Download or read book Impressionist Quartet written by Jeffrey Meyers and published by Oldcastle Books Ltd. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Jeffrey Meyers follows the lives of four Impressionist painters whose rebellious work was scorned by the critics and derided by their contemporaries. The French art establishment dismissed them altogether and at the time their sold for very little. Impressionist Quartet describes the relationships between these artists and how they struggle emotionally and intellectually to create a new way of seeing and representing the world.
Download or read book Mary Cassatt Painter of Modern Women Second World of Art written by Griselda Pollock and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This groundbreaking study, the definitive introduction to the work of artist Mary Cassatt, places her work in the wider context of nineteenth-century feminism and art theory and is now updated with color illustrations. This groundbreaking study redefines the status of the beloved American artist Mary Cassatt, placing her work in the wider context of nineteenth- century feminism and art theory. Mary Cassatt looks at the artist’s work in light of her time as an advocate for women’s intellectual life and political emancipation. Esteemed by her contemporaries for her commitment to what she and her radical colleagues in Paris termed “the new art”—now called impressionism—Cassatt brought her discerning gaze and compositional inventiveness to the study of the subtle, often psychological, social interactions of women in public and private spaces. Focusing on key moments of engagement and change over the artist’s long career, art historian Griselda Pollock discusses Cassatt’s artistic training across Europe, her profound study of the Old Masters, and places fresh emphasis on the artist’s interest in Manet and other contemporary French and Spanish painters as well as her influence on American collections of French modernism. Now revised with a new preface, updates to the bibliography, and color illustrations throughout, this book offers a reevaluation of the work of this important artist as seen through the frames of class, gender, space, and difference.
Download or read book Mary Cassatt written by Griselda Pollock and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2022-04-07 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A close ally of Camille Pissarro, Berthe Morisot and Edgar Degas, Mary Cassatt was the only American painter at the heart of the Impressionist group in Paris. Highly respected on both sides of the Atlantic, Cassatt was a forthright advocate for womens intellectual, creative and political emancipation. She brought her discerning gaze and compositional inventiveness across many media to the subtle social interactions of women in public and private spaces, such as at the theatre, and in moments of intimacy with children, where she was one of the most attentive and unsentimental analysts of the infant body and the childs emerging personality. Tracing key moments in Cassatts long career, art historian Griselda Pollock highlights Cassatts extensive artistic training across Europe, analysing her profound study of Old Masters while revealing her intelligent understanding of both Manet and Courbet. Pollock also provides close readings of Cassatts paintings and her singular vision of women in modernity. Now revised with a new preface, updates to the bibliography and colour illustrations throughout, this book offers a rich perspective on the core concerns of a major Impressionist artist through the frames of class, gender, space and difference.
Download or read book The Art of Rivalry written by Sebastian Smee and published by Random House. This book was released on 2016-08-16 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize–winning art critic Sebastian Smee tells the fascinating story of four pairs of artists—Manet and Degas, Picasso and Matisse, Pollock and de Kooning, Freud and Bacon—whose fraught, competitive friendships spurred them to new creative heights. Rivalry is at the heart of some of the most famous and fruitful relationships in history. The Art of Rivalry follows eight celebrated artists, each linked to a counterpart by friendship, admiration, envy, and ambition. All eight are household names today. But to achieve what they did, each needed the influence of a contemporary—one who was equally ambitious but possessed sharply contrasting strengths and weaknesses. Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas were close associates whose personal bond frayed after Degas painted a portrait of Manet and his wife. Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso swapped paintings, ideas, and influences as they jostled for the support of collectors like Leo and Gertrude Stein and vied for the leadership of a new avant-garde. Jackson Pollock’s uninhibited style of “action painting” triggered a breakthrough in the work of his older rival, Willem de Kooning. After Pollock’s sudden death in a car crash, de Kooning assumed Pollock's mantle and became romantically involved with his late friend’s mistress. Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon met in the early 1950s, when Bacon was being hailed as Britain’s most exciting new painter and Freud was working in relative obscurity. Their intense but asymmetrical friendship came to a head when Freud painted a portrait of Bacon, which was later stolen. Each of these relationships culminated in an early flashpoint, a rupture in a budding intimacy that was both a betrayal and a trigger for great innovation. Writing with the same exuberant wit and psychological insight that earned him a Pulitzer Prize for art criticism, Sebastian Smee explores here the way that coming into one’s own as an artist—finding one’s voice—almost always involves willfully breaking away from some intimate’s expectations of who you are or ought to be. Praise for The Art of Rivalry “Gripping . . . Mr. Smee’s skills as a critic are evident throughout. He is persuasive and vivid. . . . You leave this book both nourished and hungry for more about the art, its creators and patrons, and the relationships that seed the ground for moments spent at the canvas.”—The New York Times “With novella-like detail and incisiveness [Sebastian Smee] opens up the worlds of four pairs of renowned artists. . . . Each of his portraits is a biographical gem. . . . The Art of Rivalry is a pure, informative delight, written with canny authority.”—The Boston Globe
Download or read book Dancing for Degas written by Kathryn Wagner and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2010-03-16 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the City of Lights, at the dawn of a new age, begins an unforgettable story of great love, great art—and the most painful choices of the heart. With this fresh and vibrantly imagined portrait of the Impressionist artist Edgar Degas, readers are transported through the eyes of a young Parisian ballerina to an era of light and movement. An ambitious and enterprising farm girl, Alexandrie joins the prestigious Paris Opera ballet with hopes of securing not only her place in society but her family’s financial future. Her plan is soon derailed, however, when she falls in love with the enigmatic artist whose paintings of the offstage lives of the ballerinas scandalized society and revolutionized the art world. As Alexandrie is drawn deeper into Degas’s art and Paris’s secrets, will she risk everything for her dreams of love and of becoming the ballet’s star dancer?
