PETER CORNELL just passed away so here is a tribute from Fitcarraldos homepage:
It is with great sadness that we share the news that Peter Cornell died in Stockholm on 1 March 2025. We want to take this moment to celebrate Peter’s writing and to mourn him with a few words from Joachim Hamou, his friend and agent:

‘On Saturday, 1 March 2025, writer, art critic, and art historian Peter Cornell passed away in Stockholm, Sweden. Cornell was 82 years old and had been battling ill health for some time. Despite this, he remained active and engaged, participating in numerous events, conferences and exhibitions. Not least with the republication of his own book from 1987, The Ways of Paradise, which was translated into English by Saskia Vogel and published with Fitzcarraldo Editions in November 2024, as well as into French, by Jacques Mangold, with After 8 Books. Peter also co-curated the exhibition Swedish Ecstasyat Bozar in Brussels in 2023, in parallel with numerous catalogue texts for both famous and obscure artists.

I discovered Peter Cornell’s work thanks to the original Swedish publication of The Ways of Paradisein 1987. It became the formative book for my understanding of art and esoteric practices. I believe the enduring resonance of Peter Cornell’s work today is no coincidence – just as it was not by chance in the late 1980s.

His books explore the esoteric dimension of contemporary art and modernism. Instead of the objectifying ideals and values that remain prevalent, he brought out the irrational, the sensual and the metaphysical in art.

In his writing, Peter has reflected a lot on what we cannot see and what is deliberately hidden from us. His work is like a secret source that challenges reason and absolutism. Peter Cornell gave us no obvious answers or definite truth, and he probably did so on purpose.

I really hope his work will continue to travel and expand the minds and souls of many more readers.’

We are honoured to have published Peter Cornell and deeply saddened by this loss.

Fitzcarraldo Editions

This is how After 8 Books present the book (launched November 2023):

Les Voies du Paradis brings together what remains of a lost manuscript: the footnotes alone to a missing text, left by a researcher after his death and edited by Peter Cornell. These notes and their illustrations form an incomplete whole, which can be read here through its gaps. A thread - Ariadne's? - is woven between the diagrams, the figures of spirals and labyrinths - from Cesare Ripa to Ernst Josephson and Robert Smithson, from the Templars to the Spiritists and Surrealists - that run through the text and echo each other, like elements of an enigma or esoteric figures. The 'Paradise' referred to here is the dream of absolute knowledge, the grasp of the hidden order of things, to which poets and artists as well as mystics and scientists aspire...

Published in Sweden in 1987, Les Voies du Paradis has acquired the reputation of a cult book. In it, Peter Cornell offers an original perspective on the links between art, literature, spirituality and the occult, in a text that is halfway between essay and fiction, erudition and mystification. The will to know is presented as a quest caught in the trap of the irrational; the notes are assembled by associative logic, an eclectic programme that is still trying to find a lost centre - like the algorithms that have been entrusted with the fantasised task of putting human knowledge in order.