death in venice essay

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Analysis of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 10, 2022

The Nobel Prize–winning author Thomas Mann (1875–1955) stands out as one of the most important figures of early 20th-century literature. Influenced by German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche , Mann’s fiction serves as a model of subtle philosophical examination of the ideas and characters in his stories. Death in Venice , like his first major novel Buddenbrooks , was inspired for the most part by actual events in Mann’s life. He had lived on an island near Venice during a cholera outbreak in 1905, which initiated the setting for the story. Then, during a trip to Venice in 1911, he read an obituary for composer Gustav Mahler, leading to the creation of his fictional writer, Gustav von Aschenbach.

Death in Venice tells the story of an artist and the nature of art. The focal character, Aschenbach, is a man who possesses a latent sensuality but is able to keep his passions contained, refusing to grant them expression in either his life or his art. Aschenbach is a classic example of a Freudian “repressed” soul—a man existing in a state of imbalance that, it was believed, hindered and even extinguished the possibility of producing a work of truly inspired art. An aging German writer who serves as the paragon of solemn dignity and self-discipline, Aschenbach at first maintains his cerebral and duty-bound role, believing that true art emerges only through defiance of corrupting passions and physical weaknesses.

This defiance begins to weaken during a trip to Venice, a trip Aschenbach takes for the purpose of securing artistic inspiration from a change in scenery. The trip, however, serves as the first indulgence the restrained author has allowed himself and marks the beginning of his decline. Through the languid Venetian atmosphere and the peacefully rocking gondolas, Aschenbach is lured away from his rigid self-discipline. He later notices an extremely beautiful Polish boy named Tadzio. Initially, the aging writer convinces himself that his interest in the 14-year-old boy is only aesthetic, but as the novel progresses, Aschenbach falls deeply and obsessively in love with the boy, even though the two never have direct contact.

Tadzio’s sensual hold on Aschenbach shatters the once firm resolve he employed to deny himself pleasure. Aschenbach spends his days secretly watching Tadzio as the boy plays on the beach. He even resorts to stalking as he follows Tadzio’s family throughout the streets of Venice. Not even the cholera outbreak dampens his desire, his need to be near the boy. Aschenbach will become progressively more daring in his pursuit of Tadzio, more debased in his thoughts, and, true to Mann’s literary use of irony, Aschenbach will die of cholera, a degraded slave to his passions, a man stripped of his dignity.

Mann portrays Aschenbach as a figure who undergoes a total displacement from one extreme of art to the other; readers experience his emergence out of the cerebral and into the physical, from pure form to pure emotion. Mann uses the novella to warn of the dangers posed by either extreme in a method he called “myth plus psychology.” Each of these elements plays equally vital roles in tracing Aschenbach’s decline. Tadzio is more than a flesh-and-blood boy posing as the object of Aschenbach’s desires; he is a myth Mann compares to Greek sculpture, to Plato’s Phaedrus, to Hyacinth, and to Narcissus. Aschenbach’s journeys across the lagoon into Venice shows him in terms that mirror the legendary trip across the River Styx into the underworld. Strange red-haired figures frequently appear to Aschenbach, suggesting devils or demons. All of these references to the mythological serve the universalization of Mann’s characters and their experiences within the story.

Psychological elements also figure prominently in Death in Venice . As the story initially unfolds, Aschenbach’s libidinal drives are completely repressed, but as Freud would have noted, the writer’s repression has only forced his drives to emerge by another means, in this case in daydreams holding the intensity of visions. Further into the story, Aschenbach has a daydream involving a tropical swamp, and later it is an orgiastic worship of a strange god epitomizing the Freudian longing for what is hoped to be the ultimate erotic abandon—death.

Mann’s densely complex narrative represents the best of his ability to create layer upon layer of meaning and symbolism. Each reading evokes a new revelation or uncovers a new area of intellectual exploration. Death in Venice demonstrates the essence of the eternal struggle between the passions of nature and the restraints of rational man, but the disease to which Aschenbach succumbs acts as a metaphor for the question of passion as disease versus passion as natural and desirable. Mann takes the reader on a journey through the issue of doubt, challenging the reader to ask: Is it better to have loved obsessively and died, or to never have known this passion at all?

As a writer, Mann can be classified as oblique and economical. He writes with precision, wasting no words. Every detail he supplies to his reader should be explored as significant, as every detail serves Mann’s strategy of hinting, implying, and suggesting, as opposed to directly revealing. What may seem to be only marginal particulars within Mann’s prose—such as the black color of a gondola, a stonemason’s yard for the selling of blank gravestones, or the stained, exposed teeth of a grimacing figure—are indeed all instrumental in establishing a foreboding atmosphere of imminent death. By weaving these threads throughout the story, by linking a variety of motifs working in concert, Mann makes the link between sensual art and death early on and then forges that link throughout the novel, leaving the reader not searching for a climax at the end of the story but, instead, closing the cover with a more deeply ingrained understanding of the multifaceted connection existing between sensual art and death.

Analysis of Thomas Mann’s Stories

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brennan, Joseph Gerard. Thomas Mann’s World. New York: Russell & Russell, 1962. Bruford, Walter Horace. The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: Bildung from Humboldt to Thomas Mann. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Burgin, Hans. Thomas Mann, a Chronicle of His Life. Mobile: University of Alabama Press, 1969. Hatfield, Henry Caraway. Thomas Mann: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1964. Heilbut, Anthony. Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature. Riverside: University of California Press, 1997. Heller, Erich. The Ironic German, a Study of Thomas Mann. London: Secker & Warburg, 1958. ———. Thomas Mann, the Ironic German: A Study. Mamaroneck, N.Y.: P.P. Appel, 1973. Kahn, Robert L. Studies in German Literature. Houston: Rice University, 1964. Masereel, Frans. Mein Stundenbuch, 165 Holzschnitte Von Frans Masereel. Einleitung von Thomas Mann. Munich: K. Wolff, 1926. Mueller, William Randolph. Celebration of Life: Studies in Modern Fiction. New York: Sheed & Ward, 1972. Reed, Terence. Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. Robertson, Ritchie. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Stock, Irvin. Ironic Out of Love: The Novels of Thomas Mann. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1994.

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Death in Venice

Thomas mann, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Thomas Mann's Death in Venice . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Death in Venice: Introduction

Death in venice: plot summary, death in venice: detailed summary & analysis, death in venice: themes, death in venice: quotes, death in venice: characters, death in venice: symbols, death in venice: theme wheel, brief biography of thomas mann.

Historical Context of Death in Venice

Other books related to death in venice.

