Author: René Gimpel
Publisher: Universe Publishing(NY)
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 486
Book Description
Diary of an Art Dealer
Author: René Gimpel
Publisher: Universe Publishing(NY)
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 486
Book Description
Publisher: Universe Publishing(NY)
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 486
Book Description
The Journal of a Transatlantic Art Dealer
Author: Diana J. Kostyrko
Publisher: Harvey Miller
ISBN: 9781909400511
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Includes a catalog of selected artworks from Gimpel's collections.
Publisher: Harvey Miller
ISBN: 9781909400511
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Includes a catalog of selected artworks from Gimpel's collections.
Secrets of an Art Dealer
Author: James Henry Duveen
Publisher:
ISBN: 1443731056
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 316
Book Description
ART DEALtR JAMES HENRY DUVEEN New York E. P. DUTTON CO., INC. To THAT BEING WHICH OCCURS ONLY ONCE IN LIFE A MOTHER CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. REMAKING A RELIQUARY FOR 30,000, 9 II. THE PRINCE WHO LOST HIS TAPESTRIES . 28 III. THE TRAGEDY OF THE JABAGH VASES . 45 IV. THE FATAL PLATE OF BERNARD PALISSY . 64 V. THE TITLED KLEPTOMANIAC . . 77 VI. THE MADDEST COLLECTOR I HAVE EVER KNOWN ...... 88 VII. THE BLACKMAILING OF AN EXPERT, . 102 VIII. How PIERPONT MORGAN BOUGHT MIS TAKES, . . . .118 IX. How A V. C. EARNED A ROYAL SNUFFBOX 134 X. A LOVE-INTRIGUE THAT RUINED AN ART DEALER . . . . . .146 XL How A TWENTY MILLION WIDOW LOST ME 2 7,000 . . . .160 XII. THE SECRET OF NAPOLEON IIs CASKET . 172 XIII. THE DRESDEN PORCELAIN CASE . 184 XIV. THE ART DEALER WHO ESCAPED PENAL SERVITUDE . ., . .196 XV. WHEN CONNOISSEURS Go WRONG . . 208 XVI. How I LOST FIVE 2o, loo VASES . . 224 XVII. THE TRAGEDY OF VAN OLDENBARNE VELDT 238 XVIII. DOUBLE CROSSED BY A FRIEND . .251 XIX. THE CURSE OF THE MALEVOLENT GODS 260 XX. SAVED BY THE CAMORRA . . . 272 ILLUSTRATIONS FACE PAGE GOTHIC TAPESTRY THE CREDO TOURNAI ... 36 THE HEESWIJK CASTLE SET OF AZURE CHINESE VASES WITH THREE COVERS . . . . . . 37 A BERNARD PALISSY DISH ...... 68 A SNUFF Box 69 DRESDEN PORCELAIN SLEIGH GROUP .... 92 FRAXJ HERMINA FEIST ...... 93 GOTHIC SUIT OF ARMOUR . . . . . 108 THE FAMOUS GUZMAN CROSS . . . . .109 THE SNUFF Box OF FREDERICK THE GREAT . . 138 CHEVALIER JACOB VAN Esso THE RIDDER, . 139 THE Louis XVI WRITING CABINET . . . .166 NAPOLEON II KING OF ROME . . . . .167 EXECUTION OF MAXIMILIAN OF AUSTRIA, . .180 THE FREEMASON GROUP OF DRESDEN PORCELAIN . 181 THE COUNTESS COSEL, DRESDEN CRINOLINE FIGURE . 198 FIVE CHINESE PORCELAIN FAMILLEROSE VASES . 199 A Louis XV FAN ....... 212 STUART HIGH-BACK CHAIR . . . . .213 FAMILLE NOIRE VASE 230 JONKHEER VAN OLDENBARNEVELDTs HOUSE IN THE NoORD ElNDE AT THE HAGUE . . . . .231 OLD DELFT POTTERY BY ALBERT DE KEYSER . . 246 CLARET WORCESTER PLATE 247 THE MALEVOLENT GODS ..... 262 WORCESTER DISH 263 vn SECRETS OF AN ART DEALER SECRETS OF AN ART DEALER CHAPTER I REMAKING A RELIQUARY FOR 30,000 THE Combes law which, at a stroke, converted all the ecclesiastical treasures of France into State property, was one of those upheavals which, like the War, brought objects into the art markets of the world which had long been thought quite safe from any chance of dispersal. Thirty odd years ago no one dreamed that such wonderful goldsmiths work, pictures and other treasures, would ever be freed from the dead hand, and the result was startling. The Loi Combes taught me that even the Church would steal its own property rather than allow it to fall into the hands of the State despoilers. Priests, devout citizens, not quite so devout or so respectable ladies afid a host of hangers-on intrigued and conspired one against the other, linked only by the common trait of feverish greed. As I was motoring with an artist friend on the Continent I happened to be amongst the first to be caught up into this maelstrom I say motoring, for although we were aiming for the Riviera we had only got one third of the way in ten days We could have walked it faster, but those were the days when io SECRETS OF AN ART DEALER tyres were only guaranteed for about 500 miles and the motorist spent more time under his car than in it. Near Auxerre Sydney Watson, my companion, sat down on a roadside bank and hitched up hiselegant trousers. He paid no attention at all to a small crowd of loafers and children who goggled alternately at him and me. My dear Duveen, he exclaimed, the more I see of motor cars the more I congratulate myself I know nothing about them Especially in this tropical heat. Kneeling in the dust with the sweat trickling down my face, and wrestling with a burst tyre, I only just avoided losing my temper, 1 must have looked a Harry Tate figure, clad in I regret to say a suit of dark purple leather...
