FLOWERING LIGHT:
Kabbalistic Mysticism and the Art of Elliot R. Wolfson

• About the Author
• Reviews of Flowering Light

For years, the work of Elliot Wolfson (one of the world’s leading scholars of Jewish mysticism) has been taking the form of poetry and painting, and he has composed a compelling, mysterious body of such work that calls not only for serious treatment by critics and scholars, but also for new critical genres. With Flowering Light, Marcia Brennan takes just such a bold, imaginative step. The first to examine Wolfson’s scholarship, poetry, and painting as a single, integrated body of work, Brennan also effectively invents a new form of scholarship. Flowering Light is at once a critical work—an explication of the scholarly, painted, and poetic works of Wolfson—and a mystifying, mystical work of art in its own right: “a work of conceptual art,” in the author’s own words, “that resonates with the capacity of mystical envisioning to create imaginative worlds.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marcia Brennan is Associate Professor of Art History at Rice University. She is the author of Painting Gender, Constructing Theory: The Alfred Stieglitz Circle and American Formalist Aesthetics (2001); Modernism's Masculine Subjects: Matisse, The New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction (2004); and Curating Consciousness: Mysticism and the Modern Museum (2010).

REVIEWS

“This text in many ways creates a new paradigm for art history and art criticism.”
  —Jay Clarke, Curator for Print and Drawings, The Art Institute of Chicago.

“A brilliant, luminous, evocative book. What we witness is Professor Brennan’s remarkably wide-ranging but deferential erudition that moves seamlessly among Kabbalah, sufi mysticism, precise, powerful descriptions of the paintings, Wolfson’s poetry, his writing, his biography – the whole of it resting on a stable foundation of post-Modern scholarship."
  —Joanna E. Ziegler, Professor and Chair, Department of Visual Arts, College of the Holy Cross