One of Vanity Fair's Best Books of 2022 "Milton Gendel had the good
fortune to live a wildly entertaining life in Rome--a charmed,
romantic period he captured in diaries and photos. Milton had the
further good fortune to have Cullen Murphy bring this vanished
dolce vita to life." --Graydon Carter, coeditor of Air Mail A
never-before-seen treasure trove of photos and diary entries from
the celebrated photographer Milton Gendel that bring Rome's
midcentury heyday to life. "I'm just passing through," Milton
Gendel liked to say whenever anybody asked him what he was doing in
Rome. Even after seven decades in the Eternal City, from his
arrival as a Fulbright Scholar in 1949 until his death in 2018 at
the age of ninety-nine, he refused to be pigeonholed. He was always
an American--never an "expat," never an émigré--but he couldn't
leave, so deep were his ties, and this dual bond left an indelible
imprint on his life and art. Born in New York City to Russian
immigrants, Gendel first made his way to Meyer Schapiro's classroom
at Columbia University and then to Greenwich Village, where he and
his friend Robert Motherwell joined the circle of surrealists
around Peggy Guggenheim and André Breton. But it was Rome that
earned his enduring fascination--the city supplied him with endless
outlets for his curiosity, a series of dazzling apartments in
palazzi, the great loves of his life, and the scores of friendships
that made his story inextricably part of the city's own. Gendel did
much more than just pass through, instead becoming one of Rome's
foremost documentarians. He spoke Italian fluently, worked for the
industrialist Adriano Olivetti, and sampled the latest currents of
Italian art as a correspondent for ARTnews. And he was an artist in
his own right, capturing the lives of Sicilian peasants and British
royals alike on film and showing his photographs at the Roman
outpost of the Marlborough Gallery. Then there were his diaries, a
casement window thrown open onto a who's who of artists, writers,
and socialites sojourning in the city that remained, for Gendel,
the Caput Mundi: Mark Rothko, Princess Margaret, Alexander Calder,
Anaïs Nin, Gore Vidal, Martha Gellhorn, Muriel Spark. His longtime
home on the Isola Tiberina was the nerve center of the dolce vita
generation, whose comings and goings and doings he immortalized in
both words and images. Here, for the first time in print, are
Gendel's diaries, together with his photographs, selected and
edited by Cullen Murphy. Just Passing Through brings together the
most striking artifacts of one of the past century's richest and
most expansive lives, salted with wit and insight into the figures
who defined an era. Includes black-and-white photographs
General
Imprint: |
St Martin's Press
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
November 2023 |
Authors: |
Milton Gendel
|
Editors: |
Cullen Murphy
|
Dimensions: |
235 x 155 x 25mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback - Trade
|
Pages: |
272 |
ISBN-13: |
978-1-250-87257-9 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
1-250-87257-X |
Barcode: |
9781250872579 |
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