Download or read book Retire and Go written by Russ Firlik and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2022-05-06 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Millions of individuals retire each year, and retirement provides an opportunity for a fresh start. The possibilities are endless--even on a budget--for those prepared to open their minds and dream big. Russ and Emily Firlik, who had just retired from teaching, dared to rethink their more traditional retirement plans to embark on 9 months of slow travel in France and Italy, keeping a strict budget in mind and guided by their passion for the arts, history and architecture. This memoir details the author's personal travel experience and includes insights and instructions for the thrifty long-term traveler. It will inspire others to dream big and plan their own adventures, while helping them with the practical details of sticking to a budget and anticipating the unexpected.
Download or read book Ford Madox Ford and America written by and published by Brill. This book was released on 2012-01-01 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The controversial British writer Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) is increasingly recognized as a major presence in early twentieth-century literature. This series of International Ford Madox Ford Studies was founded to reflect the recent resurgence of interest in him. Each volume is based upon a particular theme or issue; and relates aspects of Ford’s work, life, and contacts, to broader concerns of his time. Ford is best-known for his fiction, especially The Good Soldier, long considered a modernist masterpiece; and Parade’s End, which Anthony Burgess described as ‘the finest novel about the First World War’, Samuel Hynes has called ‘the greatest war novel ever written by an Englishman’, and which has been adapted by Tom Stoppard for the BBC and HBO. Ford’s America, like the other places he wrote about extensively such as England or France, is a place of the imagination as much as the real place in which he lived and travelled. This volume is the first extended treatment of Ford’s lifelong contacts with American literature and culture. It combines contributions from British and American experts on Ford and Modernism. It has five closely inter-connected sections which display, between them, the range of Ford’s creative relationships with American writers and American territory. The first explores the transatlantic dimension of Ford’s modernism, from his involvement with Americans like James and Pound in Britain before the war, through the Paris days among the Americans in the transatlantic review circle such as Hemingway and Stein, to his time in America in the 20s and 30s, and the American care for his reputation after his death. The second section focuses on New York, and the publishing world portrayed in Ford’s only novel set mainly in the US, When the Wicked Man. A third section, discussing culture, politics, and journalism in his writing of the 1930s, is followed by two examples of his commentary on contemporary American culture, both published here for the first time. The final section juxtaposes two examples of the many American writers who have paid tribute to Ford: an essay tracking Robert Lowell’s regular recollections of his encounters with him; and Mary Gordon’s celebration of his life with the Polish-American painter Janice Biala. The volume also contains fourteen illustrations, including artwork by Biala and photographs of Ford.
Download or read book Unmentionables Poems written by Beth Ann Fennelly and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2008-04-17 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new collection by a poet declared "one of the most exciting poets of her generation" (Harvard Review). With elegant wordplay and her usual subversive wit, Beth Ann Fennelly explores the "unmentionable"—not only what is considered too bold but also what can't be said because words are insufficient. In sections of short narratives, she questions our everyday human foibles. Three longer sequences display her admirable reach and fierce intelligence: One, "The Kudzu Chronicles," is a rollicking piece about the transplanted weed. Another, "Bertha Morisot: Retrospective," conjures up a complex life portrait of the French impressionist painter. The third presents fifteen dream songs that virtually out-Berryman Berryman.
