatCon wasn’t pornography, but Muslims. Several speakers made a point to single out Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim American and leading New York City mayoral candidate.

“New York, our greatest city, is on the precipice of being run by a Zohran Mamdani — I think we realize that something has gone absolutely wrong,” Jack Posobiec, an alt-right political activist who has promoted Christian nationalism in the past, told the crowd. He then added: “As I stand here today, we are less than 10 years away from one of America’s great cities being run by a Muhammad.”

Jack Posobiec speaks during the National Conservatism Conference, Sept. 4, 2025, in Washington. (RNS photo/Jack Jenkins)

Steve Bannon addresses the National Conservatism Conference, Sept. 4, 2025, in Washington. (RNS photo/Jack Jenkins)

Posobiec was echoed later that day by Bannon, the onetime adviser to Trump. Referring to Mamdani, Bannon insisted “the existential threat to Israel — the Jewish people — is not in Tehran,” but rather “is right in New York City.” He then denounced Mamdani as “a Marxist and a jihadist,” while acknowledging Mamdani is likely to win the election.

Whether a return to the anti-Muslim sentiment — a flavor of vitriol that once helped bolster Trump’s 2016 election coalition — will be enough to help NatCon is an open question. But if this year’s gathering is any indication, it appears to be the chosen path forward for Christian nationalists hoping to expand their tent: In his own address, Wilson argued that while America was “deeply Christian and Protestant at the founding,” it also “did successfully adapt to the presence of Catholics and Jews.”

But accepting large numbers of Muslim immigrants in the U.S., he said, is a bridge too far.

“Millions of Muslims without any commitment to, or mechanism of, assimilation is another matter,” said Wilson, who has previously said that Muslims would be barred from holding office in his version of a Christian America. “There’s only so much white sand you can put in the sugar bowl before it isn’t the Sugar Bowl anymore.”

Pastor Doug Wilson attends the National Conservatism Conference, Sept. 4, 2025, in Washington. (RNS photo/Jack Jenkins)

At NatCon, a confusing resurgence of anti-Muslim sentiment

WASHINGTON (RNS) — NatCon’s negative focus on Islam makes for a potential preview of what conservatives will be concerned with in the next year.

Josh Hammer, right, addresses the National Conservatism Conference, Sept. 3, 2025, in Washington. (RNS photo/Jack Jenkins)

Jack Jenkins
September 3, 2025

WASHINGTON (RNS) — During a breakout session at this year’s National Conservatism Conference on Wednesday (Sept. 3), one group of panelists was asked an unusual question: Did they consider the U.S. to be a “Protestant tree” in which “Jews and Catholics are allowed, as birds, to nest in the branches”?

Josh Hammer, the only Jewish member of the panel, eschewed the arborial analogy but replied that he believes Jews and Catholics “have always been a part of the American story.” A “more interesting question,” he offered, is what Founding Fathers had to say about “Mohammedism” — a reference to Islam.

Fellow panelist William Wolfe, head of the Center for Baptist Leadership and a self-described Christian nationalist, interjected: “I’m happy to cut that branch off, Josh.”

The crowd burst into laughter.

The episode was one of several derogatory mentions of Islam at the conference, a three-day convening at a hotel in downtown Washington. Once considered a far-right fringe gathering and still deeply associated with Christian nationalism, NatCon, as it’s known among its regular attendees, has become a major waypoint in the conservative calendar. The ideas germinated here increasingly shape the ideological framework of the Trump administration, as speakers at past conferences have gone on to become MAGA stars, including Vice President JD Vance.

This year’s lineup had no lack of administration officials, from Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought to border czar Tom Homan.

NatCon’s negative focus on Islam, therefore, makes for a potential preview of what conservatives will be concerned with in the next year, especially in midterm election campaigns. Already, New York’s mayoral election in November has attracted dire predictions in conservative circles about the front-runner, Zohran Mamdani, and his Muslim faith, should he win.

William Wolfe speaks during the National Conservatism Conference, Sept. 3, 2025, in Washington. (RNS photo/Jack Jenkins)

The topic was a focus of the conference’s first panel on Tuesday, titled “The Threat of Islamism in America.” Ryan Girdusky, a onetime CNN commentator who was banned from the network last year after he jocularly implied that Muslim journalist Mehdi Hasan had ties to terrorist groups, was among the panelists. (“I hope your beeper doesn’t go off,” he said on air, in an apparent reference to the 2024 attack directed at Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah, when beepers across the country, planted with explosive charges, suddenly ignited.)

At NatCon, Girdusky argued against mass immigration generally (“The best part of immigration is scarcity,” he said), and Muslim immigration in particular. Echoing a theme aired in speeches in recent months by Vance, Girdusky said Mamdani, a naturalized U.S. citizen, drew crowds at his rallies whose “ancestors did not come on the Mayflower. Most did not come on Ellis Island. Most didn’t come in the past 30 years.”

