cosmopolitan
Uncanny Spectacle: The Public Career of the Young John
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Simpson, Marc / Weinberg, H. Barbara / Ormond, Richard, PUBLISHER: Yale University Press, By the time John Singer Sargent turned thirty, years old in , he already commanded an international reputation in the art world, creating a stream of works for exhibition that people eagerly awaited and discussed at length. Henry, James noted that Sargent's talent offered "the slightly 'uncanny' spectacle" of an artist on the threshold of his career who in fact had nothing more to learn. This book explores how the young American painter in just over a decade jumped from apprenticeship to wide acclaim, how he presented himself and his works, and how he sought to shape public perception of his talent. The book includes illustrations of every painting Sargent exhibited in Paris, London, and New York through . Drawing on the correspondence of the artist, his friends, and his family, as well as an extensive review of contemporary critical responses, the text examines these works of Sargent's early maturity -- some unseen in this century and others among his best-known works, including Smoke of Ambergris and Madame X. The authors contend that the canvases present a fresh view of Sargent's aspirations and ambitions, representing a metaphoric self-portrait of the artist as a young man. The early paintings, their relationship to one another, and their reception also shed light on the complex, cosmopolitan art world in which Sargent lived. Uncanny Spectacle accompanies an exhibition of John Singer Sargent's early paintings that will open in June at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Suleiman, Rubin / Suleiman, Susan Rubin, PUBLISHER: University of Nebraska Press, Can you forget the place you once called home? What does it take to make you recapture it? In this moving memoir, Susan Rubin Suleiman describes her returns to the city of her birth--where she speaks the language like a native but with an accent. Suleiman left Budapest in as a young child with her parents, fleeing communism; thirty-five years later, she returned with her two sons from a brief vacation and began to remember her childhood. Her earliest memories, of Nazi persecution in the final year of World War II, came back to her in fragments, as did memories of her first school years after the war of the stormy marriage between her father, a brilliant Talmudic scholar, and her mother, a cosmopolitan woman from a more secular Jewish family. In , after the fall of communism and the death of her mother, Suleiman returned to Budapest for six-month stay. She recounts her ongoing quest for personal history, interweaving it with the stories of present-day Hungarians struggling to make sense of the changes in their individual and collective lives. Suleiman's search for documents relating to her childhood, the lives of her parents and their families, and the Jewish communities of Hungary and Poland takes her on a series of fascinating journeys within and outside Budapest. Emerging from this eloquent, often suspenseful diary is the portrait of an intellectual who recaptures her past and comes into contact with the vital, troubling world of contemporary Eastern Europe. Suleiman's vivid descriptions of her encounters with a proud, old city and its people in a time of historical change remind us that every life story is at once unique and part of a larger history.