Publisher:
ISBN: 1443731056
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 316
Book Description
ART DEALtR JAMES HENRY DUVEEN New York E. P. DUTTON CO., INC. To THAT BEING WHICH OCCURS ONLY ONCE IN LIFE A MOTHER CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. REMAKING A RELIQUARY FOR 30,000, 9 II. THE PRINCE WHO LOST HIS TAPESTRIES . 28 III. THE TRAGEDY OF THE JABAGH VASES . 45 IV. THE FATAL PLATE OF BERNARD PALISSY . 64 V. THE TITLED KLEPTOMANIAC . . 77 VI. THE MADDEST COLLECTOR I HAVE EVER KNOWN ...... 88 VII. THE BLACKMAILING OF AN EXPERT, . 102 VIII. How PIERPONT MORGAN BOUGHT MIS TAKES, . . . .118 IX. How A V. C. EARNED A ROYAL SNUFFBOX 134 X. A LOVE-INTRIGUE THAT RUINED AN ART DEALER . . . . . .146 XL How A TWENTY MILLION WIDOW LOST ME 2 7,000 . . . .160 XII. THE SECRET OF NAPOLEON IIs CASKET . 172 XIII. THE DRESDEN PORCELAIN CASE . 184 XIV. THE ART DEALER WHO ESCAPED PENAL SERVITUDE . ., . .196 XV. WHEN CONNOISSEURS Go WRONG . . 208 XVI. How I LOST FIVE 2o, loo VASES . . 224 XVII. THE TRAGEDY OF VAN OLDENBARNE VELDT 238 XVIII. DOUBLE CROSSED BY A FRIEND . .251 XIX. THE CURSE OF THE MALEVOLENT GODS 260 XX. SAVED BY THE CAMORRA . . . 272 ILLUSTRATIONS FACE PAGE GOTHIC TAPESTRY THE CREDO TOURNAI ... 36 THE HEESWIJK CASTLE SET OF AZURE CHINESE VASES WITH THREE COVERS . . . . . . 37 A BERNARD PALISSY DISH ...... 68 A SNUFF Box 69 DRESDEN PORCELAIN SLEIGH GROUP .... 92 FRAXJ HERMINA FEIST ...... 93 GOTHIC SUIT OF ARMOUR . . . . . 108 THE FAMOUS GUZMAN CROSS . . . . .109 THE SNUFF Box OF FREDERICK THE GREAT . . 138 CHEVALIER JACOB VAN Esso THE RIDDER, . 139 THE Louis XVI WRITING CABINET . . . .166 NAPOLEON II KING OF ROME . . . . .167 EXECUTION OF MAXIMILIAN OF AUSTRIA, . .180 THE FREEMASON GROUP OF DRESDEN PORCELAIN . 181 THE COUNTESS COSEL, DRESDEN CRINOLINE FIGURE . 198 FIVE CHINESE PORCELAIN FAMILLEROSE VASES . 199 A Louis XV FAN ....... 212 STUART HIGH-BACK CHAIR . . . . .213 FAMILLE NOIRE VASE 230 JONKHEER VAN OLDENBARNEVELDTs HOUSE IN THE NoORD ElNDE AT THE HAGUE . . . . .231 OLD DELFT POTTERY BY ALBERT DE KEYSER . . 246 CLARET WORCESTER PLATE 247 THE MALEVOLENT GODS ..... 262 WORCESTER DISH 263 vn SECRETS OF AN ART DEALER SECRETS OF AN ART DEALER CHAPTER I REMAKING A RELIQUARY FOR 30,000 THE Combes law which, at a stroke, converted all the ecclesiastical treasures of France into State property, was one of those upheavals which, like the War, brought objects into the art markets of the world which had long been thought quite safe from any chance of dispersal. Thirty odd years ago no one dreamed that such wonderful goldsmiths work, pictures and other treasures, would ever be freed from the dead hand, and the result was startling. The Loi Combes taught me that even the Church would steal its own property rather than allow it to fall into the hands of the State despoilers. Priests, devout citizens, not quite so devout or so respectable ladies afid a host of hangers-on intrigued and conspired one against the other, linked only by the common trait of feverish greed. As I was motoring with an artist friend on the Continent I happened to be amongst the first to be caught up into this maelstrom I say motoring, for although we were aiming for the Riviera we had only got one third of the way in ten days We could