Another panelist, Wade Miller of the Center for Renewing America, a think tank founded by OMB Director Vought, was even more explicit. “Islam is anti-Christianity, authoritarian and against our entire constitutional order,” Miller said. He insisted the progressive left in the United States has embraced a “woke-Islamist alliance,” pointing to the pro-Palestinian activism that swept college campuses as Israel invaded the Gaza Strip. He later declared that “we are a Christian nation.”

Wade Miller speaks during the National Conservatism Conference, Sept. 2, 2025, in Washington. (RNS photo/Jack Jenkins)

Another CRA activist, senior fellow Nathan Pinkoski, warned that the U.S. could become like Europe, where, he argued, the continent’s “trashed civilizational immune system” allowed “Islamists to make inroads into European nations.”

Anti-Muslim sentiment is hardly new among American conservatives, nor is it unusual for it to appear at NatCon — the 2024 iteration of the conference also featured a talk on “The Islamic Supremacist Challenge to America.”

But when questioned about the urgency of their message, at least one of the panelists could give no rationale for the timing of their warnings, or why Islam was on the agenda at all. Miller said he wasn’t sure, guessing only that “maybe” it was because of recent U.S. strikes in Iran.

Nonetheless, Islam was a recurring component of the larger discussion of immigration. Bo French of Fort Worth, Texas — who chairs the Tarrant County Republican Party and has himself been accused of anti-Muslim comments — said he came to the Islamism panel out of concern that the U.S. will end up with an influx of Muslim immigrants such as countries in Europe, especially the United Kingdom, have experienced. “I think we’re probably 10 years behind where they are, but I think it is accelerating,” French said.

Hammer, senior editor-at-large at Newsweek, also tied his concern to immigration but insisted the issue is of immediate importance. “I think that Islamic immigration should be zero today,” Hammer told RNS. “It is a pressing concern.”

Muslims represent around 1% of the U.S. population, according to Pew Research, and the Trump administration has dramatically restricted immigration in various ways that include banning entry from many Muslim-majority countries. A 2022 poll from the Public Religion Research Institute found that while a slim majority of white evangelicals believe the U.S. should “prevent people from some Muslim majority countries from entering the U.S.,” majorities of every other religious group polled said the reverse.

Trump courted Muslim votes in his 2024 presidential campaign, capitalizing on Muslim disenchantment with the Biden administration’s support for Israel.

Miller acknowledged the growing Muslim interest in Republican ideas in his panel presentation, saying, “Some on our side … insist that we should see Islam and Muslims as political allies,” he said. But Muslims, he summed up, “are not our friends.”


The degeneracy of Christian nationalism and the demolition of culture

(RNS) — Trump's assault on art and culture is only outdone by his debasement of his fellow humans.

Rigoberto Gonzalez’s “Refugees Crossing the Border Wall into South Texas.” Photo by Difference Engine/Wikimedia Commons

Phyllis Zagano
August 29, 2025

(RNS) — The United States exists in a new-old universe. After nearly 250 years of democracy, it seems infected with totalitarianism, racial superiority, anti-communism and all the petrified theories advanced by another populist politician, Adolph Hitler.

Donald Trump did say he would be a dictator on day one.

History will be the judge, but things look rather bleak right now for the democracy side of the equation.

Take art and culture.

During the 12 years of Hitler’s corruption of the concepts of law and order, he also attacked what we now call “creatives” and cultural institutions. The backlash against artistic Modernism had begun earlier in Germany’s Weimar era, but the Führer fully enforced his own ideas of what comprised art. He banned “degenerate art”: Bauhaus, Cubism, Dada, Expressionism, Fauvism, Impressionism and Surrealism. And the regime supported only official painters, sculptors, architects, writers and even actors.

Things are trending in the same direction in the 21st-century United States. Trump, having gotten himself elected chair of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, has vowed to end “woke political programming” at Washington’s premier arts venue.

As an example of what this means, the Kennedy Center hosted a screening this week of “The Revival Generation,” a documentary about a “nationwide campus revival movement” drawing Gen Z Americans. Billed as a “call to faith and a message of hope” that “(c)aptures a spiritual awakening among today’s youth,” the program included a one-hour worship service with “a local worship collective.”

Next Trump ordered a review of exhibits at the Smithsonian Museums that has sent curators scrambling to “fix” exhibits Mr. Trump finds too woke. The list of things needing repair at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of the American Latino focuses on mentions of race, slavery, immigration and sexuality.

The artwork that offends the curator-in-chief is not Cubism or Dadaism or Impressionism. Unlike Hitler, Trump has not put Picasso, Duchamp and Monet on the banned lists. Rather, it is Rigoberto Gonzalez’s extraordinary “Refugees Crossing the Border Wall into South Texas.”

