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Context and Content: The Memoir of a Fortunate Architect
By A. J. Diamond. 2022
A deeply personal memoir from one of Canada’s most celebrated architects.In this personal account of A.J. Diamond’s life and work,…
he shares how he came to be the founder of the leading architecture firm Diamond Schmitt, one of Canada’s most successful architecture companies. He also explains his principles of design, which at their core are about making a positive impact in the world, considering the needs of the content, client, and context. Diamond gives insight into his design principles in relation to some of his most notable projects, including the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto, la Maison symphonique de Montréal, the Mariinsky II Theatre in Saint Petersburg, and the new city hall in Jerusalem. Diamond also chronicles his family ancestry, his childhood in South Africa, from his birth in his grandfather’s study in the small provincial town of Piet Retief on the borders of Eswatini (Swaziland) and Mozambique, to his university days at the University of Cape Town and Oxford — where he played rugby at the international level, scoring two winning tries for the Oxford Blues against Australia — and the University of Pennsylvania. His memoir traces his immigration to the U.S. and, eventually, Canada as well as his growing architectural practice in Toronto, where he focused on the issues facing his chosen city.
Guston in Time: Remembering Philip Guston
By Ross Feld. 2003
In this warm and vibrant work of memoir and criticism, a young writer forges a friendship with Philip Guston, one of…
the most influential and controversial painters of the twentieth century.The late work of Philip Guston has had a profound influence on painters today, but as Guston&’s star has risen, it has been forgotten how scandalous these paintings, with their cartoonish imagery and almost fumbling application of paint, were initially deemed to be. The 1970 show at the Marlborough Gallery in which Guston, abandoning the delicate abstract expressionism for which he was known, revealed his new style, was critically savaged. In the aftermath of this drubbing, he retreated to his studio in Woodstock, New York—in part to nurse his wounds but, more important, to go on painting exactly as he saw fit.Ross Feld, a young poet, novelist, and critic, was one of the rare critics to respond favorably to Guston&’s late work. Guston answered with a grateful note, and a new friendship was soon born. Guston in Time, written not long before Feld&’s early death from cancer, is a portrait of Guston the man; and of his wife, Musa, a major figure not only in his life but in his work; a reckoning with his supremely individual achievement as an artist; and a work of art in its own right.A retrospective of Guston&’s work, Philip Guston Now, will be on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from May 1 to September 11, 2022; at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, from October 23, 2022, to January 15, 2023; at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., from February 26 to August 27, 2023; and at the Tate Modern, London, from October 3, 2023 to February 4, 2024.
Max Factor: The Man Who Changed the Faces of the World
By Fred E. Basten. 2011
Nice women never wore makeup. Even the word was taboo in polite society--until Max Factor entered the scene. Born in…
Poland in 1877, Factor worked as a beautician for the Russian royal family, the Romanovs. In 1904, he fled to America, where he opened a cosmetics store in Los Angeles. Creating makeup originally for silent films, then the talkies, and, ultimately, color motion pictures, Factor designed looks for Katharine Hepburn, Rita Hayworth, Bette Davis, and countless other beauties of the day. Soon women everywhere wanted to look like their favorite glamorous stars, and Factor was there to help, bringing his innovative cosmetics to the general public. He revolutionized the world of beauty by producing many firsts: false eyelashes, lip gloss, foundation, eye shadow, the eyebrow pencil, concealer, wand-applicator mascara, and water-resistant makeup. A true innovator, he also introduced the concept of color harmony and the celebrity-endorsed cosmetics advertising that forms the glamorous backbone of the modern industry. Max Factor was the father of modern makeup. This is his extraordinary story.
Frank and Charli: Woodstock, True Love, and the Sixties
By Frank Yandolino. 2016
Stories of Remarkable People and Enduring Love in the Time of Woodstock In the 1960s and '70s, Frank Yandolino rode…
the hippie counterculture movement alongside visionaries like Artie Kornfeld and Michael Lang, and he helped put together the Woodstock Festival of 1969, the era’s emblem of love and peace. From then on (and even before that), Yandolino, a beguiling fast-talker, charmer, and gifted storyteller, took charge of his life according to those ideals, grabbing and embracing all opportunities that were thrown his way. This memoir is an account of his life as a hippie, art director, entrepreneur, manager, and screenwriter (as well as various other hats he wore in the creative industry)—representing musicians like Joe Cocker and Paul Butterfield, art directing at Penthouse magazine, designing "erotic sheets,” writing a screenplay about Marilyn Monroe and her seamstress Lena Pepitone, among other things. With his gung-ho attitude and fortuitous connections, Yandolino befriended Salvador Dali, hung out with Jimi Hendrix, ran with Abbie Hoffman, was kidnapped by a festival security detail in Paris, mixed with models and Penthouse pets, and watched secret Hells Angels initiation ceremonies. Throughout it all, Yandolino’s key message is his "free bird” philosophy of grabbing every chance you can and staying true to one’s artistic individuality. And, in the end, despite his fast life, he was always grounded by his love for his wife, Charli.