• Full Title: Death in Venice ( Der Tod in Venedig , in German)
• When Written: 1911
• Where Written: Munich, Germany
• When Published: 1912
• Literary Period: Modernism
• Genre: Novella
• Setting: Munich, Germany and Venice, Italy.
• Climax: Dressed in new clothes and wearing makeup in an attempt to appear younger, Aschenbach follows Tadzio through Venice and then becomes delirious in the heat in a city square. He talks as if he is Socrates talking to the young Phaedrus, in Plato’s Phaedrus , and asks whether beauty is the path to virtue or sin.
• Antagonist: Aschenbach can be seen as his own antagonist. He struggles against his own repressed desires and, as he chooses to stay in Venice and keep pursuing Tadzio, he leads himself to his own downfall.

Extra Credit for Death in Venice

Deaths in Venice. Mann’s novella has been proven popular both with readers and with other writers eager to create their own versions of the story. It has been adapted into both a film and a ballet, and Benjamin Britten created a celebrated opera version of the story in 1973.

Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice” Critical Reading Essay

Death in Venice is a novella by the German Thomas Mann. The book was published in Germany in the early part of 1912. The book’s original name was Der Tod in Venedig. In1925, Kenneth Burke translated the book into English. It is, at heart, a story of homosexual lust.

The story starts with the protagonist, a man named Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous author who was widowed at an early age. The story starts with Aschenbach passing through a cemetery. While on his stroll, he happens upon a red-haired man who impolitely stares at him. Soon after this incident, he decides to take a trip. Aschenbach chose Venice and took a suite at the Grand Hotel des Bains on Lido Island. On his way to the island, he sees an elderly man with a group of youths. The old man tries to create an illusion of youth by wearing thick makeup and dyeing his hair. Aschenbach is disgusted at the man and turns away. He then encounters another red-haired gondolier who returns him to the wharf.

Aschenbach checks into the hotel and dines there for the evening. During dinner, he sees a Polish family whose daughters are so overdressed that they resemble nuns, but what caught his attention was the adolescent boy, beautiful and fair-skinned. He overhears from the conversations that the boy’s name is Tadzio.

Because of the humid weather in Venice, Aschenbach’s health suffers and he decides to leave Lido. On the day of his departure, he sees Tadzio once more and regrets his decision to leave. He is overjoyed when he finds out his luggage has been misplaced He then returns to his hotel and forgets the idea of leaving. As his stay in Venice lengthened, Aschenbach’s interest in the boy heightens; he follows the boy secretly around Venice. His obsession with Tadzio grew so rapidly that he declared it as love.

With his growing “love” for the boy, Aschenbach completely forgets his past self. He becomes a slave to his love for the boy and no traces of the famous aristocratic author remains. It even comes to the point that he begins feeling sexual attraction for Tadzio. Though his feelings for the boy are intense, he never touches him nor talks to the boy. Disgusted at his aging and ugly body, he visits the hotel’s barber daily until he is persuaded to paint his face and dye his hair to look younger.

After the makeover, Aschenbach closely resembles the old man he saw while in the Vaporetto. By this time Aschenbach has become the degenerate he previously thought disgusting. Days pass and Aschenbach found out that the Polish family intended to leave in the afternoon. Though ill and weak, he went down to the beach and sat in his usual spot. Tadzio was unsupervised and he was with an older boy. A quarrel breaks out between the two boys and Tadzio loses. He angrily leaves his companion and wanders nearer Aschenbach. Tadzio looks out to sea and then turns to look at Aschenbach. The latter feels the urge to follow the boy but his strength fails him and he collapses back to his chair. Aschenbach is found dead a few minutes later.

Book and Movie

The movie version follows the storyline of the book while introducing a few scenes for dramatic effect. The work is strewn with references to Greek mythology. Indeed, mythology is the very framework of the plot.

Before Aschenbach traveled to Venice, he was a disciple of the god Apollo, god of reason and intellect. Aschenbach led a disciplined life, generally thinking first before acting. He had never given himself up to the lure of emotional decisions. Then the book introduces Dionysus, god of tumult and passion.

He looms over Aschenbach, yearning to destroy his reason and intellect. Silenus, the lead devotee to Dionysus, also plays an important role in the novel as the red-haired man who kept crossing the path of Aschenbach, Every time that Silenus appears, Aschenbach seems to lose his grip and falls deeper and deeper into a passion.

The decline and withering of Aschenbach is the central tragedy of the story. In the beginning, he is a great author, a man filled with pride and dignity. He loathed those that succumbed to their emotions and changed their appearances to impress and earn the attention of others. The old man who dyed his hair and discolored his face with makeup fills with disgust and loathing.

As the novel progressed, Aschenbach loses his grip on reality by succumbing to depraved homosexual desire. This initially manifested as perhaps an amusing infatuation, an eccentricity tolerated in some European circles. But soon, this rises to a crescendo of unholy desire and lust. In so doing, Aschenbach succumbs to emotions, placing his heart above his head. He forsakes both reason and dignity.

Symbolically, therefore, the first battle that Dionysus won was in bringing about Aschenbach’s loss of reason. He lingered in Venice, knowing full well that his health could not tolerate the hot and humid climate. He thought the boy more important than his own health. The boy soon became an obsession and he followed him from place to place. Aschenbach had not only lost his reason, but he had also enslaved himself to a passion for the boy.

The next discernible change was in Aschenbach’s beliefs. The old Aschenbach who devoted himself to the beliefs of Apollo would never have tolerated changing his appearance to look younger and impress people. In fact, the old Aschenbach loathed and was disgusted by people like this, but the new alter ego had lost his reason, dyed his hair, and applied makeup on himself. Not only was this a change in principle, but it was also a loss of dignity. The worst thing that happened was his eventual change in gender. Aschenbach at first rationalized his situation as pure love in the aesthetic or platonic sense. It would have been harmless in this sense, but in the end, he even felt sexual urges for the boy. He became a homosexual, an outcast who could not express his unholy and unacceptable ardor to the object of his “affections.”

There can be no question that Death in Venice is a book about homosexual passion – at least this is the contention of some literary scholars of like persuasion and queer studies theorists (O’Hehir 1). There is tragedy writ large in the tale of a man who descends from great respectability to dying alone on a beach, the object of his desire so close.

When Aschenbach starts on his trip, it is as a search for something that had intrigued him during the encounter with the red-haired man in the graveyard. At the end of his journey, he finds solely his own destruction as human, loss of dignity, of self-respect, and in the end, his own life.

Works Cited

Ebert, Roger. “Death in Venice” Chicago Sun-Times. 1971.

O’Hehir, Andrew. “Just How Gay is Death in Venice.” Powells.com. 4 th Edition. Web.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2023, December 15). Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" Critical Reading. https://ivypanda.com/essays/thomas-manns-death-in-venice-critical-reading/

"Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" Critical Reading." IvyPanda , 15 Dec. 2023, ivypanda.com/essays/thomas-manns-death-in-venice-critical-reading/.

