Peter Wolf and the Lost Art of Chance Encounters

In his elegant memoir of postwar Greenwich Village life, When Kafka Was the Rage, the literary critic Anatole Broyard wrote that “you could always find your own life reflected in art, even if it was distorted or discolored.” Broyard then cited one sentence from a book on surrealism that struck him: “Beauty is the chance meeting, on an operating table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”