Nights in Tents: On the Front Lines of the Occupy Movement
By Laura Love. 2016
From an acclaimed musician comes an inside look at one of the most controversial and influential civil rights movements of…
our time.Nights in Tents is a memoir of the profoundly moving, and often hysterical, circumstances a fifty-one-year-old middle-class musician encountered when she abandoned a pleasantly predictable life on her pastoral, off-grid home nestled in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State to run off with the Occupy Movement.Internationally recognized singer/songwriter, Laura Love, put her music career on hold for a year to live in the chaotic tent encampments from Wall Street to Oakland. Traveling through the United States, Laura was immersed in the electrifying political culture of Occupy. She pitched her tent on city center concrete plazas; she helped shut down the Port of Oakland; she took over a Bank of America in San Francisco and was teargassed, arrested, and jailed for her trouble. All the while, she formed close bonds with the disparate characters who make up the 99 percent.Love's insight into the importance of this moment in history, as well as her surprising predictions about the next phase, promise to inspire and enlighten. This lively, engaging account takes the reader on a journey that will captivate fans of political humor, women's interests, African American perspectives, LGBT stories, as well as fans of narrative nonfiction and the memoir in general.Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
Michelangelo’s developing genius is revealed as never before by the man who became Michelangelo’s last apprentice— an American artist and…
art historian whose family helped carve Mount Rushmore. Many believe Michelangelo's talent was miraculous and untrained, the product of “divine” genius—a myth that Michelangelo himself promoted by way of cementing his legacy. But the young Michelangelo studied his craft like any Renaissance apprentice, learning from a master, copying, and experimenting with materials and styles. In this extraordinary book, Alan Pascuzzi recounts the young Michelangelo’s journey from student to master, using the artist’s drawings to chart his progress and offering unique insight into the true nature of his mastery. Pascuzzi himself is today a practicing artist in Florence, Michelangelo’s city. When he was a grad student in art history, he won a Fulbright to “apprentice” himself to Michelangelo: to study his extant drawings and copy them to discern his progression in technique, composition, and mastery of anatomy. Pascuzzi also relied on the Renaissance treatise that “Il Divino” himself would have been familiar with, Cennino Cennini's The Craftsman’s Handbook (1399), which was available to apprentices as a kind of textbook of the period. Pascuzzi’s narrative traces Michelangelo’s development as an artist during the period from roughly 1485, the start of his apprenticeship, to his completion of the Sistine Chapel ceiling in 1512. Analyzing Michelangelo’s burgeoning abilities through copies he himself executed in museums and galleries in Florence and elsewhere, Pascuzzi unlocks the transformation that made him great. At the same time, he narrates his own transformation from student to artist as Michelangelo’s last apprentice.
Maharishi & Me: Seeking Enlightenment with the Beatles' Guru
By Susan Shumsky. 2018
Susan Shumsky is a successful author in the human potential field. But in the 1970s, in India, the Swiss Alps,…
and elsewhere, she served on the personal staff of the most famous guru of the 20th century—Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Maharishi died in 2008 at age ninety, but his influence endures through the spiritual movement he founded: TM (Transcendental Meditation). Other books have been written about him, but this spellbinding page-turner offers a rare insider's view of life with the guru, including the time the Beatles studied at his feet in Rishikesh, India, and wrote dozens of songs under his influence. Both inspirational and disturbing, Maharishi and Me illuminates Susan's two decades living in Maharishi's ashrams, where she grew from a painfully shy teenage seeker into a spiritually aware teacher and author. It features behind-the-scenes, myth-busting stories, and over 100 photos of Maharishi and his celebrity disciples (the Beatles, Deepak Chopra, Mia Farrow, Beach Boys, and many more). Susan's candid, honest portrayal draws back the curtain on her shattering, extreme emotional seesaws of heaven and hell at her guru's hands. This compelling, haunting memoir will continue to challenge readers long after they turn its last page. It dismantles all previous beliefs about the spiritual path and how spiritual masters are supposed to behave. Susan shares: “Merely by being in his presence, we disciples entered an utterly timeless place and rapturous feeling, and, at the same time, realized the utter futility and insanity of the mundane world.” Susan's heartfelt masterwork blends her experiences, exacting research, artistically descriptive and humorous writing, emotional intelligence, and intensely personal inner exploration into a feast for thought and contemplation. Neither starry-eyed nor antagonistic, it captures, from a balanced viewpoint, the essence of life in an ashram.
