Bernard Berenson The Making Of A Legend

Author : Ernest Samuels
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674067790
Total Pages : 740 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Bernard Berenson, the Making of a Legend written by Ernest Samuels and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 740 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Controversy swirls around Bernard Berenson today as it did in his middle years, before and between two world wars. Who was this man, this supreme connoisseur of Italian Renaissance painting? How did he support his elegant estate near Florence, his Villa I Tatti? What exactly were his relations with the art dealer Joseph Duveen? What part did his wife, Mary, play in his scholarly work and professional career? The answers are to be found in the day-to-day record of his life as he lived it--as reported at first hand in his and Mary's letters and diaries and reflected in the countless personal and business letters they received. His is one of the most fully documented lives of this century. Ernest Samuels, having spent twenty years studying the thousands of letters and other manuscripts, presents his story in absorbing detail. Berenson helped Isabella Stewart Gardner build her great collection and performed similar though lesser services for other wealthy Americans. It was merely an avocation and a useful source of income; his vocation was scholarship. But after 1904, when the book opens, his expertise was in ever-greater demand: a purchaser's only assurance of the authorship of an Italian painting was the opinion of an expert, and in this field Berenson was pre-eminent. Increasingly he was drawn into the lucrative world of the art dealers; inevitably Joseph Duveen found it essential to enlist his services, at first ad hoc, then by contractual agreement. Samuels charts the course of Berenson's long association with Duveen Brothers, detailing the financial arrangements, the humdrum chores and major contested attributions, the periodic clashes between the stubborn scholar and the arrogant entrepreneur. The portrayal of Berenson's relationship with Mary is especially intriguing: a union of opposites in all but brains and wit, bonded--despite love affairs, jealousies, recriminations--no longer by passion but by shared concerns. Impinging on their lives are those of a huge circle of friends and acquaintances in America and the beau monde of Europe. Both as biography and as a chapter of social and cultural history, it is a compelling book.

Author : Ernest Samuels
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 524 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Bernard Berenson written by Ernest Samuels and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'This is a life filled with extraordinary people... Collectively they made the 1890's outrageously exciting, and the Berensons, in their relentless quest for recognition and security, serve as the perfect mirror. Samuels turns the mirror deftly, through Boston, London, Florence, Oxford, Vienna, and Chicago, pausing briefly in the boudoir, lingering in the golden hills of Tuscany, relentlessly reflecting the social scene... Samuels brilliantly captures it all.'--Christian Science Monitor

Author : Stanley Mazaroff
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 1421440466
Total Pages : 247 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Henry Walters and Bernard Berenson written by Stanley Mazaroff and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collecting Italian Renaissance paintings during America’s Gilded Age was fraught with risk because of the uncertain identities of the artists and the conflicting interests of the dealers. Stanley Mazaroff’s fascinating account of the close relationship between Henry Walters, founder of the legendary Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, and Bernard Berenson, the era’s preeminent connoisseur of Italian paintings, richly illustrates this important chapter of America’s cultural history. When Walters opened his Italianate museum in 1909, it was labeled as America’s “Great Temple of Art.” With more than 500 Italian paintings, including self-portraits purportedly by Raphael and Michelangelo, Walters’s collection was compared favorably with the great collections in London, Paris, and Berlin. In the midst of this fanfare, Berenson contacted Walters and offered to analyze his collection, sell him additional paintings, and write a scholarly catalogue that would trumpet the collection on both sides of the Atlantic. What Berenson offered was what Walters desperately needed—a badge of scholarship that Berenson’s invaluable imprimatur would undoubtedly bring. By 1912, Walters had become Berenson’s most active client, their business alliance wrapped in a warm and personal friendship. But this relationship soon became strained and was finally severed by a confluence of broken promises, inattention, deceit, and ethical conflict. To Walters’s chagrin, Berenson swept away the self-portraits allegedly by Raphael and Michelangelo and publicly scorned paintings that he was supposed to praise. Though painful to Walters, Berenson’s guidance ultimately led to a panoramic collection that beautifully told the great history of Italian Renaissance painting. Based primarily on correspondence and other archival documents recently discovered at the Walters Art Museum and the Villa I Tatti in Florence, the intriguing story of Walters and Berenson offers unusual insight into the pleasures and perils of collecting Italian Renaissance paintings, the ethics in the marketplace, and the founding of American art museums.