The list goes on. Some of it is, well, edgy. But it is not of the order of “Immersion (Piss Christ),” Andres Serrano’s 1987 photograph of a crucifix submerged in a container of his own urine. Despite an outcry from politicians who tried to defund its sponsors, the piece won an award in a competition partly sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. Ronald Reagan was president then.

If only Trump would confine his new strictures to art and culture, his populism would be an affront only to the pursuit of beauty. But they cross several lines, assaulting truth as well.

As several mainline faith leaders and the U.S. Catholic bishops have pointed out, the derisive oppression of poor immigrants by members of the current administration is sickening. That some administration officials continue to publicly espouse Christian ethics is mind-boggling.

Government spokespeople bend the truth and present an alternate reality. Then, there are the humorless bureaucrats who can change numbers to suit the master’s will. The administration is efficient and punctual, and its leader can do no wrong.

The American republic is aiming for a head-on collision with democracy, and not incidentally is becoming an enigma, if not a laughingstock, to the rest of the free world.

It has to stop.


EVEN THE CRITICS OF PATRIARCHY ARE PATRIARCHS

After challenging Doug Wilson, podcaster’s confession shakes anti-patriarchy movement

“Women have been declaring the damage for years,” she said. “But something about a man holding the mic — even when it was women survivors talking into it — made the warnings more palatable to people who were steeped in Christian patriarchy.”

(FāVS News) — Podcast host Peter Bell’s admission came shortly after a Moscow, Idaho, community event where he and others spoke about the impact of Wilson’s teachings.

“Sons of Patriarchy” podcast logo and host Peter Bell. (Courtesy images)

Tracy Simmons
September 4, 2025

(FāVS News) — Days after challenging Pastor Doug Wilson to a public debate, Peter Bell, producer and host of the podcast “Sons of Patriarchy,” made a social media confession that has forced a reckoning within the community he helped build around exposing abuse in patriarchal churches.

Bell, whose podcast investigates Wilson’s Moscow, Idaho-based church movement, said in a since-deleted Aug. 23 Facebook post that he struggled with pornography addiction for nearly two decades, was fired from multiple jobs for lying and experienced marital separation during his podcast’s first season last year.

The confession came shortly after Bell appeared at a Moscow community event Aug. 8 at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Center, where he and others spoke about the impact of Wilson’s teachings. The podcast producers scheduled their first Moscow visit to coincide with Grace Agenda, a weekend conference hosted by Wilson’s Christ Church that serves as a major recruiting event for the church. After the Kenworthy event, Bell and “Sons of Patriarchy” staff approached Wilson at the conference, and Wilson agreed to a one-on-one conversation with the podcast host, who has spent months documenting abuse allegations within Wilson’s Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.

Bell acknowledged to FāVS News that the timing of his Facebook post was deliberate.

“With the recent airing of the CNN interview with Doug Wilson” — a profile that examined Wilson’s Christian nationalist movement and connections to U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — “our team began receiving far more media inquiries, survivor stories and ‘interest’ after Doug agreed to a one-on-one with me,” Bell said in an interview.

“This compounded with the kinds of messages we were receiving, mostly coming from women, who were praising me. They wanted to let me know that they wished their husbands could be like me, their sons would grow up to be like me, and their pastors cared like me,” Bell said. “I couldn’t handle the praise, knowing that if those who were messaging us knew the truth about me, maybe they’d be less inclined. I had told parts of it before, but I needed everything out there.”

A crowd attends a “Sons of Patriarchy” live event at the Kenworthy Performing Arts Center, Aug. 8, 2025, in Moscow, Idaho. (Photo by Tracy Simmons/FāVS News)

The confession sparked tension within the “Sons of Patriarchy” team. Bell’s co-host and majority owner of the podcast, Sarah Bader, responded with a social media statement distancing the team from Bell’s post.

“He did not run this post by the team. And we are holding him to account for it,” Bader posted. “We apologize to our survivor community for his actions and are putting measures and controls into place so that it can’t happen again.”

RELATED: Doug Wilson agrees to debate ‘Sons of Patriarchy’ after dueling events in Moscow, Idaho

In Bell’s confession, he revealed he had been “addicted to porn for a little less than 20 years” and continues to struggle “to this day.” He also said he was “fired from two or three full-time ‘secular’ jobs … for lying, and covering up other things, in rather large ways” and was “kicked out” of ministry positions for dishonesty.

The issues led to separation from his wife during the production of his podcast’s first season just about a year ago, Bell wrote. The couple has since reconciled.

