5 November

Born in 1878 — Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, Russian artist.

Above: Petrograd Madonna, 1920

Also, born in 1926, English writer, painter, and critic John Berger.

I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Previously on November 5, Petrov-Vodkin & Charles Taylor.