Tom Thomson was Canada's Vincent van Gogh. He painted for a period of five years before meeting his untimely death…
in a remote wilderness lake in July 1917. He was buried in an unofficial grave close to the lake where his body was found. About eight hours after he was buried, the coroner arrived but never examined the body and ruled his death accidental due to drowning. A day and a half later, Thomson's family hired an undertaker to exhume the body and move it to the family plot about 100 miles away. This undertaker refused all help, and only worked at night. In 1956, John Little's father and three other men, influenced by the story of an old park ranger who never believed Thomson's body was moved by the undertaker, dug up what was supposed to be the original, empty grave. To their surprise, the grave still contained a body, and the skull revealed a head wound that matched the same location noted by the men who pulled his corpse from the water in 1917. The finding sent shockwaves across the nation and began a mystery that continues to this day. In Who Killed Tom Thomson? John Little continues the sixty-year relationship his family has had with Tom Thomson and his fate by teaming up with two high-ranking Ontario provincial police homicide detectives. For the first time, they provide a forensic scientific opinion as to how Thomson met his death, and where his body is buried. Little draws upon his father's research, plus recently released archival material, as well as his own thirty-year investigation. He and his colleagues prove that Thomson was murdered, and set forth two persons of interest who may have killed Tom Thomson.
A Rift in the Earth: Art, Memory, and the Fight for a Vietnam War Memorial
By James Reston Jr.. 2017
A Distinguished and Bestselling Historian and Army Veteran Revisits the Culture War that Raged around the Selection of Maya Lin's…
Design for the Vietnam Memorial A Rift in the Earth tells the remarkable story of the ferocious “art war” that raged between 1979 and 1984 over what kind of memorial should be built to honor the men and women who died in the Vietnam War. The story intertwines art, politics, historical memory, patriotism, racism, and a fascinating set of characters, from those who fought in the conflict and those who resisted it to politicians at the highest level. At its center are two enduring figures: Maya Lin, a young, Asian-American architecture student at Yale whose abstract design won the international competition but triggered a fierce backlash among powerful figures; and Frederick Hart, an innovative sculptor of humble origins on the cusp of stardom. James Reston, Jr., a veteran who lost a close friend in the war and has written incisively about the conflict's bitter aftermath, explores how the debate reignited passions around Vietnam long after the war’s end and raised questions about how best to honor those who fought and sacrificed in an ill-advised war. Richly illustrated with photographs from the era and design entries from the memorial competition, A Rift in the Earth is timed to appear alongside Ken Burns's eagerly anticipated PBS documentary, The Vietnam War. “The memorial appears as a rift in the earth, a long polished black stone wall, emerging from and receding into the earth."—Maya Lin "I see the wall as a kind of ocean, a sea of sacrifice. . . . I place these figures upon the shore of that sea." —Frederick Hart
Raphael, Painter in Rome: A Novel
By Stephanie Storey. 2020
Another Fabulous Art History Thriller by the Bestselling Author of Oil and Marble, Featuring the Master of Renaissance Perfection: Raphael!…
Michelangelo&’s Sistine Chapel ceiling is one of the most iconic masterpieces of the Renaissance. Here, in Raphael, Painter in Rome, Storey tells of its creation as never before: through the eyes of Michelangelo&’s fiercest rival—the young, beautiful, brilliant painter of perfection, Raphael. Orphaned at age eleven, Raphael is determined to keep the deathbed promise he made to his father: become the greatest artist in history. But to be the best, he must beat the best, the legendary sculptor of the David, Michelangelo Buonarroti. When Pope Julius II calls both artists down to Rome, they are pitted against each other: Michelangelo painting the Sistine Ceiling, while Raphael decorates the pope's private apartments. As Raphael strives toward perfection in paint, he battles internal demons: his desperate ambition, crippling fear of imperfection, and unshakable loneliness. Along the way, he conspires with cardinals, scrambles through the ruins of ancient Rome, and falls in love with a baker&’s-daughter-turned-prostitute who becomes his muse. With its gorgeous writing, rich settings, endearing characters, and riveting plot, Raphael, Painter in Rome brings to vivid life these two Renaissance masters going head to head in the deadly halls of the Vatican.
