Keith Cunningham’s paintings are exercises in inscrutability. In art as in life, the Australian-born artist was driven by private obsessions and a desire for obscurity. Stashed in a spare room until Cunningham’s death in 2014, the seventy-plus oils on canvas or board featured in “The Cloud of Witness” are dense with macabre moods and ever-lurking violence.

With a background in graphic design (Cunningham left school at fifteen to work in the advertising department of premier Sydney retailer David Jones), the artist fled the sunniness of his homeland for the bleak landscapes of postwar London.

Back in 2020, as the world came to a standstill, Nina Katchadourian revisited Dougal Robertson’s Survive the Savage Sea. Based on a true story, the 1973 bestseller recounts the adventures of a Scottish family who survived thirty-eight days adrift on a dinghy in the Pacific Ocean, following an attack by orca whales that sank their wooden schooner, the Lucette. Fascinated by this story since the age of seven, Katchadourian connected with the author’s eldest son, Douglas Robertson, to reconstruct the events of June 15 to July 22, 1972. She did so via daily text messages and phone conversations over