have walked it faster, but those were the days when io SECRETS OF AN ART DEALER tyres were only guaranteed for about 500 miles and the motorist spent more time under his car than in it. Near Auxerre Sydney Watson, my companion, sat down on a roadside bank and hitched up hiselegant trousers. He paid no attention at all to a small crowd of loafers and children who goggled alternately at him and me. My dear Duveen, he exclaimed, the more I see of motor cars the more I congratulate myself I know nothing about them Especially in this tropical heat. Kneeling in the dust with the sweat trickling down my face, and wrestling with a burst tyre, I only just avoided losing my temper, 1 must have looked a Harry Tate figure, clad in I regret to say a suit of dark purple leather...
The Cartiers
Author: Francesca Cartier Brickell
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0525621636
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 673
Book Description
“A dynamic group biography studded with design history and high-society dash . . . [This] elegantly wrought narrative bears the Cartier hallmark.”—The Economist The “astounding” (André Leon Talley) story of the family behind the Cartier empire and the three brothers who turned their grandfather’s humble Parisian jewelry store into a global luxury icon—as told by a great-granddaughter with exclusive access to long-lost family archives “Ms. Cartier Brickell has done her grandfather proud.”—The Wall Street Journal The Cartiers is the revealing tale of a jewelry dynasty—four generations, from revolutionary France to the 1970s. At its heart are the three Cartier brothers whose motto was “Never copy, only create” and who made their family firm internationally famous in the early days of the twentieth century, thanks to their unique and complementary talents: Louis, the visionary designer who created the first men’s wristwatch to help an aviator friend tell the time without taking his hands off the controls of his flying machine; Pierre, the master dealmaker who bought the New York headquarters on Fifth Avenue for a double-stranded natural pearl necklace; and Jacques, the globe-trotting gemstone expert whose travels to India gave Cartier access to the world’s best rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, inspiring the celebrated Tutti Frutti jewelry. Francesca Cartier Brickell, whose great-grandfather was the youngest of the brothers, has traveled the world researching her family’s history, tracking down those connected with her ancestors and discovering long-lost pieces of the puzzle along the way. Now she reveals never-before-told dramas, romances, intrigues, betrayals, and more. The Cartiers also offers a behind-the-scenes look at the firm’s most iconic jewelry—the notoriously cursed Hope Diamond, the Romanov emeralds, the classic panther pieces—and the long line of stars from the worlds of fashion, film, and royalty who wore them, from Indian maharajas and Russian grand duchesses to Wallis Simpson, Coco Chanel, and Elizabeth Taylor. Published in the two-hundredth anniversary year of the birth of the dynasty’s founder, Louis-François Cartier, this book is a magnificent, definitive, epic social history shown through the deeply personal lens of one legendary family.