Black Broadway in Washington, DC (American Heritage)
By Briana A. Thomas. 2021
Before chain coffeeshops and luxury high-rises, before even the beginning of desegregation and the 1968 riots, Washington's Greater U Street…
was known as Black Broadway. From the early 1900s into the 1950s, African Americans plagued by Jim Crow laws in other parts of town were free to own businesses here and built what was often described as a "city within a city." Local author and journalist Briana A. Thomas narrates U Street's rich and unique history, from the early triumph of emancipation to the days of civil rights pioneer Mary Church Terrell and music giant Duke Ellington, through the recent struggles of gentrification.
Boy in a China Shop: Life, Clay and Everything
By Keith Brymer Jones. 2022
The star presenter and judge of Channel 4's The Great Pottery Throw Down looks back on his life and career…
- and the passion for ceramics that started it all.Keith Brymer Jones is the star presenter and judge of Channel 4's The Great Pottery Throw Down famous for his emotional responses to the heartfelt and personal pieces made by contestants on the show. He is also the ultimate professional craftsman who's done the hard yards to get where he is today, working his way up from being a skivvy in an industrial pottery to running his own hugely successful international ceramics business. Here, in his first ever memoir, Keith tells the story of his life and inspiring rise to success through the objects and images that have been meaningful to him every step of the way, as he recounts key moments and events as well as the people and places that have shaped him. From his childhood and early devotion to dance to discovering clay at the age of eleven, to his tough apprenticeship at Harefield Pottery and struggles to establish his own business, this memoir goes beyond the TV show to offer us a rare insight into Keith's own philosophy and outlook on life.(P)2022 Hodder & Stoughton Limited
William Blake vs. the World
By John Higgs. 2022
A wild and unexpected journey through culture, science, philosophy and religion to better understand the mercurial genius of William Blake.Poet,…
artist, and visionary, William Blake is an archetypal misunderstood genius. His life passed without recognition and he worked without reward, often mocked, dismissed and misinterpreted. Yet from his ignoble end in a pauper's grave, Blake now occupies a unique position as an artist who unites and attracts people from all corners of society—a rare inclusive symbol of human identity. Blake famously experienced visions, and it is these that shaped his attitude to politics, sex, religion, society, and art. Thanks to the work of neuroscientists and psychologists, we are now in a better position to understand what was happening inside that remarkable mind and gain a deeper appreciation of his brilliance. His timeless work, we will find, has never been more relevant. In William Blake vs the World we return to a world of riots, revolutions, and radicals; discuss movements from the Levellers of the sixteenth century to the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s; and explore the latest discoveries in neurobiology, quantum physics, and comparative religion. Taking the reader on a wild adventure into unfamiliar territory, John Higgs places the bewildering eccentricities of a most singular artist into fascinating context. And although the journey begins with us trying to understand him, we will ultimately discover that it is Blake who helps us to understand ourselves.
The stylish, wild story of the marriage of Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward—a tale of love, art, Hollywood, and heartbreak…
“Those years in the sixties when I was married to Dennis were the most wonderful and awful of my life.” —Brooke HaywardLos Angeles in the 1960s: riots in Watts and on the Sunset Strip, wild weekends in Malibu, late nights at The Daisy discotheque, openings at the Ferus Gallery, and the convergence of pop art, rock and roll, and the New Hollywood. At the center of it all, one inspired, improbable, and highly combustible couple—Dennis Hopper and Brooke Hayward—lived out the emblematic love story of ’60s L.A.The home these two glamorous young actors created for themselves and their family at 1712 North Crescent Heights Boulevard in the Hollywood Hills became the era’s unofficial living room, a kaleidoscopic realm—“furnished like an amusement park,” Andy Warhol said—that made an impact on anyone who ever stepped into it. Hopper and Hayward, vanguard collectors of contemporary art, packed the place with pop masterpieces by the likes of Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha, and Warhol, and welcomed a who’s who of visitors, from Jane Fonda to Jasper Johns, Joan Didion to Tina Turner, Hells Angels to Black Panthers. In this house, everything that defined the 1960s went down: the fun, the decadence, the radical politics, and, ultimately, the danger and instability that Hopper explored in the project that made his career, became the cinematic symbol of the period, and blew their union apart—Easy Rider.Everybody Thought We Were Crazy is at once a fascinating account of the Hopper and Hayward union and a deeply researched, panoramic cultural history. It’s the intimate saga of one couple whose own rise and fall—from youthful creative flowering to disorder and chaos—mirrors the very shape of the decade.