IvyPanda . (2023) 'Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" Critical Reading'. 15 December.

IvyPanda . 2023. "Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" Critical Reading." December 15, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/thomas-manns-death-in-venice-critical-reading/.

1. IvyPanda . "Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" Critical Reading." December 15, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/thomas-manns-death-in-venice-critical-reading/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" Critical Reading." December 15, 2023. https://ivypanda.com/essays/thomas-manns-death-in-venice-critical-reading/.

• Aschenbach in “Death in Venice” by Thomas Mann
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• “Death in Venice” by Thomas Mann and “Therese Raquin” by Emile Zola
• The Wisdom of Silenus: The Meaning of Life & Death
• "Death in Venice," a Novella by Thomas Mann
• Genocide and the Right to Be Free
• “Death in Venice” by Thomas Mann: Metaphysical Roots of White Decadence’s
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The Dead Rise at the Venice Biennale

By Jackson Arn

Physical fatigue is always a factor in criticism, but at the Venice Biennale, the world’s most prestigious recurring art exhibition, it picks up a few seats on the private jury of taste. The event, showcasing hundreds of artists and patronized by hundreds of thousands of people, spans two main locations: the lush parkland of the Giardini, created by Napoleon, and the cluster of retired shipyards and armories known as the Arsenale. Each day of press previews, my black sneakers gained a layer of whitish dust, as though mummified by travel, and my eyes burned with a thousand sightings of the same pink tote bag on everybody’s arm. (By the time I left, it seemed as Venetian as a Bellini.) Gravity tugs harder than usual here. No dosage of caffeine is enough. Successful art works sense their audience’s aches and respond with exquisite tact.

The limitations of the human body may well be the Biennale’s true subject, but at this installment, the sixtieth since 1895, the explicit theme is otherness. The show’s title is “Foreigners Everywhere,” which at its least trivial signals an emphasis on the creations of the marginalized. In the eighty-seven national pavilions that make up half of the event, many of the featured artists are Indigenous; at the Central Exhibition, which constitutes the other half, a good chunk hail from the Global South and a majority are deceased, the past being the biggest foreign country of all. You might want to complain about the preponderance of death in a show that is implicitly about the health of contemporary art. But any curatorial choice that gives us fewer immersive rooms and preening enfants terribles doesn’t seem so bad to me.

How could it, when there are still artists like Affandi to discover? A movie-theatre clerk who taught himself how to paint in the nineteen-thirties, already renowned in his native Indonesia, he is represented in the Central Exhibition by a glorious shriek of a self-portrait, in wormy streaks of yellow and green. Adriano Pedrosa, the Biennale’s curator and the artistic director of the São Paulo Museum of Art, excels at connecting artists separated by vast chasms of time and geography—walking around, I sensed that if Affandi, who died in 1990, had taught himself to weave, he might have made art like Shalom Kufakwatenzi, a young Zimbabwean with two textile works in the show. (At times, Affandi very nearly did weave with paint, squeezing thick lines of pigment straight onto the canvas and arranging them with his hands.) There’s the same bright, unapologetic raggedness, the stuff of life frozen in mid-wriggle.

Many other fine pieces in the Central Exhibition are textile-based: a dense, earthy slab of threads by the Colombian Olga de Amaral, who turns ninety-two this year; a selection of embroidered burlap pieces by the anonymous Chileans known as Arpilleristas; large, cool compositions by Susanne Wenger, who spent most of her long life in Nigeria, practicing the Yoruba religion and mastering batik, the art of wax-resist dyeing. Her pieces, which show mortals and deities floating side by side, stick to the same spiky patterns and subdued hues but never retrace their steps; you could imagine them continuing forever, and might well want them to. If not, walk a few feet to the exhibition’s other main batik specialist, Ṣàngódáre Gbádégẹsin Àjàlá, who passed away in 2021. His creations are as religiously inclined as Wenger’s—he was her adopted son—but with a livelier clamor of bodies pressed together. There’s almost too much to savor; the intricate coloring, combined with pale spiderweb shading, gives the figures a pimpled texture I can’t remember seeing in art before and now can’t stop noticing everywhere. Àjàlá, Wenger, and the rest of the fibre brigade may be the snappiest retort to the gripe that there are too many dead artists this year: when we’re dealing with textiles, one of the oldest visual art forms and still backlogged with brilliance, the distinction between new and old stops mattering so much. Good is good, even if it takes decades for anyone to notice.

Is the sixtieth Venice Biennale a good exhibition, then? There’s superb stuff to be sniffed out, although with hundreds of artists from around the world there had really better be. The Giardini and the Arsenale contain more work than several respectable museums put together—and that’s not even counting various collateral exhibitions, plus the handful of national pavilions scattered across the rest of the city. Lines can be nasty and outbursts nastier still. On the first day of previews, a guard sent me to a ticketing booth to haggle with an attendant. She asked me who I was writing for; the words had barely left my mouth before the man behind me started cursing me, this magazine, America, and Joe Biden.

Granted, there are things worth getting upset about here, with good and bad art works talking over each other for entire rooms at a time. Peak braying is reached in a single tall gallery that Pedrosa has stuffed like a storage unit with abstract paintings by thirty-seven artists, most of them making their Biennale début. You can always try to make up for neglect by rushing lots of strong material through at once, but this doesn’t necessarily do the material any favors: plenty of abstraction needs time and space to bloom in the beholder’s eye, and none of the paintings in this room are permitted much of either, with the result being that nothing much blooms at all. Blame the curation, blame the inherent dilemma of the logjam—either way, it’s the one portion of the Central Exhibition which strikes me as an outright failure. A Rothko couldn’t thrive in a place like this.

The most obvious way to stand out in a big, loud multitude is to be louder, and loudness, with a side helping of eeriness, was more or less the métier of the mid-century Italian artist Domenico Gnoli. His sprawling painting of a woman’s shoe looks as rough as sandpaper, with two vampire fangs of red fabric poking down from its top edge—it has to be one of the most calmly odd things in the Central Exhibition this year, and also one of the most purely pleasurable, pulling you in with the friendly yank of a pop song. Gnoli’s approach isn’t so far from that of the Mexican Ana Segovia, whose “Pos’ se acabó este cantar” is one of this Biennale’s more memorable film pieces. Panting with hot color and haywire machismo, it features two Mexican cowboys, or charros , standing millimetres apart, their every move swollen to monumentality by the camera’s closeness. Flirtation is hard to distinguish from violence, sexy thrashing being rather similar to the angry kind. You may long for answers, or learn to enjoy the twinges of comedy and menace.

