It reads almost as parody, this profile of a white genius South African Olympic-level swimmer turned poet turned painter, spouse to glamor, whose every environ reeks of privilege and American pretensions to culture, written by a writer of undergraduate earnestness, dutifully transcribing key passages from T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Only the paintings and their process persuade: sedimentary layers of wood, linen, cardboard, canvas, sometimes set afire, sometimes unextinguished, molten with repurposed texts—Kafka, Zbigniew Herbert, “a few other distinguished shamans.” Sacks and Graham alike astonish by forswearing all irony: absurdly magnificent monsters of the morality of art.