Download or read book Mademoiselle written by Rhonda K. Garelick and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-09-30 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER Certain lives are at once so exceptional, and yet so in step with their historical moments, that they illuminate cultural forces far beyond the scope of a single person. Such is the case with Coco Chanel, whose life offers one of the most fascinating tales of the twentieth century—throwing into dramatic relief an era of war, fashion, ardent nationalism, and earth-shaking change—here brilliantly treated, for the first time, with wide-ranging and incisive historical scrutiny. Coco Chanel transformed forever the way women dressed. Her influence remains so pervasive that to this day we can see her afterimage a dozen times while just walking down a single street: in all the little black dresses, flat shoes, costume jewelry, cardigan sweaters, and tortoiseshell eyeglasses on women of every age and background. A bottle of Chanel No. 5 perfume is sold every three seconds. Arguably, no other individual has had a deeper impact on the visual aesthetic of the world. But how did a poor orphan become a global icon of both luxury and everyday style? How did she develop such vast, undying influence? And what does our ongoing love of all things Chanel tell us about ourselves? These are the mysteries that Rhonda K. Garelick unravels in Mademoiselle. Raised in rural poverty and orphaned early, the young Chanel supported herself as best she could. Then, as an uneducated nineteen-year-old café singer, she attracted the attention of a wealthy and powerful admirer and parlayed his support into her own hat design business. For the rest of Chanel’s life, the professional, personal, and political were interwoven; her lovers included diplomat Boy Capel; composer Igor Stravinsky; Romanov heir Grand Duke Dmitri; Hugh Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster; poet Pierre Reverdy; a Nazi officer; and several women as well. For all that, she was profoundly alone, her romantic life relentlessly plagued by abandonment and tragedy. Chanel’s ambitions and accomplishments were unparalleled. Her hat shop evolved into a clothing empire. She became a noted theatrical and film costume designer, collaborating with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Luchino Visconti. The genius of Coco Chanel, Garelick shows, lay in the way she absorbed the zeitgeist, reflecting it back to the world in her designs and in what Garelick calls “wearable personality”—the irresistible and contagious style infused with both world history and Chanel’s nearly unbelievable life saga. By age forty, Chanel had become a multimillionaire and a household name, and her Chanel Corporation is still the highest-earning privately owned luxury goods manufacturer in the world. In Mademoiselle, Garelick delivers the most probing, well-researched, and insightful biography to date on this seemingly familiar but endlessly surprising figure—a work that is truly both a heady intellectual study and a literary page-turner. Praise for Mademoiselle “A detailed, wry and nuanced portrait of a complicated woman that leaves the reader in a state of utterly satisfying confusion—blissfully mesmerized and confounded by the reality of the human spirit.”—The Washington Post “Writing an exhaustive biography of Chanel is a challenge comparable to racing a four-horse chariot. . . . This makes the assured confidence with which Garelick tells her story all the more remarkable.”—The New York Review of Books “Broadly focused and beautifully written.”—The Wall Street Journal
Download or read book Guernica written by Gijs van Hensbergen and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-01-03 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The remarkable story of the famous painting by Picasso and its diverse meanings from its conception to the present day 'Enthralling ... This is high-action drama, told like the rest within a huge frame of reference, theme interlocked with theme ... A painting which began its life within a particular political context has emerged as a universal statement on the ever-present horror and suffering of war. Van Hensbergen has treated an extraordinary subject admirably' Evening Standard Of all the great paintings in the world, Picasso's Guernica has had a more direct impact on our consciousness than perhaps any other. In this absorbing and revealing book, Gijs van Hensbergen tells the story of this masterpiece. Starting with its origin in the destruction of the Basque town of Gernika in the Spanish Civil War, the painting is then used as a weapon in the propaganda battle against Fascism. Later it becomes the nucleus of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the detonator for the Big Bang of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s. This tale of passion and politics shows the transformation of this work of art into an icon of many meanings, up to its long contested but eventually triumphant return to Spain in 1981.
Download or read book From Rodin to Giacometti written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-09-06 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of papers delivered at an international conference in September 1996 at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art during a major Giacometti retrospective. The contributors are leading curators, art historians and literature specialists. While the relationship between nineteenth- and twentieth-century painters and writers has been the subject of intense interest in recent years, the parallel relationship between sculptors and writers has been largely neglected. These essays seek to redress the balance by looking at a variety of ways in which the conventional barriers between writing and sculpting were broken down by such pioneering figures as Rodin, Degas, Bourdelle, Valéry, Apollinaire, Reverdy, Breton, Bataille, Arp, Picasso and Giacometti. Among the topics discussed are: the many personal and professional contacts, dual artistic talent, 'Ecrits d'artistes', ekphrasis, sculpture as object, the sculptorly representation of the poet, the poetic representation of the sculptor, sculpture as metaphor, proprioception and mental images. Fully illustrated throughout, this book offers new perspectives on familiar masterpieces like Rodin's Gates of Hell, but also opens up less well known subjects like Valéry's sculpture and Breton's Object-Poems. Above all it makes a provocative and original contribution to Word and Image studies.
Download or read book Jean Cocteau written by James S. Williams and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2008-02 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Evaluating Cocteau’s career and his fascinating personal life on equal terms, James Williams offers here a groundbreaking analysis that sets them both within highly revealing historical and artistic contexts.
Download or read book National Union Catalog written by and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes entries for maps and atlases.
Download or read book Forms and Words written by Salvador Espriu and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Art of the Defeat written by Laurence Bertrand Dorléac and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2008 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Art of the Defeat offers an unflinching look at the pivotal role art played in France during the German occupation. It begins with Adolf Hitler's staging of the armistice at Rethondes and moves across the dark years - analyzing the official junket by French artists to Germany, the exhibition of Arno Breker's colossi in Paris, the looting of the state museums and Jewish collections, the glorification of Philippe P?tain and a pure national identity, the demonization of modernists and foreigners, and the range of responses by artists and artisans. The sum is a pioneering expos? of the deployment of art and ideology to hold the heart of darkness at bay"--Page 4 of cover.
Download or read book Art in America written by Frank Jewett Mather and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 844 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Buildings of Europe written by Christopher Woodward and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Picasso written by Giorgio Cortenova and published by Smithmark Publishers. This book was released on 1996 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The American Music Teacher written by and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 646 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book written by and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 1416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Arts Yearbook written by and published by . This book was released on 1962 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Arts Digest written by and published by . This book was released on 1961 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Spanish Cultural Index written by Spain. Dirección General de Relaciones Culturales and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Pictures on Exhibit written by and published by . This book was released on 1961-10 with total page 798 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
