Author: Balthus
Publisher: Ecco
ISBN: 9780066212609
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
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: 038535276X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1047
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Book Description
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: Balthus
Publisher: Ecco Press
ISBN: 9780060936839
Category : Painters
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
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: Jeffrey Meyers
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807182702
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
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.
Author: Andrew Brink
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820497211
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
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: David McCullough
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0743218302
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 448
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Book Description
The National Book Award–winning biography that tells the story of how young Teddy Roosevelt transformed himself from a sickly boy into the vigorous man who would become a war hero and ultimately president of the United States, told by master historian David McCullough. Mornings on Horseback is the brilliant biography of the young Theodore Roosevelt. Hailed as “a masterpiece” (John A. Gable, Newsday), it is the winner of the Los Angeles Times 1981 Book Prize for Biography and the National Book Award for Biography. Written by David McCullough, the author of Truman, this is the story of a remarkable little boy, seriously handicapped by recurrent and almost fatal asthma attacks, and his struggle to manhood: an amazing metamorphosis seen in the context of the very uncommon household in which he was raised. The father is the first Theodore Roosevelt, a figure of unbounded energy, enormously attractive and selfless, a god in the eyes of his small, frail namesake. The mother, Mittie Bulloch Roosevelt, is a Southerner and a celebrated beauty, but also considerably more, which the book makes clear as never before. There are sisters Anna and Corinne, brother Elliott (who becomes the father of Eleanor Roosevelt), and the lovely, tragic Alice Lee, TR’s first love. All are brought to life to make “a beautifully told story, filled with fresh detail” (The New York Times Book Review). A book to be read on many levels, it is at once an enthralling story, a brilliant social history and a work of important scholarship which does away with several old myths and breaks entirely new ground. It is a book about life intensely lived, about family love and loyalty, about grief and courage, about “blessed” mornings on horseback beneath the wide blue skies of the Badlands.
Author: Art Institute of Chicago
Publisher: Hudson Hills
ISBN: 9780865592070
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
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: Lance Esplund
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465094678
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
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: Janice S. Lieberman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429955669
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 378
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Book Description
Patients in psychoanalytic treatment present with a variety of problems that reflect contemporary cultural issues and values. Clinical Evolutions on the Superego, Body, and Gender in Psychoanalysis explores the effects of such societal changes on psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, covering topics such as greed, envy and deception, body narcissism, gender roles, and relationships. Janice S. Lieberman includes numerous clinical vignettes and insights into working clinically with changing norms. Lieberman explores how changes in values and norms of behavior in the world beyond the consulting room have influenced what is now heard by analysts within it, using clinical data to demonstrate the psychological underpinnings of the values promulgated by current trends in politics and in society more widely. She explores what she observes to be "a new superego"; where deception abounds and often goes unpunished, where greed and envy have arguably increased and there is an enhanced emphasis on the body and its appearance. Traditional gender roles have been challenged in fortuitous ways, but a certain amount of chaos and confusion has ensued. Relationships are found and maintained using technology, yet many feel lonely and empty. She writes about the clinical dilemmas she has faced and offers suggestions for resolving them in working with today’s patients. Lieberman also sees parallels for these developments in several artists’ lives and in their work. Clinical Evolutions on the Superego, Body, and Gender in Psychoanalysis will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.
Author: Michael Waters
Publisher: BOA Editions, Ltd.
ISBN: 1938160738
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 113
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Book Description
With both ardor and sensuality, Darling Vulgarity challenges us to embrace humanity’s imperfections while urging us toward new spiritual realities. And then, sometimes, the poems are just plain sexy. Or, as Nat Hardy wrote, “Waters’ meditative and confessional forays into the sexual sublime are both disturbing and artfully passionate.” Darling Vulgarity also includes poems based on Waters’ true literary experiences with such notables as Raymond Carver, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Lowell.
