Vanished Splendors A Memoir

Author : Balthus
Publisher : Ecco Press
ISBN 13 : 9780060936839
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Vanished Splendors written by Balthus and published by Ecco Press. This book was released on 2004-08-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The painter Balthus, whose tenacity and cultivated taste for secrecy have enveloped him in an aura of mystery, wrote this memoir at the end of his long life. He speaks about his life, family, work, his theory of art and how it intersects with history, literature and spirituality.

Author : Balthus
Publisher : Ecco
ISBN 13 : 9780066212609
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.0X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Vanished Splendors: A Memoir written by Balthus and published by Ecco. This book was released on 2002-12-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The painter Balthus, whose tenacity and cultivated taste for secrecy have enveloped him in an aura of forbidding mystery, wrote this memoir at the end of his long life. A man who for decades opted to "give expression to the world" rather than to "express" himself speaks for the first and only time about his life, family, work, his theory of art and how it intersects with history, literature, and spirituality. Balthus was born Balthasar Klossowski in 1908 to Polish art historian Erich Klossowski and his wife, the painter Elisabeth Dorothea Spiro. The family lived in Germany, France, and Switzerland. In this memoir Balthus describes his childhood with his mother and her lover -- the poet Rainer Maria Rilke -- who became Balthus's own spiritual mentor. He evokes la vie de boheme in Paris during the 1920s, his friendships with Picasso, Derain, Artaud, Giacometti, Saint-Exupéry, René Char, Pierre Jean Jouve, and Albert Camus. He discusses his paintings, offers glimpses into his marriage, and expresses his passion for Chinese art and the Swiss chalets and Italian villas that he helped to restore. He recalls touching moments with his beloved daughter Harumi and the inspiration he drew from his cats. Also, in a kind of final lesson, Balthus shares his thoughts about painting and creation, denounces contemporary art as being illusory and deceitful, and talks candidly about his Catholic faith and how it inspired his work. "We are most charmed by the memoir's ease of expression, as if Balthus were confiding in us, as individuals," writes Joyce Carol Oates in her introduction to Vanished Splendors. "We are brought into a startling intimacy with genius."

Author : Nicholas Fox Weber
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 038535276X
Total Pages : 1047 pages
Book Rating : 4.65/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Balthus written by Nicholas Fox Weber and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-09-25 with total page 1047 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first full-scale biography of one of the most elusive and enigmatic painters of our time -- the self-proclaimed Count Balthus Klossowski de Rola -- whose brilliantly rendered, markedly sexualized portraits, especially of young girls, are among the most memorable images in contemporary art. The story of Balthus's life has been shrouded by contradiction and hearsay, most of it his own invention; over the years he created for himself a persona of mystery, aristocracy, and glamour. Now, in Nicholas Fox Weber's superb biography, Balthus, the man and the artist, stands revealed as never before. He was born in Paris in 1908 to Polish parents. At age twelve he first stepped into the spotlight with the publication of forty of his drawings illustrating a story about a cat by Rainer Maria Rilke, who was then Balthus's mother's lover and a crucial influence on the young boy. From that moment, Balthus has never been out of the public eye. In 1934 his first exhibition, in Paris, stunned the art world. The seven canvases drew attention to his extraordinary technique -- a mix of tradition and imagination informed by the work of Piero della Francesca, Courbet, and Joseph Reinhardt, but unique to the twenty-six-year-old artist -- and to their provocative content; one of the paintings, The Guitar Lesson, was so powerful in its sadomasochistic imagery that it was deemed necessary to remove it from public display. Continuously since then, Balthus's work has provoked both great opprobrium and profound admiration -- as has the artist himself, whether collaborating with Antonin Artaud on his Theater of Cruelty, transforming the Villa Medici into the social center of Fellini's Rome in the 1950s, or competing for the artistic limelight with his friends Picasso and André Derain. The artist's complexities are clarified and his genius understood in a book that derives its particular immediacy from Weber's long and intense conversations with Balthus -- who never previously consented to discuss his life and work with a biographer -- as well as his interviews with the painter's closest friends, members of his family, and many of the subjects of his controversial canvases. Weber's critical and human grasp (he acutely analyzes the paintings in terms of both their aesthetic achievement and what they reveal of their maker's psyche), combined with his rich knowledge of Balthus's life and his insight into the ideas and forces that have helped to shape Balthus's work over the past seven decades, gives us a striking, illuminating portrait of one of the most admired and outrageous artists of our time.

