Eric Karpeles

A Fellow of the Czesław Miłosz Institute at Claremont College, painter and writer Eric Karpeles has given the Amon Carter Lecture on the Arts at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, the annual Proust lecture at the Center for Fiction in New York,  and the Franke Lecture in the Humanities at Yale. He is the painter of the Rockefeller Chapel at the HealthCare Chaplaincy and The Sanctuary, each a monumental work conceived as a multi-faith meditation space for people in search of grounding at times of crisis. He is the translator of Józef Czapski’s lectures on Proust (Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp), a biography of the man (Almost Nothing: The 20th Century Art and Life of Józef Czapski), and an illustrated monograph of the artist’s paintings and drawings (Józef Czapski: An Apprenticeship of Looking). Karpeles has worked as an ambulance driver, interviewed composer Stephen Sondheim onstage, had tea with Indira Gandhi and collaborated on a book of mathematical equations and Hebrew quotations used as a prop in a film by the Coen Brothers.