With fewer than half of the Central Exhibition artists presently breathing, the national pavilions have double the usual pressure to sum up the state of contemporary art. Some countries always participate, though others, like Ethiopia and Tanzania, are here for the first time, and another, Russia, declined to take part and lent its empty pavilion to Bolivia. On my second day of pavilion-going, a P.R. person told me that the decision was only a tiny sub-scheme in Russia’s ongoing bid for Bolivia’s mining reserves. Oscar Wilde thought that all art was quite useless; whether it can win Vladimir Putin a bottomless supply of lithium remains to be seen.

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If this Biennale can be trusted, though, the state of contemporary art is rumbly. At first, I thought the noises were coming from thunderclouds, or my own gut, but no—ambient echoes score a significant number of the national pavilions this year, enough to give the entire show a low, uniform, very important murmur, italics for the ears. It’s the right soundtrack for pavilions that seem locked in a deadly serious arms race of whimsy. Visit a few and fun quickly hardens into formula. You wait in line, drone-serenaded. You go in and immediately some whatsit mugs you: a gaggle of masked figures rolling around in muck, a rain forest of rainbow tendrils, an arrangement of rainbow beads, a wrecked boat, a dead giraffe.

The giraffe—actually a spotted hut-like structure, modelled on the carcass of a giraffe that died in the Prague Zoo in the nineteen-fifties—can be found in the Czech pavilion, courtesy of Eva Kot’átková. Some informal polling suggests that it’s one of the more popular pavilions this year, which I suspect has a lot to do with how nice it feels to squat inside the giraffe hut and rest for a minute. When you stand up and return to the rumbling outside, the visceral weirdness fades fast—just another interchangeable phrase in the big Biennale Mad Lib. A welcome exception is Yuko Mohri’s installation in the Japanese pavilion. Several of her pieces transform the space into a cavern of dripping water, a nod to the leaks, worsened by a series of earthquakes, that have dogged Tokyo’s metro system for years. The most striking works star rotting fruit, which has been poked with electrodes that translate moisture into—you guessed it—drone noises. It’s no less weird than a dead giraffe, of course, but for once the weirdness doesn’t feel like a weapon aimed at the viewer. The tone is calmer, serene in its indifference; nature and technology are locked in a Platonic dialogue that we mortals can only eavesdrop on. Mohri doesn’t demand your shock, and so earns your interest.

Good? Bad? When you’re deep in the trance state brought on by pavilion-hopping, it’s probably more honest to think in terms of what works and what doesn’t. Two days after our first meeting, the man who yelled at me walked right by without showing any sign of recognition—too preoccupied with the forty-sixth President, I suppose, or possibly with the timeless mysteries of art. Maybe he’d just come from the German pavilion, the apotheosis of post-good art at this year’s Biennale. It contains multiple offerings, including a video by Yael Bartana that crosscuts between woodland witchcraft and a spaceship, and an unclassifiable piece by Ersan Mondtag that can be read as a wretched, furious monument to the artist’s grandfather, who died of asbestos poisoning. Alone, each piece might not have fared so well—Bartana’s might have been too woozy-cheesy, Mondtag’s too self-definingly sombre. Yet they somehow unlock each other. Wandering through Mondtag’s re-creation of his grandfather’s world, complete with performers and mounds of dust, I caught a glimpse of C.G.I. outer space, and the obscenity of this old family tragedy jabbed at me like it was mine.

The real standouts here are the understated pieces. The jurors seem to have felt so, anyway, when they awarded the Golden Lion to Archie Moore, a First Nations Australian artist who covered the walls of his national pavilion with a seemingly infinite family tree, scratched in chalk like a school project. Some of the entries are blurred, and most are too dense or high to make out in the dim light. In the center of the room sits a stack of redacted documents concerning dead First Nations Australians, separated from its surroundings by a ring of water—an island in an island. Like Mohri, Moore seems to be holding something back, and, in a Biennale full of hard sells, that works. But even soft-sell art can seem overdone. A few days before Moore’s victory, a sign outside the Israeli national pavilion announced that it wouldn’t open until a ceasefire and a hostage agreement were reached. In all probability, Israel’s will be the only national pavilion that anyone is still talking about in two years. By then, though, the Biennale will be back, and Venice will fill with new rumbling, the lingua franca of the contemporary art world: part purr, part groan, part long, uncertain hmmm . ♦

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By Susan B. Glasser

By Jeannie Suk Gersen

By Keith Gessen

Back to his roots: Ukrainian Museum in New York offers another angle on Peter Hujar

Show shines a light on lesser-known early images by the celebrated photographer.

Different direction: the Ukrainian Museum’s show concentrates on Peter Hujar’s work up to 1969 and features images the artist created depicting children with disabilities, including Girl on Swing, Southbury (1957) Courtesy of The Ukrainian Museum, New York; © The Peter Hujar Archive—Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

This exhibition presents three little-known groups of early works by the Ukrainian American photographer Peter Hujar (1934-87), and pays homage to his famous images of the queer avant-garde counterculture of the 1970s and 1980s in the Lower East Side, where the Ukrainian Museum now stands. Hujar was raised by his Ukrainian grandmother on a farm in New Jersey, speaking only Ukrainian until he started school, and the exhibition reflects his struggle to find his identity, says Peter Doroshenko, the museum’s director and curator of the exhibition.

“People have always known he had Ukrainian heritage,” Doroshenko tells The Art Newspaper . “He didn’t talk about it that much. With some friends he did; with others he didn’t. It was that battle of trying to figure out identity. And his was even more complex, because he was dealing with a gay identity at a time when it wasn’t completely apropos to be gay.”

The “Rialto” of the exhibition’s title refers to the Lower East Side’s Yiddish Theatre District, which still existed when Hujar lived in the neighbourhood. He lived in one of the old Jewish theatres; The Saint, a gay club known as the “Vatican of disco” and frequented by Andy Warhol and the theatre director Robert Wilson, was across the street.

Creating a context

“These are the things I wanted to describe to create a context for Hujar,” Doroshenko says. “He was literally going across the street to Veselka”—the neighbourhood’s landmark Ukrainian restaurant. “He was talking to the cooks in Ukrainian. It was all part of a bigger cultural phenomenon.”

The focus of the exhibition is Hujar’s work up to 1969. As part of his research, Doroshenko spoke with the photographer’s surviving friends and consulted materials in his archive, which is overseen by Hujar’s friend Stephen Koch. Doroshenko found photographs taken by Hujar at homes for disabled children in Southbury, Connecticut, and in Florence, Italy, which reveal Hujar’s ability to establish a unique rapport with his subjects. His photos of the skulls of the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, also featured in the exhibition, cast them as memento mori .

