Author: Alexander BlandPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
The Adventurous World of Paris, 1900-1914
Author: Alexander BlandPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Art, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 248
Book Description
The Crimes of Paris
Author: Thomas HooblerPublisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316052531
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 307
Book Description
Turn-of-the-century Paris was the beating heart of a rapidly changing world. Painters, scientists, revolutionaries, poets -- all were there. But so, too, were the shadows: Paris was a violent, criminal place, its sinister alleyways the haunts of Apache gangsters and its cafes the gathering places of murderous anarchists. In 1911, it fell victim to perhaps the greatest theft of all time -- the taking of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. Immediately, Alphonse Bertillon, a detective world-renowned for pioneering crime-scene investigation techniques, was called upon to solve the crime. And quickly the Paris police had a suspect: a young Spanish artist named Pablo Picasso....
Modigliani
Author: Meryle SecrestPublisher: 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 . . .
Anna Held and the Birth of Ziegfeld's Broadway
Author: Eve GoldenPublisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 9780813128733
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
" Anna Held (1870?-1918), a petite woman with an hourglass figure, was America's most popular musical comedy star during the two decades preceding World War I. In the colorful world of New York theater during La Belle Époque, she epitomized everything that was glamorous, sophisticated, and suggestive about turn-of-the-century Broadway. Overcoming an impoverished life as an orphan to become a music-hall star in Paris, Held rocketed to fame in America. From 1896 to 1910, she starred in hit after hit and quickly replaced Lillian Russell as the darling of the theatrical world. The first wife of legendary producer Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., Held was the brains and inspiration behind his Follies and shared his knack for publicity. Together, they brought the Paris scene to New York, complete with lavish costumes and sets and a chorus of stunningly beautiful women, dubbed ""The Anna Held Girls."" While Held was known for a champagne giggle as well as for her million-dollar bank account, there was a darker side to her life. She concealed her Jewish background and her daughter from a previous marriage. She suffered through her two husbands' gambling problems and Ziegfeld's blatant affairs with showgirls. With the outbreak of fighting in Europe, Held returned to France to support the war effort. She entertained troops and delivered medical supplies, and she was once briefly captured by the German army. Anna Held and the Birth of Ziegfeld's Broadway reveals one of the most remarkable women in the history of theatrical entertainment. With access to previously unseen family records and photographs, Eve Golden has uncovered the details of an extraordinary woman in the vibrant world of 1900s New York.
The Measure of Paris
Author: Stephen ScobiePublisher: University of Alberta
ISBN: 0888645880
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 357
Book Description
Paris remains one of the most fascinating cities in the world. It provides a measure of excellence in many areas of culture, and it is itself constantly being measured, both by its lovers and by its critics. This book presents a series of studies on the images of Paris presented by writers (mostly Canadian, from John Glassco to Mavis Gallant to Lola Lemire Tostevin), but also in such other areas as social history and personal memoir. The result is a wide-ranging discussion of the city's history in 20th century literature and thought, which will appeal to all those who love Paris, or who have ever walked on its streets.
Monarch of the Flute
Author: Nancy ToffPublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199883556
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 452
Book Description
Georges Barrère (1876-1944) holds a preeminent place in the history of American flute playing. Best known for two of the landmark works that were written for him--the Poem of Charles Tomlinson Griffes and Density 21.5 by Edgard Varèse--he was the most prominent early exemplar of the Paris Conservatoire tradition in the United States and set a new standard for American woodwind performance. Barrère's story is a musical tale of two cities, and this book uses his life as a window onto musical life in Belle Epoque Paris and twentieth-century New York. Recurrent themes are the interactions of composers and performers; the promotion of new music; the management, personnel, and repertoire of symphony orchestras; the economic and social status of the orchestral and solo musician, including the increasing power of musicians' unions; the role of patronage, particularly women patrons; and the growth of chamber music as a professional performance medium. A student of Paul Taffanel at the Paris Conservatoire, by age eighteen Barrère played in the premiere of Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun. He went on to become solo flutist of the Concerts Colonne and to found the Sociètè Moderne d'Instruments á Vent, a pioneering woodwind ensemble that premiered sixty-one works by forty composers in its first ten years. Invited by Walter Damrosch to become principal flute of the New York Symphony in 1905, he founded the woodwind department at the Institute of Musical Art (later Juilliard). His many ensembles toured the United States, building new audiences for chamber music and promoting French repertoire as well as new American music. Toff narrates Barrère's relationships with the finest musicians and artists of his day, among them Isadora Duncan, Yvette Guilbert, André Caplet, Paul Hindemith, Albert Roussel, Wallingford Riegger, and Henry Brant. The appendices of the book, which list Barrère's 170 premieres and the 50 works dedicated to him, are a resource for a new generation of performers. Based on extensive archival research and oral histories in both France and the United States, this is the first biography of Barrère.