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0525621636
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 673
Book Description
“A dynamic group biography studded with design history and high-society dash . . . [This] elegantly wrought narrative bears the Cartier hallmark.”—The Economist The “astounding” (André Leon Talley) story of the family behind the Cartier empire and the three brothers who turned their grandfather’s humble Parisian jewelry store into a global luxury icon—as told by a great-granddaughter with exclusive access to long-lost family archives “Ms. Cartier Brickell has done her grandfather proud.”—The Wall Street Journal The Cartiers is the revealing tale of a jewelry dynasty—four generations, from revolutionary France to the 1970s. At its heart are the three Cartier brothers whose motto was “Never copy, only create” and who made their family firm internationally famous in the early days of the twentieth century, thanks to their unique and complementary talents: Louis, the visionary designer who created the first men’s wristwatch to help an aviator friend tell the time without taking his hands off the controls of his flying machine; Pierre, the master dealmaker who bought the New York headquarters on Fifth Avenue for a double-stranded natural pearl necklace; and Jacques, the globe-trotting gemstone expert whose travels to India gave Cartier access to the world’s best rubies, emeralds, and sapphires, inspiring the celebrated Tutti Frutti jewelry. Francesca Cartier Brickell, whose great-grandfather was the youngest of the brothers, has traveled the world researching her family’s history, tracking down those connected with her ancestors and discovering long-lost pieces of the puzzle along the way. Now she reveals never-before-told dramas, romances, intrigues, betrayals, and more. The Cartiers also offers a behind-the-scenes look at the firm’s most iconic jewelry—the notoriously cursed Hope Diamond, the Romanov emeralds, the classic panther pieces—and the long line of stars from the worlds of fashion, film, and royalty who wore them, from Indian maharajas and Russian grand duchesses to Wallis Simpson, Coco Chanel, and Elizabeth Taylor. Published in the two-hundredth anniversary year of the birth of the dynasty’s founder, Louis-François Cartier, this book is a magnificent, definitive, epic social history shown through the deeply personal lens of one legendary family.
Stewards of the Nation's Art
Author: Andrea Geddes Poole
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442698713
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 333
Book Description
Between 1890 and 1939, the groups of men involved in running Britain's four main public art galleries - the National Gallery, the Tate Gallery, the Wallace Collection, and the National Portrait Gallery - were embroiled in continuous power struggles. Stewards of the Nation's Art examines the internal tensions between the galleries' administrative directors, the aristocrats dominating the boards of trustees, and those in the Treasury who controlled the funds as well as board appointments. Andrea Geddes Poole uses meticulous primary research from all four of these institutions to discuss changing ideas about class, education, and work during this period. The conflicts between aristocratic trustees and administrative directors were not only about the running of the galleries, but also reflected the era's strain between aristocratic amateurs and nouveau riche professionals. Stewards of the Nation's Art is an absorbing study that explores the extent to which the aristocracy was able to hold on to cultural power in an increasingly professional and meritocratic age.
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442698713
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 333
Book Description
Between 1890 and 1939, the groups of men involved in running Britain's four main public art galleries - the National Gallery, the Tate Gallery, the Wallace Collection, and the National Portrait Gallery - were embroiled in continuous power struggles. Stewards of the Nation's Art examines the internal tensions between the galleries' administrative directors, the aristocrats dominating the boards of trustees, and those in the Treasury who controlled the funds as well as board appointments. Andrea Geddes Poole uses meticulous primary research from all four of these institutions to discuss changing ideas about class, education, and work during this period. The conflicts between aristocratic trustees and administrative directors were not only about the running of the galleries, but also reflected the era's strain between aristocratic amateurs and nouveau riche professionals. Stewards of the Nation's Art is an absorbing study that explores the extent to which the aristocracy was able to hold on to cultural power in an increasingly professional and meritocratic age.
Memoir of an Art Gallery
Author: Julien Levy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 376
Book Description
Introduction by Ingrid Schaffner.
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 376
Book Description
Introduction by Ingrid Schaffner.