As Susan Sontag wrote in her introduction to Hujar’s book Portraits in Life and Death (1976), “Photographers, connoisseurs of beauty, are also—wittingly or unwittingly—the recording-angels of death.” ( Peter Hujar: Portraits in Life and Death , also organised by the Ukrainian Museum, is a collateral event of the Venice Biennale, until 24 November.)

• Peter Hujar: Rialto , Ukrainian Museum, until 1 September

Winning the Venice Biennale's Golden Lion has thrust Archie Moore into the global spotlight and with him, 65,000 years of history

Last Saturday, in a packed auditorium in Venice, dozens of artists and curators from all over the globe gathered for a history-making announcement.

Among them was Bigambul and Kamilaroi artist Archie Moore — Australia's representative for the 60th Venice Biennale, the world's pre-eminent art biennial.

He is only the second First Nations artist to solo-represent Australia since 1954 and on Saturday, became the first Australian to win the coveted Golden Lion award for best national participation for his monumental installation work kith and kin .

The work features hundreds of documents and a vast hand-drawn family tree, which covers the entire pavilion and maps Moore's ancestry over some 2,400 generations.

"Thus 65,000 years of history (both recorded and lost) are inscribed on the dark walls as well as on the ceiling, asking viewers to fill in blanks and take in the inherent fragility of this mournful archive," the jury said in its citation.

The morning of the ceremony, Moore and his team received a call strongly encouraging them to attend the event.

Even with that hint, Moore hadn't truly considered the prospect of winning the Biennale's most prestigious award.

But news of his win has thrust the Brisbane-based artist into the international spotlight.

Accepting the award, Moore thanked his team, saying: "It makes me feel honoured to be rewarded for the hard work one does. I am grateful to everyone who has always been part of my journey – from my kith to my kin – to my Creative Australia team and everyone else back home and those of the Venice lagoon."

In the art world, winning the Golden Lion is akin to winning an Oscar. It's a major milestone, not just for Australia's participation in the Biennale but for First Nations art on the world stage.

Yet for most Australians, Moore is relatively unknown.

The elusive Archie Moore

Bundjalung writer and curator Djon Mundine knows Moore well and has written extensively about his work.

He describes the 54-year-old artist as "a night parrot" – one of the most elusive and mysterious birds in the world.

The night parrot is a small and critically endangered species , endemic to Australia, including Moore's birthplace of Toowoomba in the Darling Downs region of southern Queensland.

"The rarely sighted bird has until today been present but invisible … it can only be 'seen' through its 'trace'," Mundine wrote in his essay The Night Parrot, Archie Moore, and the Tree of Life.

It's an apt metaphor for Moore, whose quiet and reflective nature almost feels at odds with the powerful statements he makes through his artwork.

Moore completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts at Queensland University of Technology in 1998 and has been steadily building his reputation as a multidisciplinary artist for the past three decades.

"I find all media interesting … I've done paper sculptures, I've worked with a perfumer to create smells that create memories, [I've also made] videos and sound works," Moore says.

His approach is eclectic and incredibly versatile – Moore prefers to let the message dictate the medium.

His openness to form spans painting, drawing, photography, textiles, sculpture, site-specific installation work — even taxidermy. (In 2013, Moore won the University of Queensland's National Artists' Self-Portrait Prize with his pithy self-portrait work Black Dog, a taxidermied dog named "Archie".)

Drawing on memory and personal history

Moore's selection as Australia's representative for the 2024 Biennale Arte, the international art exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, came as a shock to the artist.

At the time, he described it to ABC RN's Awaye! as "overwhelming".

But he's spent more than a year researching and preparing for this moment.

"It's amazing to realise the project on the large scale the Australia pavilion provides which is 60 metres of walls. It's an amazing way to visualise Aboriginal inhabitance on the continent," Moore says.

As described by the jury, Moore's "quiet, impactful pavilion" kith and kin confronts the ongoing legacies of Australia's colonial history, and offers a moving exploration of the universality of family.

They are themes that have long fascinated Moore.

He's previously created work using personal history as a metaphor for Australian history, including a genealogical chart Family Tree (2021), and installations A Home Away From Home (Bennelong/Vera's Hut) (2016) and Dwelling (2022).

Commissioned for the 20th Biennale of Sydney, A Home Away From Home (Bennelong/Vera's Hut) is a full-scale replica of the small brick hut built in 1790 for Wangal man Woollarawarre Bennelong. Inside the replica, Moore has recreated the home of his maternal grandmother, complete with corrugated iron walls and a dirt floor.

In his multi-room installation work Dwelling, staged at Gertrude Contemporary in Melbourne, Moore invited viewers to step into his shoes — and memories — by constructing vignettes of his childhood home.

Immersing audiences in his personal recollections and experiences is a major theme of Moore's work.

"That impossibility of knowing another is a bit of a metaphor for the failures of reconciliation, like, will White Australia and Black Australia ever get to know or understand each other fully?" he says.

Finding kinship in the archives

Moore first became interested in genealogy six years ago.

His interest was spurred on by the declining health of his mother, and the realisation of the knowledge that would be lost when she died.

"My mother had a minor stroke in 2016 … [After that], she seemed to be a lot more willing to talk about stuff so I took that opportunity to ask her a lot of questions and she gave me a lot of information," he says.

Although his mother passed away last year, Moore was able to share the news of his Biennale appointment with her.

"She wouldn't have understood what this [the Venice Biennale] is but she knew it was something special."

Moore's mother is among the "kin" featured in his Biennale presentation — she is one of the thousands of names that make up the epic hand-drawn family tree that covers the blackboard-painted walls of the Australia pavilion.

"So she exists in the tree," Moore says.

In researching kith and kin, Moore trawled ancestry.com, state archives, newspapers and coronial reports to map his family tree.

It extends to Moore's great-great-grandmother, who was known as "Queen Susan of Welltown".

Royal monikers of "King" or "Queen" were colonial titles, often bestowed on a senior Aboriginal person who acted as an interlocutor for their Mob.

"She lived on a sheep property in Bunganya … and she is one of the few women [who] got the Queen title and breastplate," Moore explains.

"There's not much I found out about her that goes into detail but there was a little bit in a bulletin article that said that she refused to wear it [the breastplate] because it was so heavy."

The 'sky camp'

From Queen Susan, the branches of Moore's family tree stretch out to include speculative ancestral names for more than 2,400 generations, which climb up the walls and onto the ceiling of the pavilion.

He describes this element of the work as a "reparative gesture" that speaks to his family's disconnection from their own oral history, which had been silenced by the violence of colonisation.

The names Moore has chosen are singular and drawn from the names of people who lived and worked in the same area as Queen Susan.

"I put their names first and then other Indigenous names for the rest of the tree," Moore explains.

The effect is celestial and calls attention to the deep time of space in the way Moore's Kamilaroi ancestors, who were skilled astronomers, understood the stars.

