The Great Valley

What do splashes of paint on canvases, "The Red Book" by Carl Gustav Jung, and modernist texts by Gertrude Stein have in common? The book by American philosopher and art critic Morgan Mays ("Drunken Silenus", "The Fate of Animals") begins with an attempt to decipher the mysterious cycle of paintings "The Great Valley", created by Joan Mitchell, one of the key artists of abstract expressionism, in voluntary exile in the French town of Vétheuil, and then transforms into a dizzying journey where true art is born from pain, memory, and loss. As Mays navigates through the "verbal whirlpools" of Gertrude Stein, gazes at Claude Monet's water lilies, and empathizes with the heroes of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, he discovers that the Great Valley is an unattainable realm from which we have never actually left. This book, full of paradoxes, humor, and melancholy, places the final period in the exploration of art as revelation, where behind the chaos of paint and words, the true face of reality is suddenly revealed.