A History of the Western Art Market
Author: Titia Hulst
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520340779
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 432
Book Description
This is the first sourcebook to trace the emergence and evolution of art markets in the Western economy, framing them within the larger narrative of the ascendancy of capitalist markets. Selected writings from across academic disciplines present compelling evidence of art's inherent commercial dimension and show how artists, dealers, and collectors have interacted over time, from the city-states of Quattrocento Italy to the high-stakes markets of postmillennial New York and Beijing. This approach casts a startling new light on the traditional concerns of art history and aesthetics, revealing much that is provocative, profound, and occasionally even comic. This volume's unique historical perspective makes it appropriate for use in college courses and postgraduate and professional programs, as well as for professionals working in art-related environments such as museums, galleries, and auction houses. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 2017. This is the first sourcebook to trace the emergence and evolution of art markets in the Western economy, framing them within the larger narrative of the ascendancy of capitalist markets. Selected writings from across academic disciplines present compellin
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520340779
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 432
Book Description
This is the first sourcebook to trace the emergence and evolution of art markets in the Western economy, framing them within the larger narrative of the ascendancy of capitalist markets. Selected writings from across academic disciplines present compelling evidence of art's inherent commercial dimension and show how artists, dealers, and collectors have interacted over time, from the city-states of Quattrocento Italy to the high-stakes markets of postmillennial New York and Beijing. This approach casts a startling new light on the traditional concerns of art history and aesthetics, revealing much that is provocative, profound, and occasionally even comic. This volume's unique historical perspective makes it appropriate for use in college courses and postgraduate and professional programs, as well as for professionals working in art-related environments such as museums, galleries, and auction houses. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 2017. This is the first sourcebook to trace the emergence and evolution of art markets in the Western economy, framing them within the larger narrative of the ascendancy of capitalist markets. Selected writings from across academic disciplines present compellin
Mythical Diary
Author:
Publisher: 5Continents
ISBN: 9788874398010
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 160
Book Description
Mythical Diary is a visual journey through the classical sculpture of the Archaeological Museum of Naples. It is a physical engagement with the marble bodies of myth. Through his black and white photography, Luigi Spina disassembles the limbs of the sculptures, emphasizing their curves and hidden eroticism, humanizing them to establish a dialogue with the observer. Sculpture is a sign of eternal, unchanging beauty: the only true testimony of many lives that have passed and come to an end, leaving a profound mark in the story of many other existences. For Spina, with his own vision of sculpture, a statue of Aphrodite is not merely a stereotypical portrayal of myth. In it are gathered the anxieties, dreams, hopes and joys of all those who have seen her and dreamed of or studied her. In a way, classical sculpture is profoundly present in our veins, in our very breath. The project takes the form of an imaginary diary covering fifteen days. But this is only an ephemeral period of time, a convention. The whole work developed over a period of days and months amounting to years, always in contact with the circumscribed space made of myriad lives and stories, which we call a museum. In Mythical Diary, Spina attempts to make classical sculpture interact with the viewer's desire to be a part of this ancient world which has continually influenced our way of life, our culture and our society, proving itself to be contemporary with any period.
Publisher: 5Continents
ISBN: 9788874398010
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 160
Book Description
Mythical Diary is a visual journey through the classical sculpture of the Archaeological Museum of Naples. It is a physical engagement with the marble bodies of myth. Through his black and white photography, Luigi Spina disassembles the limbs of the sculptures, emphasizing their curves and hidden eroticism, humanizing them to establish a dialogue with the observer. Sculpture is a sign of eternal, unchanging beauty: the only true testimony of many lives that have passed and come to an end, leaving a profound mark in the story of many other existences. For Spina, with his own vision of sculpture, a statue of Aphrodite is not merely a stereotypical portrayal of myth. In it are gathered the anxieties, dreams, hopes and joys of all those who have seen her and dreamed of or studied her. In a way, classical sculpture is profoundly present in our veins, in our very breath. The project takes the form of an imaginary diary covering fifteen days. But this is only an ephemeral period of time, a convention. The whole work developed over a period of days and months amounting to years, always in contact with the circumscribed space made of myriad lives and stories, which we call a museum. In Mythical Diary, Spina attempts to make classical sculpture interact with the viewer's desire to be a part of this ancient world which has continually influenced our way of life, our culture and our society, proving itself to be contemporary with any period.