“I write it both to get it off my chest, to give Doug Wilson and his people the dirt they’re probably looking for, and to dissuade anyone from thinking I’m the ‘anti-patriarchy’ hero they might think I am,” Bell wrote in the Facebook post, which garnered hundreds of comments. “There was this picture/aura forming about and around me, that I was the ‘anti-patriarchy hero’ so many in these circles were looking for.”

The confession particularly stung trauma survivors who trusted Bell with their stories of abuse within patriarchal church systems, several alleged survivors wrote on social media. As Bell interviews women who have left these environments, his admission raised questions about his fitness for the role.

“I totally and completely understand if survivors no longer desire to be interviewed by me,” Bell said. “My goal isn’t to get someone behind a microphone — my goal is for them to be heard.”

Peter Bell, left, and Doug Wilson, right. (Video screen grabs)

However, Bell defended his continued involvement.

“I haven’t had the chance to interview survivors” since the confession, he said, “but to be transparent, it hasn’t changed much. I didn’t change after the confession. I said what I said because I’ve already come to terms with everything.”

Bell described how leaders can maintain public ministries while struggling privately — an insight that parallels cases his podcast has investigated.

The issue of pastors struggling with pornography while maintaining public ministries has been a recurring theme in allegations documented by “Sons of Patriarchy.” Tim Meshginpoosh, a longtime observer of these churches, wrote in a Substack post that when such issues have surfaced, “the response of the elders was soft, and when the marriages blew up, the wife got blamed, shunned, and ostracized.”

Bell said churches often handle these issues differently based on one’s status.

“A high-ranking leader with decades of experience and beloved by the congregation? You get a slap on the wrist, a cover-up and pass right on through,” Bell said. “A no-name member who will put a blot on your reputation? You’ve got two choices: Make sure no one ever hears about it and your ‘sterling’ reputation is saved … or, strike them down with the fury of the Lord as an example to those watching.”

Patterns of institutional response Bell described played out in reaction to his own disclosure. Bader’s response seemed to split the podcast’s following, with some calling her statement “woke” while others said they appreciated her consideration for triggered survivors.

Meshginpoosh questioned whether Bell should have been the face of the anti-patriarchy effort given his recent struggles.

“The concern I have — it was way too soon,” Meshginpoosh said in an interview. “He recorded the first season while he was still separated from his wife. … If you have that kind of recent past, you need to take some time to do the hard work.”

Meshginpoosh also noted a tactical disadvantage, should there be a debate with Wilson.

“If you’re going to go up against Wilson, you’re going to have a hard time grilling him about the Steven Sitler disaster if you’re trying to pick up the pieces of multiple integrity fails on the job and a 20-year porn addiction,” he said

The Sitler case has long been a source of controversy for Wilson. In 2005, Sitler, a student at New St. Andrews College, a private college founded by Christ Church, confessed to molesting multiple children. Sitler pleaded guilty to lewd conduct with a minor and was sentenced to prison. Wilson wrote a letter to the sentencing judge describing Sitler as “most responsive” and “completely honest” and asking for leniency, according to a Southern Poverty Law Center report — despite Wilson’s own writings advocating death penalties for such crimes. Wilson officiated Sitler’s wedding, and Sitler was eventually found to have sexually abused his infant son, leading to legal protections.

Cases like Sitler’s are what “Sons of Patriarchy” was created to expose. But some worried Bell’s confession overshadowed that mission. Author Sarah Stankorb, who has covered Wilson’s movement and was on stage at the Moscow event, wrote in a statement to Baptist News Global that the confession was problematic in its timing.

“I worry, in light of Peter Bell’s post, we’re losing the thread,” Stankorb wrote. “It blindsided a lot of survivors and other advocates whose trust is already fragile. It also has created a huge distraction from the work of making Wilson’s impact visible.”

Stankorb also noted a troubling pattern in responses to abuse allegations.

“Women have been declaring the damage for years,” she said. “But something about a man holding the mic — even when it was women survivors talking into it — made the warnings more palatable to people who were steeped in Christian patriarchy.”

Bell acknowledged uncertainty about his continued role as the podcast’s host, saying he serves “at the behest of the volunteers and those who support the work.” He suggested Bader could lead the podcast.

“Whether or not I lead this podcast in the future has no bearing on my own personal desire to see movements founded and influenced by Doug Wilson to be toppled,” he said. “This is personal for me, and I care, regardless of a microphone being in front of me or not.”

However, supporters believe the “Sons of Patriarchy” mission remains vital. Meshginpoosh said the podcast serves as a “force multiplier” for survivors who have waited years for someone to advocate for them.

“Ultimately, they are doing good work,” he said. “They are exposing the abuses and systemic dynamics within the Presbyterian/Presbyterian-ish world. I want SoP to continue to do good work.”

Attempts to reach Bader for comment were unsuccessful.