Author : Laura Smith
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0399563601
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Art of Vanishing written by Laura Smith and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A young woman chafing at the confines of marriage confronts the high cost of craving freedom and adventure in a memoir that "pushes literary boundaries" (The Atlantic) At twenty-five, as her wedding date approached, Laura Smith began to feel trapped. Not by her fiancé, who shared her appetite for adventure, but by the unsettling idea that it was hard to be at once married and free. Laura wanted her life to be different. She wanted her marriage to be different. And she found in the strangely captivating story of another restless young woman determined to live without constraints both an enticement and a challenge. Barbara Newhall Follett was a free-spirited trailblazer who published her first novel at 11, enlisted as a deck hand on a boat bound for the south China seas at 15 and was one of the first women to hike the Appalachian trail. Then in December 1939, when she was not much older than Laura, she walked out of her apartment on a quiet tree-lined street in Brookline, leaving behind a fraying marriage, and vanished without a trace. Obsessed by her story, Laura set off to find out what had happened. The Art of Vanishing is a riveting mystery and a piercing exploration of marriage and convention that asks deep and uncomfortable questions: Why do we give up on our childhood dreams? Is marriage a golden noose? Must we find ourselves in the same row houses with Pottery Barn lamps telling our kids to behave? Searingly honest and written with a raw intensity, it will challenge you to rethink your most intimate decisions and may just upend your life.

Author : Lance Esplund
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 0465094678
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Art of Looking written by Lance Esplund and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2018-11-27 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A veteran art critic helps us make sense of modern and contemporary art The landscape of contemporary art has changed dramatically during the last hundred years: from Malevich's 1915 painting of a single black square and Duchamp's 1917 signed porcelain urinal to Jackson Pollock's midcentury "drip" paintings; Chris Burden's "Shoot" (1971), in which the artist was voluntarily shot in the arm with a rifle; Urs Fischer's "You" (2007), a giant hole dug in the floor of a New York gallery; and the conceptual and performance art of today's Ai Weiwei and Marina Abramovic. The shifts have left the art-viewing public (understandably) perplexed. In The Art of Looking, renowned art critic Lance Esplund demonstrates that works of modern and contemporary art are not as indecipherable as they might seem. With patience, insight, and wit, Esplund guides us through the last century of art and empowers us to approach and appreciate it with new eyes. Eager to democratize genres that can feel inaccessible, Esplund encourages viewers to trust their own taste, guts, and common sense. The Art of Looking will open the eyes of viewers who think that recent art is obtuse, nonsensical, and irrelevant, as well as the eyes of those who believe that the art of the past has nothing to say to our present.

Author : Andrew Brink
Publisher : Peter Lang
ISBN 13 : 9780820497211
Total Pages : 226 pages
Book Rating : 4.15/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Desire and Avoidance in Art written by Andrew Brink and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Desire and Avoidance in Art argues that while early developmental traumas can produce life-long creative endeavors with striking aesthetic results, they may also, for the male artist, result in destructive relations with women. Brink introduces the scheme of personality formation - as found in the work on infant and child development of John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, Mary Main, Patricia Crittenden, Allen N. Schore, and others - to explore a new venture in psychobiography. He effectively uses the concept of «anxious attachment» to describe mother-infant/child relations and their sequelae. Using pertinent developmental data found in each artist's childhood, Andrew Brink accounts for the anxious-avoidant attachment style (or, in Crittenden's terminology, the Anxious/Controlling style) from which these artists suffered. He aims to explain why partnerships with women are sometimes hazardous and frequently tragic for male artists by referencing various feminist writers. Based on their viewpoints, Brink extracts psychodynamic explanations that are largely based on what the artists' imagery reveals. Furthermore, he explains how the attachment theory of attraction-avoidance is shown to supplement and enrich other ways of understanding chronically tense relations between the sexes. Brink focuses his attention on artists such as Picasso, Bellmer, Balthus, and Cornell, who are culturally powerful and often stimulate discussion about misogynic figures within a social context.

