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A Painter's Life is a rare glimpse into the mind of an
uncompromising painter. Mari Lyons was a life-long "every-day"
painter and from an early journal she kept for a short time she
reveals the heartbreaks, the pain of rejection, the intense and
abiding love of her work, and the quiet triumphs of a painter
juggling the demanding life of a mother of four, a busy husband,
constant financial pressure; she had a fierce desire to make
ever-better work, and for her work to become more visible in the
world. Later talks she gave at the Munson William Proctor Institute
and Rider University frame the journal entries with the aesthetic
concepts that animate her work. This look at her inner life is made
more palpable by a selection of more than eighty-five
representative paintings in color, along with sketches and
photographs. Mari studied with Max Beckmann as a teenager, and
later at Bard College, Yale-Norfolk, and with Stanley William
Hayter. Her early work received high praise in college and from her
first exhibition at the Polari Gallery in Woodstock when she was
nineteen and still a student. She married at twenty-one, had three
children in as many years, and then moved from the Midwest to New
York City, where her fourth child was born. At first influenced by
the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s, she painted
non-objectively but soon found the rich thingness of the world
irresistible and her work developed into what she called "painterly
figuration." Her journals and notes reveal the intimate details of
her long mediation between these two commitments. In time she
exhibited regularly at the First Street Gallery in Chelsea and
received praise in such places as The Wall Street Journal, The New
Republic, The New York Times, The Sun, Forbes FYI, and elsewhere.
Today her paintings are in The Museum of the City of New York, The
New York State Museum, Bard College, The Montana Historical
Society, Mills, Wellesley, and Russell Sage colleges, The Montana
Museum of Art, and many other museums and private collections.
The first biography of America's greatest twentieth-century
sculptor. In this beautifully written, deeply researched book Jed
Perl shows how Alexander Calder became an avant-garde artist with
enduring appeal. One of our most beloved modern artists, Calder is
celebrated above all as the inventor of the mobile. Only now is the
full story of his life being told in a gloriously illustrated
biography, which features unseen photographs and is based on scores
of interviews and unprecedented access to Calder's papers. Born
into a family of artists, Calder forged important friendships with
a who's who of twentieth-century creators, including Georges
Braque, Marcel Duchamp, Martha Graham, Joan Miro, Piet Mondrian and
Virgil Thomson. His early years studying engineering were followed
by artistic triumphs in Paris in the late 1920s, and his emergence
as a leader in the international abstract avant-garde. His marriage
in 1931 to Louisa James-a great-niece of Henry James-is a richly
romantic story. This transatlantic life carries readers from New
York's Greenwich Village, to the Left Bank of Paris during the
Depression, and then to a refugee-filled London just before the
War, where Calder's circle of friends included Barbara Hepworth,
Ben Nicholson and Kenneth Clark.
Antoine Watteau, one of the most mysterious painters who ever
lived, is the inspiration for this delightful investigation of the
tangled relationship between art and life. Weaving together
historical fact and personal reflections, the influential art
critic Jed Perl reconstructs the amazing story of this pioneering
bohemian artist who, although he died in 1721, when he was only
thirty-six, has influenced innumerable painters and writers in the
centuries since--and whose work continues to deepen our
understanding of the place that love, friendship, and pleasure have
in our daily lives.
Perl creates an astonishing experience by gathering his reflections
on this "master of silken surfaces and elusive emotions" in the
form of an alphabet--a fairy tale for adults--giving us a new way
to think about art. This brilliant collage of a book is a hunt for
the treasure of Watteau's life and vision that encompasses the
glamour and intrigue of eighteenth-century Paris, the riotous
history of Harlequin and Pierrot, and the work of such modern
giants as Cezanne, Picasso, and Samuel Beckett.
By turns somber and beguiling, analytical and impressionistic,
"Antoine's Alphabet "reaffirms the contemporary relevance of the
greatest of all painters of young love and imperishable dreams. It
is a book to savor, to share, to return to again and again.
"From the Hardcover edition."
As art critic for "The New Republic," Jed Perl is renowned for
combining a passion for art and a skepticism about the current art
establishment with an ability to write about art in the context of
our larger culture. In this collection of essays, including two
written especially for this book, he delivers a brilliant mixture
of first-rate art criticism and politically informed insight into
the true workings of the American art world.Perl offers incisive
analysis into the marketing mentality that dominates today's
museums, the poverty of academic criticism, and the changing
expectations of the gallery-going public. He re-evaluates the old
masters, and turns an avid, unprejudiced eye on the works of his
contemporaries. He laments the collapse of a gallery culture that
once allowed artists to develop slowly, and argues for a radical
reassessment of the way art is presented to--and is viewed by--the
public.
Soul Mates of the Lost Generation recovers for contemporary readers
one of the last great collections of letters of the Jazz Age. It is
the correspondence between the pioneering novelist John Dos Passos
and a young woman named Crystal Ross, to whom he was engaged and
who reveals herself as one of the truly daring, vivacious spirits
of that extraordinary time. Before his passing in 2015, Ross's son,
the esteemed literary scholar Lewis M. Dabney, completed a dual
biography of the couple's time together based on this rare
correspondence. The bulk of the letters were written between 1923
and 1928, during Dos Passos's first major creative period. The
letters relate scenes from the pair's life in the rich culture of
Paris in the 1920s and their association with Hemingway, the
Fitzgeralds, and other figures of literary modernism. Engaged in
1924, Dos Passos and Ross often corresponded about their ongoing
work and the work of others in Dos Passos's circle. Dos Passos
introduced his fiancee to Hemingway, and the couple accompanied him
and other writers on an early trip to Pamplona, the setting of The
Sun Also Rises, in which Ross makes a cameo appearance. This
collection of never-before-seen letters offers rare insights into
the life of the influential modernist author of Manhattan Transfer,
The 42nd Parallel, and The Big Money, and into that of a remarkably
independent, fascinating woman.
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