Kamilaroi people noted the changes in the Warnambul (the Milky Way) over millennia as a way to measure time. (In April and May, the dark spaces between the stars take the shape of an emu with its legs and neck stretched out as though running, which signals breeding time for the birds.)

Beyond the Warnambul is Bulimah, the sky camp.

"[The stars are] where the Kamilaroi side of my Aboriginal family believe we go after death," Moore says.

Confronting historical voids

Mapping out the family tree was a labour-intensive process that took Moore and three of his collaborators two months to complete.

"We needed physio in moments," Moore admits.

"But it was important to have this large scale [work] to give a sense of time and unbroken continuing culture even though there's these three holes in the tree, which are disruptions to the genealogical lineage."

The holes represent massacres, viral outbreaks, and gaps in the archives.

A table in the centre of the exhibition, which seems to hover above a black reflective pool, also functions like one of these voids, but in reference to the over-incarceration of First Nations people in Australia.

The table is full of neat paper stacks, mostly composed of redacted copies of coronial reports on the deaths of 557 Aboriginal people in police and prison custody since the findings of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody were delivered in 1991. Also among the stacks are 19 documents relating to Moore's own familial encounters with pernicious policies and laws.

"When you look at some of these documents and how Indigenous people were treated, how they were surveilled, how they didn't have freedom of movement and freedom of association with other Aboriginal people … it seemed very foreign to them," Moore says.

Included are reports by the so-called Protector of Aboriginals denying Moore's grandparents exemption from the Queensland Government's Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897.

Under the act, the rights of Aboriginal people were restricted and the Protection Board held substantial legal powers over them such as freedom of movement, the ability to control their money and the right to marry without approval.

"There's lots of documentation on them [including] correspondence between police and the Protector of Aboriginals trying to locate my grandparents, who seemed to be going from one town to the next just seeking to get married," Moore says.

The exhibition's curator, Ellie Buttrose, worked closely with Moore to mount the exhibition and says the inclusion of Moore's family records "is making this very strong link between historic injustices and contemporary injustices and how deaths in custody and over-incarceration continue to sever family ties [today]".

This is not the first time Moore has critically examined the ongoing racial violence in Australia's judicial system. In his 2022 installation Inert State at Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), he memorialised the hundreds of deaths in custody of Aboriginal people in the decades following the Royal Commission, presenting a towering stack of coroners' reports on the gallery's central "Watermall".

In kith and kin, Moore expands this idea by turning the table and the reflective pool into a memorial. The intention is to invite people to pause and peer at the redacted information that – like so much archival material for First Nations people – is tantalisingly in sight but frustratingly out of reach.

"The coronial reports are online, publicly available documents if you wanted to read them [but] I've redacted the names of the people on the covers of those reports to be respectful … and then I'm placing documents as a way of saying they're not just statistics, they're real people with families," Moore says.

The effect is moving.

"Just watching people kind of move their bodies to view the work … it's really rewarding," says Buttrose.

"But it's also really wonderful to see Archie in the space and see the way that people [are] not only reacting to his work but are also so interested to talk to him and hear more and know more about his story and his art."

Honouring kith in Venice

Far from the canals of Venice, kith and kin was conceived on the inter-tidal zones of Quandamooka people, where saltwater meets freshwater.

Moore sees a clear link between those waters and the canals of Venice.

"[I've] just been thinking about that water and the way it goes from the canal into the Venice Lagoon to the Adriatic Sea, and to surround the continent of Australia as a way of thinking about connection … we're all connected somehow," he says.

Country is more than just a setting, it's a collaborative partner and "this sense of belonging [is] deeply rooted in the landscape from birth until death," Moore says.

This understanding of Country is why Moore was drawn to the Old English definition of "kith" – a meaning that encapsulated the sense that land could be "a mentor or teacher, a parent or a child".

To him, it signals that — at least in the 14th century — English people thought about their connection to land in the same way as First Nations people still do today.

It speaks to the universal notions of family and interconnectedness, which Moore captured in his Golden Lion acceptance speech.

"Aboriginal kinship systems include all living things from the environment in a larger network of relatedness, the land itself can be a mentor or a parent to a child," he said.

"We are all one and share a responsibility of care to all living things now and into the future."

kith and kin is at the Australia pavilion, Giardini della Biennale, as part of the Venice Biennale until November 24.

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Death in Venice

Art and extremism anonymous.

In Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice," Gustave von Aschenbach is described as "the watcher" (73), who becomes interested in the young Tadzio, eventually leading to a dangerous obsession that causes his death. In the novella, Mann uses Aschenbach's sudden passionate fascination with the young Tadzio to portray the dangers of art taken to one extreme, and the need for a balance between the Dionysian and Apollonian-between drunken hedonism and detached rationalism. Aschenbach's heavy reliance on the Apollonian prior to his visit to Venice backfires on him, thrusting him to the Dionysian without any hope of finding stability. Tadzio's role in the story is passive, as he is the impetus for Aschenbach's transformation, but does not necessarily encourage Aschenbach's destructive behavior. Furthermore, Aschenbach himself is not fully aware of his changing, for he becomes somewhat delusional, dying relatively happily and peacefully.

Almost as soon as he sees Tadzio, Aschenbach becomes delusional, as discrepancies between what he perceives and what the narrator reveals become apparent. In Tadzio, Aschenbach sees a boy whose "face recalled the noblest moment of Greek sculpture-pale...the brow...

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Opinion Readers critique The Post: Get Trump’s face out of our face

Plus: A small rise in grocery prices and the biggest f-bomb ever dropped.

Every week, The Post runs a collection of letters of readers’ grievances — pointing out grammatical mistakes, missing coverage and inconsistencies. These letters tell us what we did wrong and, occasionally, offer praise. Here, we present this week’s Free for All letters.

Thank you for running Jabin Botsford’s excellent photo, in which former president Donald Trump’s face is blurred while the people behind him can be clearly seen, to accompany Robin Givhan’s excellent April 24 The Critique column, “ Trump’s characteristic bombast fades under the courtroom lights .”

When reading the print Post, I always cover images of Trump’s face, as I feel his face detracts from the seriousness of the article. The Post saved me a Post-it with this choice.

Jill Taylor, Fairfax

An immersion program in immiseration

Philip Kennicott’s ideological rant in the guise of art review, the April 23 Style Critic’s Notebook “ At Venice Biennale, art transcends the woes of the world ,” achieved the exact opposite of the spirit for which he applauds the Venice Biennale. His pervasive commentary on world affairs undermined and distracted from his arguments about the triumph of art and beauty and the highest expressions of world culture.