Author : Rachel Cohen
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300149425
Total Pages : 344 pages
Book Rating : 4.25/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Bernard Berenson written by Rachel Cohen and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: " Few would have predicted that Bernard Berenson, from a poor Lithuanian Jewish immigrant family, would rise above poverty. Yet Berenson left his crowded home near Boston's railyards and transformed himself into the world's most renowned expert on Italian Renaissance paintings, the owner of a beautiful villa and an immense private library in the hills outside Florence. The explosion of the Gilded Age art market and Berenson's work for dealer Joseph Duveen supported a luxurious life, but it came with painful costs: Berenson hid his origins and, though his attributions remain foundational, felt that he had betrayed his gifts as a critic and interpreter of paintings. This finely drawn portrait of Berenson, the first biography devoted to him in a quarter century, draws on new archival materials that bring out the significance of his secret business dealings and the central importance of several women in his life and work: his sister Senda Berenson; his wife Mary Berenson; his patron Isabella Stewart Gardner; his lover Belle da Costa Greene; his dear friend Edith Wharton, and the companion of his last forty years, Nicky Mariano. Rachel Cohen explores Berenson's inner world and extraordinary visual capacity while also illuminating the historical forces-new capital, the developing art market, persistent anti-Semitism, and the two world wars-that profoundly affected his life"--

Author : Hannah Ewence
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317630289
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Visualizing Jews Through the Ages written by Hannah Ewence and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-03-24 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores literary and material representations of Jews, Jewishness and Judaism from antiquity to the twenty-first century. Gathering leading scholars from within the field of Jewish Studies, it investigates how the debates surrounding literary and material images within Judaism and in Jewish life are part of an on-going strategy of image management - the urge to shape, direct, authorize and contain Jewish literary and material images and encounters with those images - a strategy both consciously and unconsciously undertaken within multifarious arenas of Jewish life from early modern German lands to late twentieth-century North London, late Antique Byzantium to the curation of contemporary Holocaust exhibitions.

Author : Malcolm Goldstein
Publisher : Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN 13 : 019513673X
Total Pages : 385 pages
Book Rating : 4.39/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Landscape with Figures written by Malcolm Goldstein and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2000-11-30 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first history of art dealing in the United States follows the profession from 18th-century portrait and picture salesmen in the colonies to the high-profile, jet-set gallery owners of today. 40 illustrations.

Author : Richard Shone
Publisher : Thames & Hudson
ISBN 13 : 0500771499
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Books that Shaped Art History: From Gombrich and Greenberg to Alpers and Krauss written by Richard Shone and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2013-04-05 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exemplary survey that reassesses the impact of the most important books to have shaped art history through the twentieth century Written by some of today’s leading art historians and curators, this new collection provides an invaluable road map of the field by comparing and reexamining canonical works of art history. From Émile Mâle’s magisterial study of thirteenth-century French art, first published in 1898, to Hans Belting’s provocative Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, the book provides a concise and insightful overview of the history of art, told through its most enduring literature. Each of the essays looks at the impact of a single major book of art history, mapping the intellectual development of the writer under review, setting out the premises and argument of the book, considering its position within the broader field of art history, and analyzing its significance in the context of both its initial reception and its afterlife. An introduction by John-Paul Stonard explores how art history has been forged by outstanding contributions to scholarship, and by the dialogues and ruptures between them.

Author : William R. Johnston
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780801860409
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book William and Henry Walters, the Reticent Collectors written by William R. Johnston and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1999-10-25 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surprisingly, the story of how William Walters and his son Henry created one of the finest privately assembled museums in the United States has not been told."--BOOK JACKET.

Author : Jennifer Holmes
Publisher : Troubador Publishing Ltd
ISBN 13 : 1789016541
Total Pages : 416 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book A Working Woman written by Jennifer Holmes and published by Troubador Publishing Ltd. This book was released on 2019-02-12 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Working Woman: The Remarkable Life of Ray Strachey is a traditional biography of a very untraditional woman. Tug-of-love child, Ward in Chancery, pampered schoolgirl, pioneer car driver, would-be electrical engineer, triumphant suffragist, political lobbyist, historian, biographer, novelist, journalist, broadcaster, well-known public figure, enthusiastic bricklayer, devoted mother, despairing stepmother, neglected wife: Ray Strachey was all of these and more. Bertrand Russell taught her maths; John Maynard Keynes fell (a little) in love with her; Virginia Woolf was over-awed by her; Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Nancy Astor depended on her. She inspired admiration in men and gratitude close to worship in women. As a close colleague of Millicent Fawcett, Ray Strachey played a major, non-violent, role in gaining British women the vote in 1918. She was one of the first female Parliamentary candidates, and became one of the leading feminists of the inter-war years, devoted in particular to improving employment opportunities for women. A brilliant political lobbyist with an extraordinary range of contacts, she was also a celebrated author, journalist and broadcaster, still remembered for her classic history of the Women’s Movement, The Cause (1928). She achieved all this as a working mother with overwhelming family responsibilities and an unusual (some said eccentric) private life. Lavishly illustrated, this first full account of Ray Strachey’s life is based on extensive research and draws heavily on her own lively and forthright comments on people and events. Interweaving her public roles with her challenging private life on the fringes of the Bloomsbury set, it features a host of well-known personalities, and introduces a new generation of readers to a fascinating though neglected fighter for women’s rights.

Author : A. Price
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137051833
Total Pages : 253 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The End of the Age of Innocence written by A. Price and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The End of the Age of Innocence tells the dramatic story of Edith Wharton's heroic crusade to save the lives of displaced Belgians and suffering citizens of her adopted France, by organizing refugee relief efforts during WWI.