Winslow Homer: American Passage
By William R. Cross. 1877
The definitive life of the painter who forged American identity visually, in art and illustration, with an impact comparable to…
that of Walt Whitman and Mark Twain in poetry and prose—yet whose own story has remained largely untold.In 1860, at the age of twenty-four, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) sold Harper’s Weekly two dozen wood engravings, carved into boxwood blocks and transferred to metal plates to stamp on paper. One was a scene that Homer saw on a visit to Boston, his hometown. His illustration shows a crowd of abolitionists on the brink of eviction from a church; at their front is Frederick Douglass, declaring “the freedom of all mankind.”Homer, born into the Panic of 1837 and raised in the years before the Civil War, came of age in a nation in crisis. He created multivalent visual tales, both quintessentially American and quietly replete with narrative for and about people of all races and ages. Whether using pencil, watercolor, or, most famously, oil, Homer addressed the hopes and fears of his fellow Americans and invited his viewers into stories embedded with universal, timeless questions of purpose and meaning.Like his contemporaries Twain and Whitman, Homer captured the landscape of a rapidly changing country with an artist’s probing insight. His tale is one of America in all its complexity and contradiction, as he evolved and adapted to the restless spirit of invention transforming his world. In Winslow Homer: American Passage, William R. Cross reveals the man behind the art. It is the surprising story of a life led on the front lines of history. In that life, this Everyman made archetypal images of American culture, endowed with a force of moral urgency through which they speak to all people today.Includes Color Images and Maps
Journey to the Maghreb and Andalusia, 1832: The Travel Notebooks and Other Writings
By Eugène Delacroix. 2019
In 1832, Eugène Delacroix accompanied a French diplomatic mission to Morocco, the first leg of a journey through the Maghreb…
and Andalusia that left an indelible impression on the painter. This comprehensive, annotated English-language translation of his notes and essays about this formative trip makes available a classic example of travel writing about the "Orient" from the era and provides a unique picture of the region against the backdrop of the French conquest of Algeria.Delacroix’s travels in Morocco, Algeria, and southern Spain led him to discover a culture about which he had held only imperfect and stereotypical ideas and provided a rich store of images that fed his imagination forever after. He wrote extensively about these experiences in several stunningly beautiful notebooks, noting the places he visited, routes he followed, scenes he observed, and people he encountered. Later, Delacroix wrote two articles about the trip, "A Jewish Wedding in Morocco" and the recently discovered "Memories of a Visit to Morocco," in which he shared these extraordinary experiences, revealing how deeply influential the trip was to his art and career. Never before translated into English, Journey to the Maghreb and Andalusia, 1832 includes Delacroix’s two articles, four previously known travel notebooks, fragments of two additional, recently discovered notebooks, and numerous notes and drafts. Michèle Hannoosh supplements these with an insightful introduction, full critical notes, appendices, and biographies, creating an essential volume for scholars and readers interested in Delacroix, French art history, Northern Africa, and nineteenth-century travel and culture.
Chaim Potok: Confronting Modernity Through the Lens of Tradition
By Daniel Walden. 2013
Chaim Potok was a world-class writer and scholar, a Conservative Jew who wrote from and about his tradition and the…
conflicts between observance and acculturation. With a plain, straightforward style, his novels were set against the moral, spiritual, and intellectual currents of the twentieth century. This collection aims to widen the lens through which we read Chaim Potok and to establish him as an authentic American writer who created unforgettable characters forging American identities for themselves while retaining their Jewish nature. The essays illuminate the central struggle in Potok’s novels, which results from a profound desire to reconcile the appeal of modernity with the pull of traditional Judaism. The volume includes a memoir by Adena Potok and ends with Chaim Potok’s “My Life as a Writer,” a speech he gave at Penn State in 1982.Aside from the editor, the contributors are Victoria Aarons, Nathan P. Devir, Jane Eisner, Susanne Klingenstein, S. Lillian Kremer, Jessica Lang, Sanford E. Marovitz, Kathryn McClymond, Hugh Nissenson, Adena Potok, and Jonathan Rosen.