Career Stories
Author: Juliette M. RogersPublisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271034971
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262
Book Description
In Career Stories, Juliette Rogers considers a body of largely unexamined novels from the Belle Époque that defy the usual categories allowed the female protagonist of the period. While most literary studies of the Belle Époque (1880–1914) focus on the conventional housewife or harlot distinction for female protagonists, the heroines investigated in Career Stories are professional lawyers, doctors, teachers, writers, archeologists, and scientists. In addition to the one well-known woman writer from the Belle Époque, Colette, this study will expand our knowledge of relatively unknown authors, including Gabrielle Reval, Marcelle Tinayre, and Colette Yver, who actively participated in contemporary debates on women's possible roles in the public domain and in professional careers during this period. Career Stories seeks to understand early twentieth century France by examining novels written about professional women, bourgeois and working-class heroines, and the particular dilemmas that they faced. This book contributes a new facet to literary histories of the Belle Époque: a subgenre of the bildungsroman that flourished briefly during the first decade of the twentieth century in France. Rogers terms this subgenre the female berufsroman, or novel of women's professional development. Career Stories will change the way we think about the Belle Époque and the interwar period in French literary history, because these women writers and their novels changed the direction that fiction writing would take in post-World War I France.
The Gates of Hell
Author: Arline Boucher TehanPublisher: Xlibris Corporation
ISBN: 1453548297
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Book Description
The Gates of Hell: Rodin’s Passion in Stone is not just another biography of Rodin. There are many excellent ones already. Rather, it is an attempt to understand the sculptor, after immersion in his works, by listening to his own words and those spoken about him. For Rodin was more than a sculptor of genius. He had the imagination and the courage to search for the truth, not only with his artist’s hands, but with the penetrating gaze and mastery of the word that define the writer. His book Les Cathedrals de France and his hundreds of letters offer a new close-up of the artist, both visual and verbal. His musings on art and on life, and his contemporaries’ views of him, form a biographer’s trove. This rich assemblage of words, like a hoard of tiny fragments of stone and glass, when pieced together, form a mosaic likeness of an artist who was himself a story teller in stone.
Imperial Masquerade
Author: Grant Hayter-MenziesPublisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9789622098817
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 454
Book Description
"Imperial Masquerade: The Legend of Princess Der Ling, the first biography of one of the twentieth century's most intriguing cross-cultural personalities, traces not only the life of Princess Der Ling, in all its various transformations, but offers a fresh look at the woman she lionized and, ultimately, betrayed - the Empress Dowager Cixi, to whom, like Der Ling, many legends have been affixed over the past century. The book also depicts the changing worlds of Paris, Tokyo and the other international stages of Der Ling's development as woman and as mystery, and deals with the many teachers who made her who she was." --Book Jacket.
The Life of Berlioz
Author: Peter BloomPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521485487
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228
Book Description
The Life of Berlioz situates the celebrated French musician in the vibrant and highly politicized musical culture of the periods of the Bourbon Restoration, July Monarchy, Second Republic, and Second Empire in which he lived and worked as composer, conductor, concert manager, and writer. The author of the Symphonie fantastique was indeed possessed of a fertile and fantastical imagination; but the common image of Berlioz as a misunderstood and mistreated genius obscures both the solidity of his work as a musical architect and the reality of his position as one sometimes favored by those in power. Berlioz is the quintessential romantic composer by dint of the conspicuous intermingling of art and life that marks his musical and literary output. Studying this away from the subjective sentimentality that can still mar studies of the composer in France, serves only to enhance the uncommon radiance of his music and uncommon esprit of his art.