Author : Sam Solecki
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN 13 : 0773597999
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.90/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Truffaut Notebook written by Sam Solecki and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2015-11-01 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: François Truffaut (1932-1984) ranks among the greatest film directors and has had a worldwide impact on filmmaking as a screenwriter, producer, film critic, and founding member of the French New Wave. His most celebrated films include The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim, Day for Night, and The Last Metro. A Truffaut Notebook is a lively and eclectic introduction to the life and work of this major cinematic figure. In entries as brief as a page, as well as in full-length essays, it examines topics such as Truffaut's mentors, the autobiographical nature of his films, his place in the film tradition, his film criticism, his reputation, his relationships with other directors, and the formal and thematic coherence of his body of work. Sam Solecki also argues for Truffaut's continuing appeal and relevance by examining his influence on filmmakers like Woody Allen, Noah Baumbach, Alexander Payne, Patrice Leconte, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and on writers such as Julian Barnes, Ann Beattie, and Salman Rushdie. Because the book returns regularly to the author's shifting responses to Truffaut's work over the last fifty years, it also offers an autobiographical meditation on his own lifelong fascination with film. Consisting of over eighty short entries and essays, as well as provocative lists, dreams, and quizzes, A Truffaut Notebook is an original and exciting text and a model of passionate engagement with cinema.

Author : Alain Vircondelet
Publisher : Flammarion
ISBN 13 : 9782080201607
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Balthus and Cats written by Alain Vircondelet and published by Flammarion. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the painter's works of art and personal photographs, we are given a glimpse into the intimate and wondrous sanctuary constructed by Balthus and his wife Setsuko at their home at the Grand Chalet, where cats roamed free, the trusted guardians of many secrets -- Back cover.

Author : Art Institute of Chicago
Publisher : Hudson Hills
ISBN 13 : 9780865592070
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Graphic Modernism written by Art Institute of Chicago and published by Hudson Hills. This book was released on 2003 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exhibition catalog highlights a recent gift of works on paper to the Art Institute of Chicago from the Gecht family, longtime Chicago collectors. The catalog comprises 135 drawings, prints, and sculptures from the collection, all of which embody a broad definition of Modernism. The book spans two centuries and contains artists such as Cezanne and Van Gogh as well as Mark Rothko and Philip Guston. Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse, and Picasso form the backbone of the collection with nearly 30 works of art apiece. Suzanne Folds McCullagh (curator of prints & drawings, Art Inst. of Chicago) provides a short introductory essay that tracks the evolution of the collection. Authored by a bevy of contributors, the well-written entries maintain a consistent tone and quality and strike a good balance between biographical information and interpretations of the work of art itself. While the Gecht collection is certainly quite a boon for the institute, it is not comprehensive enough in itself to make the catalog essential for all art libraries. It does, however, belong on library shelves with strong modern art and graphics collections.-Kraig A. Binkowski, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington 135 colour illustrations

Author : Jeffrey Meyers
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 0807182702
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Parallel Lives written by Jeffrey Meyers and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2024-07-02 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Parallel Lives covers the century from the birth of Sigmund Freud in 1856 to the death of Sylvia Plath in 1963. Written by the esteemed biographer and literary critic Jeffrey Meyers, the book includes European, American, and Russian authors and artists, film directors and actors, children and soldiers, friends and lovers, rivals and enemies. Drawing on the bifocal principle of dual composition in Plutarch, these brief lives are arranged in pairs to interact with each other and illuminate their subjects’ similarities, characters, and friendships. The linked structure of Parallel Lives allows several major figures—Sigmund Freud, Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Wilson, Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, and Seamus Heaney—to appear in multiple chapters. The most violent friendship ended when Verlaine shot Rimbaud and went to prison, and Rimbaud crawled back from Africa to die miserably in France. The most brilliant friendship broke up when Wilson attacked Nabokov’s edition of Alexander Pushkin. The most moving connection was Audrey Hepburn’s tender and sympathetic attachment to her soul-sister Anne Frank. Using mirror images reveals a new way to perceive these illustrious men and women. Each chapter shifts the focus back and forth between two subjects, comparing them, changing perspective, reevaluating similarities and contrasts. With vivid details and dramatic events, Meyers emphasizes the backgrounds, intellectual influences, and personality traits of his paired subjects. By examining the complex motives for irrational behavior ranging from deep affection to intense hostility, warm encouragement to bitter rivalry (sometimes together in the same chapter), Parallel Lives offers insights into the dynamics of complementary characters.