Modigliani
Author: Meryle Secrest
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307595471
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 425
Book Description
“People like us . . . have different rights, different values than do ordinary people because we have different needs which put us . . . above their moral standards.” —Modigliani Amedeo (“Beloved of God”) Modigliani was considered to be the quintessential bohemian artist, his legend almost as infamous as Van Gogh’s. In Modigliani’s time, his work was seen as an oddity: contemporary with the Cubists but not part of their movement. His work was a link between such portraitists as Whistler, Sargent, and Toulouse-Lautrec and that of the Art Deco painters of the 1920s as well as the new approaches of Gauguin, Cézanne, and Picasso. Jean Cocteau called Modigliani “our aristocrat” and said, “There was something like a curse on this very noble boy. He was beautiful. Alcohol and misfortune took their toll on him.” In this major new biography, Meryle Secrest, one of our most admired biographers—whose work has been called “enthralling” (The Wall Street Journal); “rich in detail, scrupulously researched, and sympathetically written” (The New York Review of Books) —now gives us a fully realized portrait of one of the twentieth century’s master painters and sculptors: his upbringing, a Sephardic Jew from an impoverished but genteel Italian family; his going to Paris to make his fortune; his striking good looks (“How beautiful he was, my god how beautiful,” said one of his models) . . . his training as an artist . . .and his influences, including the Italian Renaissance, particularly the art of Botticelli; Nietzsche’s theories of the artist as Übermensch, divinely endowed, divinely inspired; the monochromatic backgrounds of Van Gogh and Cézanne; the work of the Romanian sculptor Brancusi; and the primitive sculptures of Africa and Oceania with their simplified, masklike triangular faces, elongated silhouettes, puckered lips, low foreheads, and heads on exaggeratedly long necks. We see the ways in which Modigliani’s long-kept-secret illness from tuberculosis (it almost killed him as a young man) affected his work and his attitude toward life ; how consumption caused him to embrace fatalism and idealism, creativity and death; and how he used alcohol and opium with laudanum as an antispasmodic to hide the symptoms of the disease and how, because of it, he came to be seen as a dissolute alcoholic. And throughout, we see the Paris that Modigliani lived in, a city in dynamic flux where art was still a noble cause; how Modigliani became part of a life in the streets and a world of art and artists then in a transforming revolution; Monet, Cézanne, Degas, Renoir, et al.—and others more radical—Matisse, Derain, etc., all living within blocks of one another. Secrest’s book, written with unprecedented access to letters, diaries, and photographs never before seen, is an extraordinary revelation of a life lived in art . . . Here is Modigliani, the man and the artist, seemingly shy, delicate, a man on a desperate mission, masquerading as an alcoholic, cheating death again and again, and calculating what he had to do in order to go on working and concealing his secret for however much time remained . . .
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307595471
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 425
Book Description
“People like us . . . have different rights, different values than do ordinary people because we have different needs which put us . . . above their moral standards.” —Modigliani Amedeo (“Beloved of God”) Modigliani was considered to be the quintessential bohemian artist, his legend almost as infamous as Van Gogh’s. In Modigliani’s time, his work was seen as an oddity: contemporary with the Cubists but not part of their movement. His work was a link between such portraitists as Whistler, Sargent, and Toulouse-Lautrec and that of the Art Deco painters of the 1920s as well as the new approaches of Gauguin, Cézanne, and Picasso. Jean Cocteau called Modigliani “our aristocrat” and said, “There was something like a curse on this very noble boy. He was beautiful. Alcohol and misfortune took their toll on him.” In this major new biography, Meryle Secrest, one of our most admired biographers—whose work has been called “enthralling” (The Wall Street Journal); “rich in detail, scrupulously researched, and sympathetically written” (The New York Review of Books) —now gives us a fully realized portrait of one of the twentieth century’s master painters and sculptors: his upbringing, a Sephardic Jew from an impoverished but genteel Italian family; his going to Paris to make his fortune; his striking good looks (“How beautiful he was, my god how beautiful,” said one of his models) . . . his training as an artist . . .and his influences, including the Italian Renaissance, particularly the art of Botticelli; Nietzsche’s theories of the artist as Übermensch, divinely endowed, divinely inspired; the monochromatic backgrounds of Van Gogh and Cézanne; the work of the Romanian sculptor Brancusi; and the primitive sculptures of Africa and Oceania with their simplified, masklike triangular faces, elongated silhouettes, puckered lips, low foreheads, and heads on exaggeratedly long necks. We see the ways in which Modigliani’s long-kept-secret illness from tuberculosis (it almost killed him as a young man) affected his work and his attitude toward life ; how consumption caused him to embrace fatalism and idealism, creativity and death; and how he used alcohol and opium with laudanum as an antispasmodic to hide the symptoms of the disease and how, because of it, he came to be seen as a dissolute alcoholic. And throughout, we see the Paris that Modigliani lived in, a city in dynamic flux where art was still a noble cause; how Modigliani became part of a life in the streets and a world of art and artists then in a transforming revolution; Monet, Cézanne, Degas, Renoir, et al.—and others more radical—Matisse, Derain, etc., all living within blocks of one another. Secrest’s book, written with unprecedented access to letters, diaries, and photographs never before seen, is an extraordinary revelation of a life lived in art . . . Here is Modigliani, the man and the artist, seemingly shy, delicate, a man on a desperate mission, masquerading as an alcoholic, cheating death again and again, and calculating what he had to do in order to go on working and concealing his secret for however much time remained . . .
Belonging and Betrayal
Author: Charles Dellheim
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 1684580560
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 688
Book Description
The old masters' new masters -- Was modernism Jewish? -- In the middle -- To have and have not.
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 1684580560
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 688
Book Description
The old masters' new masters -- Was modernism Jewish? -- In the middle -- To have and have not.