To take one example, presented as established fact, Kennicott wrote: “The world is worse than it ever was.” I respectfully submit that life in the 1930s and 1940s would at least compete in status for “worse than.” And that’s just going back into recent memory of world history. I’m looking forward to attending the Biennale in hopes that experiencing the power and unifying force of human artistic expression will lift my spirits and in so doing provide an escape from, and not immersion in, the sort of political posturing that defined this review.

Helen West , Washington

The floccinaucinihilipilification of erudition

I find, to my consternation, that I often agree with George F. Will. But whom does he think he is writing for? The language he used in the first sentence of his April 25 op-ed, “ 112 House Republicans tried to give Putin a leg up ” (with which I eventually sort of agreed, once I deciphered it), was incomprehensible. “The nihilism of a febrile minority”? What? I am a retired PhD journalism professor and recovering English major. If this is how the “thinkers” in the modern media try to communicate their ideas to the hoi polloi, no wonder no one subscribes to newspapers anymore.

Ted Pease , Trinidad, Calif.

The mother lode of mother odes

Regarding Sebastian Smee’s April 21 Great Works, In Focus essay, “ Boldly going where billions have gone before ” [Arts & Style]:

While Smee’s commentary on the Rineke Dijkstra photograph “Julie, Den Haag, Netherlands, February 29, 1994” is worth a read, his musings on motherhood are the real treasure. Just as insightfully as Smee opines about art, he manages to capture the essence, beauty and miracle of becoming a mother in a few well-penned paragraphs. Perhaps he should have waited and gifted us this essay on Mother’s Day.

Sandy Pugh , Vienna

Though I enjoyed the April 22 Style article “ Why you’re always the right age to don a bow ,” I was disappointed the author did not mention that men, too, wear bows: bow ties. They do not come in such variety, but they are stylish and appropriate for any age (including for women).

Carl E. Nash , Washington

Only a little finger of the student body is raising a little finger

The April 27 front-page article “ At Columbia, the seeds of a revolt ” claimed that protests by students at Columbia University against Israel’s war “lit a fire now consuming U.S. campuses.” Reading the article, one might think American colleges and universities have fallen into anarchy. The truth is, protests are not occurring at most U.S. colleges. Where they are, they involve a small minority of the student body. Most students are busy preparing for final exams or trying to line up a summer internship. It’s troubling that this context is missing from The Post’s coverage of these disturbances.

Bryan Fichter , Ellicott City

Closing the book on closing the book

Years ago, The Post was pilloried for severely curtailing its coverage of books and the literary world. We wish to thank the paper for what feels like its rediscovery of the world of books. The second section (after Sports) we read every Sunday is Book World. We especially value and love the retrospectives by Michael Dirda. Ron Charles deserves praise for the breadth and readability of his reviews. We also appreciate that The Post covers mysteries and audiobooks.

Bob and Carol Hopper , Falls Church

Paper or plastic?

I read with interest Eve O. Schaub’s April 23 Tuesday Opinion essay, “ How to celebrate Earth Day? Just dump this toxic stuff .” Schaub identified the problems and implications of plastic recycling and concluded we need to make a lot less plastic rather than rely on recycling. I have long wondered at The Post’s use of plastic bags to deliver newspapers. This has always seemed extremely wasteful, as well as expensive. Take a look at this practice and change to something more appropriate in light of what we now know about plastic pollution.

Jeanne Beare , Fairfax

Calling up memories of a legend before he was called up

The April 17 obituary for Carl Erskine, “ Dodgers pitching great was last of the ‘Boys of Summer’ ” [Metro], was a fitting tribute to an outstanding pitcher and a terrific human being. As an “ice cold pop” kid at Danville Stadium in Illinois, part of the Three-I League — Illinois, Indiana and Iowa — I saw Erskine pitch for the Danville Dodgers right after he came out of the Navy. Danville was then managed by Paul Chervinko , who predicted that Erskine would soon be promoted to the big leagues. Many players who made it into the big leagues played in the Three-I League, and Erskine was one of the best. Thanks to The Post for an obituary that called up these great memories.

R.C. Notar , Lewes, Del.

Missing the boat

Please stop referring to the “collapse” of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. The bridge did not collapse. It was knocked down by an out-of-control boat. “Collapse” implies that the bridge fell into the water below without any external force or impetus, and we know that was not the case. A collapse occurs when something is wrong with the engineering, the materials, the construction or the maintenance. That bridge was just fine until the boat toppled it. By continuing to say the bridge collapsed, The Post enables a false narrative to take hold.

Robert Tiller , Silver Spring

Them’s the brakes

The headline for the April 24 news article “ Canada, long big on immigration, is pumping the brakes ” used an evocative colloquial term at risk of giving bad advice to drivers. Since 2013 , the United States has required new cars to have anti-lock braking systems, and AAA warns that it is unnecessary, even dangerous, to pump such brakes. Contrary to popular expectation, pumping anti-lock brakes sends a signal to the car that the automatic pumping system isn’t necessary and prevents it from kicking in. The Post should pick expressions that don’t have the side effect of conveying mistaken ideas about driving, especially driving in risky situations.

Edwin Stromberg , Takoma Park

Why your homemade bread just won’t rise

Michael Ramirez’s April 20 editorial cartoon, “ Food inflation ,” repeated the common view that food prices are a major, or even the paramount, factor in today’s inflation. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics belie this belief. For the 12 months ending in March, the overall consumer price index rose by 3.5 percent, while the CPI for food-at-home items rose by only 1.2 percent.

Further, food-at-home items constitute only 8 percent of the overall CPI, with other items making up 92 percent. This means that if there had been no increase at all in food-at-home prices, overall inflation would have been 3.2 percent, only slightly less than the actual increase of 3.5 percent. So one must look at items other than food at home in breaking down the current rate of inflation.

Paul Manchester , Silver Spring

Give it up for giving up

As a psychoanalyst, I was pleased to read the April 21 Book World review, “ A psychoanalyst ponders what it truly means to be alive .” Dennis Duncan’s review of “ On Giving Up ,” by author and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, thoughtfully and realistically captured the heart of the life, purpose and practice of psychoanalysis.

In his 1895 book, “ Studies in Hysteria ,” Sigmund Freud wrote that he frequently told patients , “I do not doubt that it would be easier for fate to take away your suffering than it would for me. But you will see for yourself that much has been gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. Having restored your inner life, you will be better able to arm yourself against that unhappiness.” That says it all, especially in combination with Socrates’ utterance that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

One of Phillips’s essays, “On Not Believing in Anything,” speaks to how an unwavering belief can represent “the fear of curiosity.” I’ve offered to patients considering psychoanalysis that this is an opportunity to get to know everything about the most important person in their lives: themselves. Erik Carter’s illustration for the review, which depicted Albert Camus’s “ The Myth of Sisyphus ,” asked us to reconsider our defensive relationship with our own struggles and difficulties. These challenges are imbued with the historical value of who we are and can lead us to the freedom of being who we earnestly want to be.