Letters to Gwen John
By Celia Paul. 2022
With original artworks throughout, an extraordinary fusion of memoir and artistic biography from the acclaimed artist and author of Self-Portrait.Dearest…
Gwen, I know this letter to you is an artifice. I know you are dead and that I&’m alive and that no usual communication is possible between us but, as my mother used to say, &“Time is a strange substance&” and who knows really, with our time-bound comprehension of the world, whether there might be some channel by which we can speak to each other, if we only knew how.Celia Paul&’s Letters to Gwen John centers on a series of letters addressed to the Welsh painter Gwen John (1876–1939), who has long been a tutelary spirit for Paul. John spent much of her life in France, making art on her own terms and, like Paul, painting mostly women. John&’s reputation was overshadowed during her lifetime by her brother, Augustus John, and her lover Auguste Rodin. Through the epistolary form, Paul draws fruitful comparisons between John&’s life and her own: their shared resolve to protect the sources of their creativity, their fierce commitment to painting, and the ways in which their associations with older male artists affected the public&’s reception of their work.Letters to Gwen John is at once an intimate correspondence, an illuminating portrait of two painters (including full-color plates of both artists&’ work), and a writer/artist&’s daybook, describing Paul&’s first exhibitions in America, her search for new forms, her husband&’s diagnosis of cancer, and the onset of the global pandemic. Paul, who first revealed her talents as a writer with her memoir, Self-Portrait, enters with courage and resolve into new unguarded territory—the artist at present—and the work required to make art out of the turbulence of life.
Goya: A Portrait of the Artist
By Janis Tomlinson. 2020
The first major English-language biography of Francisco Goya y Lucientes, who ushered in the modern eraThe life of Francisco Goya…
(1746–1828) coincided with an age of transformation in Spanish history that brought upheavals in the country's politics and at the court which Goya served, changes in society, the devastation of the Iberian Peninsula in the war against Napoleon, and an ensuing period of political instability. In this revelatory biography, Janis Tomlinson draws on a wide range of documents—including letters, court papers, and a sketchbook used by Goya in the early years of his career—to provide a nuanced portrait of a complex and multifaceted painter and printmaker, whose art is synonymous with compelling images of the people, events, and social revolution that defined his life and era.Tomlinson challenges the popular image of the artist as an isolated figure obsessed with darkness and death, showing how Goya's likeability and ambition contributed to his success at court, and offering new perspectives on his youth, rich family life, extensive travels, and lifelong friendships. She explores the full breadth of his imagery—from scenes inspired by life in Madrid to visions of worlds without reason, from royal portraits to the atrocities of war. She sheds light on the artist's personal trials, including the deaths of six children and the onset of deafness in middle age, but also reconsiders the conventional interpretation of Goya's late years as a period of disillusion, viewing them instead as years of liberated artistic invention, most famously in the murals on the walls of his country house, popularly known as the "black" paintings.A monumental achievement, Goya: A Portrait of the Artist is the definitive biography of an artist whose faith in his art and his genius inspired paintings, drawings, prints, and frescoes that continue to captivate, challenge, and surprise us two centuries later.
Caveat Emptor: The Secret Life of an American Art Forger
By Ken Perenyi. 2012
It is said that the greatest art forger in the world is the one who has never been caught. Caveat…
Emptor reveals the astonishing story of America&’s most accomplished art forger.Ten years ago, an FBI investigation in conjunction with the U.S. Attorney&’s Office in the Southern District of New York was about to expose a scandal in the art world that would have been front-page news in New York and London. After a trail of fake paintings of astonishing quality led federal agents to art dealers, renowned experts, and the major auction houses, the investigation inexplicably ended, despite an abundance of evidence collected. The case was closed and the FBI file was marked &“exempt from public disclosure.&” Now that the statute of limitations on these crimes has expired and the case appears hermetically sealed shut by the FBI, this book, Caveat Emptor, is Ken Perenyi&’s confession. It is the story, in detail, of how he pulled it all off. Glamorous stories of art-world scandal have always captured the public imagination. However, not since Clifford Irving&’s 1969 bestselling Fake has there been a story at all like this one. Caveat Emptor is unique in that it is the first and only book by and about America&’s first and only great art forger. And unlike other forgers, Perenyi produced no paper trail, no fake provenance whatsoever; he let the paintings speak for themselves. And that they did, routinely mesmerizing the experts in mere seconds. In the tradition of Frank Abagnale&’s Catch Me If You Can, and certain to be a bombshell for the major international auction houses and galleries, here is the story of America&’s greatest art forger.