Download or read book The Mystery of the Real written by Jeffrey Meyers and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-14 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The work of Alex Colville, O.C. (1920-2013), one of the great modern realist painters, combines the Flemish detail of Andrew Wyeth, the eerie foreboding of George Tooker and the anguished confrontations of Lucian Freud. Behind the North Americans stands their common master, Edward Hopper. Colville's works are in many museums in Canada and Germany. He has affinities with Max Beckmann and appeals to the German "secondary virtues": cleanliness, punctuality, love of order. In a long life he resolutely opposed the fashionable currents of abstract and expressionistic art. In contrast to Jackson Pollock's wild action painting, Colville created paintings of contemplation and reflection. As Jeffrey Meyers writes: I spent several days with Colville on each of three visits from California to Wolfville. I received seventy letters from him between August 1998 and April 2010, and kept thirty-six of my letters to him. He sent me photographs and slides of his work and, in his eighties, discussed the progress and meaning of the paintings he completed during the last decade of his life. His handwritten letters, precisely explaining his thoughts and feelings, provide a rare and enlightening opportunity to compare my insights and interpretations with his own intentions and ideas. He also discussed his family, health, sexuality, politics, reading, travels, literary interests, our mutual friend Iris Murdoch, response to my writing, his work, exhibitions, sales of his pictures and of course the meaning of his art. His letters reveal the challenges he faced during aging and illness, and his determination to keep painting as health difficulties mounted. He stopped writing to me when he became seriously ill two years before his death. In this context the late paintings, presented in colour in this book, take on a new poignancy.
Download or read book Writers and Their Teachers written by Dale Salwak and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-04-20 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By turns reflective, entertaining and moving, this book reveals how some of the most influential and best loved writers of our time were shaped by their inspirational teachers. Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee, Margaret Drabble, Stephen Greenblatt, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Andrew Motion, Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina and Paul Theroux are among the twenty contributors of original essays to this landmark volume celebrating masters of the teaching profession. What makes a good teacher? What lights the writer's creative fire? How can the teacher shape the writer? This book answers these questions and more, describing the powerful influence of mentors at an impressionable time of life, portraying the heart-warming transition from pupil to friend, and exploring the lasting impact that truly great teachers can have on their students. To have teachers who care, and to have such notable writers capture their spirit, is ample reason to read Dale Salwak's elegant celebration of the 'noble profession' and the world-renowned writers that it helped to hone.
Download or read book The Artist s Mind written by George Hagman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-06-18 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the past century psychoanalysts have attempted to understand the psychology of art, artists and aesthetic experience. This book examines how contemporary psychoanalytic theory provides insight into understanding the psychological sources of creativity, Modern Art and modern artists. The Artist’s Mind revisits the lives of eight modern artists including Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, from a psychoanalytical viewpoint. It looks at how opportunities for a new approach to art at the turn of the twentieth century offered artists a chance to explore different forms of creativity and artistic ambition. Key areas of discussion include: developmental sources of the aesthetic sense psychological functions of creativity and art psychology of beauty, ugliness and the Sublime. co-evolution of the modern self, modernism and art. cultural context of creativity, artistic identify and aesthetic experience. Through the examination of great artists’ lives and psychological dynamics, the author articulates a new psychoanalytic aesthetic model that has both clinical and historical significance. As such this book is essential reading for all those with an interest in the origins and fate of Modern Art.
Download or read book The Readers Advisory Guide to Nonfiction written by Neal Wyatt and published by American Library Association. This book was released on 2007-05-14 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Navigating what at she calls the " extravagantly rich world of nonfiction," renowned readers' advisor (RA) Wyatt builds readers' advisory bridges from fiction to compelling and increasingly popular nonfiction to encompass the library's entire collection. She focuses on eight popular categories: history, true crime, true adventure, science, memoir, food/cooking, travel, and sports. Within each, she explains the scope, popularity, style, major authors and works, and the subject's position in readers' advisory interviews. Wyatt addresses who is reading nonfiction and why, while providing RAs with the tools and language to incorporate nonfiction into discussions that point readers to what to read next. In easy-to-follow steps, Wyatt Explains the hows and whys of offering fiction and nonfiction suggestions together Illustrates ways to get up to speed fast in nonfiction Shows how to lead readers to a variety of books using her "read-around" and "reading map" strategies Provides tools to build nonfiction subject guides for the collection This hands-on guide includes nonfiction bibliography, key authors, benchmark books with annotations, and core collections. It is destined to become the nonfiction 'bible' for readers' advisory and collection development, helping librarians, library workers, and patrons select great reading from the entire library collection!
Download or read book Thomas Mann s Artist Heroes written by Jeffrey Meyers and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-28 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jeffrey Meyers has written acclaimed biographies of many of the most influential authors of the twentieth century, but none has affected him as deeply as Thomas Mann. From his first youthful encounter with Death in Venice, Meyers has cultivated a lifetime obsession with Mann's elegant style, penetrating irony, and insight into the life of the artist.Admirers of Thomas Mann and of Jeffrey Meyers's biographies will find in this remarkable book the best introduction to one of the greatest writers of the modern age.