Harmon Biddle , Chevy Chase

Give it up for never giving up

Thank you for the chillingly beautiful April 23 front-page article “ The day the mountain crumbled .” While incredibly sad, the story of Emily Franciose’s death by avalanche at 18 was somehow balanced by the descriptions of her loving parents and school friends, and of her exuberant passion for skiing and for life. The article masterfully wove together several threads: Franciose’s excitement about the chance to pursue her passion for backcountry skiing, her parents’ pride in her determination and independence, her friendships at the outdoors-oriented Swiss boarding school she attended, and the cautious approach taken to this trek by school officials — despite its terrible ending. The accompanying photos likewise brought out the allure of the territory along with the danger of her adventure, and the maps and chart provided a good understanding of how such calm-looking snow can turn deadly.

There were no villains in this painful story. Nature did what nature sometimes does.

Michael P. Fruitman , Ashburn

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Welcome to Venice. That’ll Be 5 Euros, Please.

Venice’s first day of charging a fee to enter the historic center went mostly smoothly, but there were some protests and polemics.

By Elisabetta Povoledo

Reporting from Venice

Pulling into the Santa Lucia train station in Venice on Thursday morning, passengers were told via an overhead announcement that they might have to pay a 5-euro fee to enter the city’s historic center. Failure to pay could result in a fine from 50 to 300 euros, the announcement said.

Outside the station, police officers in riot gear lingered, while a flock of assistants in colorful safety vests stopped arriving travelers to ensure that they had a QR code indicating that they had registered to visit on a city website. Those who hadn’t were directed to a booth where they could. After registering, overnight visitors were sent on their way without having to pay, but people planning to stay just for the day were charged (though there were other exemptions ).

It was a new welcome to Venice, the first city in the world to charge day visitors a nominal entrance fee, a measure city officials hope will help counter overtourism.

“I only found out because my partner texted me this morning to say it was happening,” said Lorraine Colcher, a hospital administrator from Wirral, England, in line at the booth. “I thought he was joking.”

And she didn’t think that people should have to pay for the privilege of seeing a “beautiful city that everyone wants to visit,” she said.

Not far from the station, hundreds of protesters were making a lot of noise. For them, charging an entrance fee was a worrisome step in bringing Venice closer to what many fear the city will become if tides don’t turn: a theme park. Blowing whistles, they handed out fake tickets reading, “Welcome to Veniceland.” Some held signs saying, “Venice is not for sale” and “Stick It to the Ticket,” and chanted, “We want to take back our city.”

“A ticket doesn’t resolve overtourism,” said Renata Marzari, a retired teacher from Venice who was among the protesters.

Like other locals, she acknowledged that an influx of tourists — which last year reached nearly 20 million — could be a challenge. Often, she said, it involved physical collisions, including “pointing accidents, when you walk into a suddenly raised hand, or photo accidents, when they back into you as they’re looking into their phones.” But the ticket, which applies only to day visitors arriving between 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., was “ridiculous,” she said. She added, “They could make more money charging for every cigarette butt that gets tossed on the ground.”

Venice is only one of dozens of cities, including Amsterdam, Athens and Barcelona, grappling with a glut of tourists. Speaking in front of the train station Thursday morning, the city’s mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, said he had been contacted by other places interested in the initiative, but he wouldn’t say which ones, “for reasons of confidentiality.”

Floating on water crisscrossed with canals, Venice, which tradition says was founded in 421, though that date is debated, is exceptionally fragile. Last year experts at UNESCO, the United Nations’ culture agency, recommended it be put on the list of its endangered World Heritage Sites, listing mass tourism as a main concern. Venice stayed off the “in danger” list after the access fee was approved, but UNESCO officials said in a statement that “further progress still needs to be made.”

Critics of the fee say that it will do little to combat the city’s real problems, which have pushed many to leave. The resident population in the city center has eroded to fewer than 49,000 people, from nearly 175,000 in 1951, according to municipal statistics . They list a lack of affordable housing, because of short-term rentals; a decline in services like schools and transportation; and the encroachment of the tourist industry into practically all walks of life.

Federica Toninelli, a member of a local association that advocates affordable housing in Venice, saw the ticket as “propaganda” and said the city must put “the needs of residents at the center of policies.” City officials need to “take strong steps that would bring the city back to a level of more manageable tourism,” she said.

Otherwise, “this is how a city dies,” said Nicola Camatti, an economics professor and expert in tourism at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice.

Franca Caltarossa, who once ran a municipal after-school program that she said lost much of its funding under the current mayor, said that “tourism has distorted the city.”

“Venice is a living city, not a theme park,” she said.

A 2020 study by tourism experts at Ca’ Foscari, Venice’s main university, suggested that the optimum number of visitors to Venice per day was around 52,000 people, about a quarter of them daily excursionists. But Venice is not capping the number of visitors.

“We are contrary to limiting the number of visitors; this is an open city,” said Michele Zuin, the city councilor in charge of the budget. Instead, the city hoped that day visitors — around 10 million last year — would plan to come on off-peak days when the city “is calmer,” Mr. Zuin said.

“We’re convinced that it is a solution to manage day visitors,” he said.

On Thursday, a national holiday in Italy, 113,000 people had registered to enter Venice. Of these, 15,700 paid the access fee and 40,000 were exempt overnight guests, while the remaining visitors — also exempt — included students, workers and relatives or friends of residents.

For 2024, the fee will be applied on 29 peak days as “an experiment,” Mr. Zuin said. Data collected during this phase will help city officials to better manage resources and better control the phenomenon, they say. Mr. Zuin said that next year, more days would be added to the fee calendar, and fees could be as high as 10 euros.

“Doubling the price is making the city a commodity, nothing more than a theme park, a museum,” said Giovanni Andrea Martini, a local opposition lawmaker. He questioned the usefulness of the fee given that City Hall’s future projects included plans to enlarge the airport and dig new canals in the lagoon so that boats, and even cruise ships, which were banned in 2019, could dock closer. “This means the city will be further suffocated,” he said Thursday, cutting the interview short because a brief scuffle had broken out between the protesters and the police.

At the train station, tourists lined up patiently at the access-fee booth to sort out their passes.

Charlotte Dean, a wine merchant, and Caroline Meatyard, a retired schoolteacher, both from England, cheerfully paid the fee. It’s “fair enough,” Ms. Dean said. “Venice is a lovely place. It should be treasured.”

Elisabetta Povoledo is a reporter based in Rome, covering Italy, the Vatican and the culture of the region. She has been a journalist for 35 years. More about Elisabetta Povoledo