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.

Experience the creative explosion that transformed American art, in the words of the artists, writers, and critics who were there: In the quarter century after the end of World War II, a new generation of painters, sculptors, and photographers transformed the face of American art and shifted the center of the art world from Paris to New York. Signaled by the triumph of abstraction and the ascendancy of painters such as Pollock, Rothko, de Kooning, and Kline, this revolution generated an exuberant and contentious body of writing without parallel in our cultural history. In the words of editor Jed Perl, "there has never been a period when the visual arts have been written about with more mongrel energy--with more unexpected mixtures of reportage, rhapsody, analysis, advocacy, editorializing, and philosophy." Perl has gathered the best of this writing together for the first time, interwoven with fascinating headnotes that establish the historical background, the outsized personalities of the artists and critics, and the nature of the aesthetic battles that defined the era. Here are statements by the most significant artists, and major critical essays by Clement Greenberg, Susan Sontag, Hilton Kramer, and other influential figures. Here too is an electrifying array of responses by poets and novelists, reflecting the free interplay between different art forms: John Ashbery on Andy Warhol, James Agee on Helen Levitt, James Baldwin on Beauford Delaney, Truman Capote on Richard Avedon, Tennessee Williams on Hans Hofmann, Jack Kerouac on Robert Frank. The atmosphere of the time comes to vivid life in memoirs, diaries, and journalism by Peggy Guggenheim, Dwight Macdonald, Calvin Trillin, and others. Lavishly illustrated with scores of black-and-white images and two 16-page color inserts, this is a book that every art lover will treasure.

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.