Download or read book John Huston Courage and Art written by Jeffrey Meyers and published by Crown Archetype. This book was released on 2011-09-27 with total page 498 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed biographer of Ernest Hemingway, Humphrey Bogart, and Errol Flynn comes the first complete biography of the legendary John Huston, the extraordinary director, writer, actor, and bon vivant who made iconic films such as The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Asphalt Jungle, and The African Queen—and lived one of the most vibrant, eventful lives in Hollywood history. An actor in the 1920s and scriptwriter in the 1930s, John Huston made his dazzling directorial debut in 1941 with The Maltese Falcon. His career as a filmmaker spanned some fifty-seven years and yielded thirty-seven feature films. He made most of his movies abroad, spent much of his life in Ireland and Mexico, and remains one of the most intelligent and influential filmmakers in history. With equal attention given to Huston’s impressive artistic output and tempestuous personal relationships, biographer Jeffrey Meyers presents a vivid narrative of Huston’s remarkably rich creative life. The son of the famous stage and screen actor Walter Huston, John Huston was born in Nevada City, Missouri, and suffered from a weak heart that forced him to live as an invalid for much of his childhood. One day, however, he impulsively left his sickbed, dove over a waterfall, swam into a raging river and began to lead a strenuous life. He became an expert sportsman as well as a boxer, bullfighter, hunter, soldier, gambler and adventurer. Though he didn’t finish high school, he was a man of true genius: a serious painter and amusing raconteur, playwright and story writer, stage and screen actor, director of plays on Broadway and operas at La Scala, autobiographer and political activist who crusaded against Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist witch hunts in Hollywood. He was a discerning collector of art and connoisseur of literature, food and wine. Passionate about horses and women, he had five successively younger wives. Meyers chronicles Huston’s extraordinarily peripatetic life and examines his rise as a great masculine artist in the formidable tradition of Melville, Conrad and Hemingway, whose persona, ethos, prose style and virile code had a powerful influence on his life and work. Thirty-four of Huston’s thirty-seven films adapted important novels, stories and plays, and Meyers perceptively describes how Huston brilliantly transformed the written word into the cinematic image. Huston’s dominant theme is the almost impossible quest, tempered by detachment and irony. His heroes sacrifice honor in pursuit of wealth but fail in that venture, are mocked by cruel fate and remain defiant in the face of defeat. Based on research in Huston’s personal and professional archives, and interviews with his children, friends and colleagues, this is the dramatic story of a courageous artist who, Meyers persuasively argues, is “one of the most fascinating men who ever lived.” From the Hardcover edition.
Download or read book Life Stories written by Maureen O'Connor and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-08-23 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memoirs, autobiographies, and diaries represent the most personal and most intimate of genres, as well as one of the most abundant and popular. Gain new understanding and better serve your readers with this detailed genre guide to nearly 700 titles that also includes notes on more than 2,800 read-alike and other related titles. The popularity of this body of literature has grown in recent years, and it has also diversified in terms of the types of stories being told—and persons telling them. In the past, readers' advisors have depended on access by names or Dewey classifications and subjects to help readers find autobiographies they will enjoy. This guide offers an alternative, organizing the literature according to popular genres, subgenres, and themes that reflect common reading interests. Describing titles that range from travel and adventure classics and celebrity autobiographies to foodie memoirs and environmental reads, Life Stories: A Guide to Reading Interests in Memoirs, Autobiographies, and Diaries presents a unique overview of the genre that specifically addresses the needs of readers' advisors and others who work with readers in finding books.
Download or read book Edouard Manet written by Kathleen Tracy and published by Mitchell Lane Publishers, Inc.. This book was released on 2010-09 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although his career spanned a mere twenty years, Édouard Manet remains one of the most influential artists in history. Rejecting the classical style of painting religious or mythological subjects, Manet was one of the first artists in the nineteenth century to paint modern people in modern situations. Many of his paintings depicted the everyday street life of Paris, especially the cafés. The realism of his art offended the mainstream art community, and as a result, Manet's work was criticized as being obscene and unskilled. Despite the critics, paintings such as The Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia inspired the Impressionist movement and marked the beginning of modern art.
Download or read book The Creation Records Story written by David Cavanagh and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2023-07-04 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'The greatest book ever written on British independent music' Guardian 'One of the best British music books of the last ten years' Mojo Founded by Alan McGee in 1983, Creation Records achieved notoriety as the home of Primal Scream, the Jesus and Mary Chain and other anti-Establishment acts. During the Britpop boom of the mid-90s, the astonishing success of Oasis brought Creation fame on the world stage. In 1999, however, McGee announced his shock departure as his label's influence over a generation of British music came to a confusing and disappointing end. Containing interviews with Creation musicians, employees, supporters and detractors, this is the inside story of Creation Records - and of British music since the 1980s.
