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Plunged into a strange land at twenty-five, Benjamin Moser began an obsessive, decades-long study of the Dutch Masters to set his world right again. Arriving as a young writer in an ancient Dutch town, Benjamin Moser found himself visiting—casually at first, and then more and more obsessively—the country’s great museums. Inside these old buildings, he discovered the remains of the Dutch Golden Age and began to unearth the strange, inspiring, and terrifying stories of the artists who gave shape to one of the most luminous moments in the history of human creativity. Beyond the sainted Rembrandt—who harbored a startling darkness—and the mysterious Vermeer, whose true subject, it turned out, was lurking in plain sight, Moser got to know a whole galaxy of geniuses: the doomed virtuoso Carel Fabritius, the anguished wunderkind Jan Lievens, the deaf prodigy Hendrik Avercamp. And through their artwork, he got to know their country, too: from the translucent churches of Pieter Saenredam to Paulus Potter’s muddy barnyards, and from Pieter de Hooch’s cozy hearths to Jacob van Ruisdael’s tragic trees. Year after year, as he tried to make a life for himself in the Netherlands, Moser found friends among these centuries-dead artists. And he found that they, too, were struggling with the same questions that he was. Why do we make art? What even is art, anyway—and what is an artist? What does it mean to succeed as an artist, and what does it mean to fail? Is art a consolation—or a mortal danger? The Upside-Down World is an invitation to ask these questions, and to turn them on their heads: to look, and then to look again. This is Holland and its great artists as we’ve never seen them before. And it’s a sumptuously illustrated, highly personal coming-of-age-story, twenty years in the making: a revealing self-portrait by one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation.
"A must-have book for anyone interested in Dutch masters and the Dutch Golden Age." – Timeless Travel Magazine Today we marvel at the shimmering light, the detail and hidden significances within the subtle techniques of Vermeer, Rembrandt, Van Eyck, Frans Hals and their compatriots. The luminescent art of the Dutch Masters grew from the bounding confidence of the newly independent Netherlands in the early 1600s. Shed of religious conflict it encouraged a wealthy mercantile class that sought the oceans of the world in search of riches and influence, and a new sensibility in art that cast light across the actions and objects of daily life. The Dutch Masters are characterized by the abandonment of religious patronage, allowing, for the first time, a relentless focus on everyday subjects: the taverns, breakfast tables and living rooms of the newly wealthy and the places they loved to visit. This wonderful new book, also highlighting the work of the pioneering Rachel Ruysch, is the latest addition to Flame Tree’s highly successful Masterworks series.
For Rembrandt, as for Shakespeare, all the world was indeed a stage, and he knew in exhaustive detail the tactics of its performance: the strutting and mincing, the wardrobe and face-paint, the full repertoire and gesture and gimace, the flutter of hands and the roll of the eyes, the belly-laugh and the half-stifled sob. He knew what it looked like to seduce, to intimidate, to wheedle and to console; to strike a pose or preach a sermon, to shake a fist or uncover a breast; and how to sin and how to atone. No artist had ever been so fascinated by the fashioning of personae, beginning with his own. No painter ever looked with such unsparing intelligence or such bottomless compassion at our entrances and our exits and the whole rowdy show in between.
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS' PICK “Thrilling . . . [told] with gonzo élan . . . When the sommelier and blogger Madeline Puckette writes that this book is the Kitchen Confidential of the wine world, she’s not wrong, though Bill Buford’s Heat is probably a shade closer.” —Jennifer Senior, The New York Times Professional journalist and amateur drinker Bianca Bosker didn’t know much about wine—until she discovered an alternate universe where taste reigns supreme, a world of elite sommeliers who dedicate their lives to the pursuit of flavor. Astounded by their fervor and seemingly superhuman sensory powers, she set out to uncover what drove their obsession, and whether she, too, could become a “cork dork.” With boundless curiosity, humor, and a healthy dose of skepticism, Bosker takes the reader inside underground tasting groups, exclusive New York City restaurants, California mass-market wine factories, and even a neuroscientist’s fMRI machine as she attempts to answer the most nagging question of all: what’s the big deal about wine? What she learns will change the way you drink wine—and, perhaps, the way you live—forever. “Think: Eat, Pray, Love meets Somm.” —theSkimm “As informative as it is, well, intoxicating.” —Fortune
Realist novels are celebrated for their detailed attention to ordinary life. But two hundred years before the rise of literary realism, Dutch painters had already made an art of the everyday--pictures that served as a compelling model for the novelists who followed. By the mid-1800s, seventeenth-century Dutch painting figured virtually everywhere in the British and French fiction we esteem today as the vanguard of realism. Why were such writers drawn to this art of two centuries before? What does this tell us about the nature of realism? In this beautifully illustrated and elegantly written book, Ruth Yeazell explores the nineteenth century's fascination with Dutch painting, as well as its doubts about an art that had long challenged traditional values. After showing how persistent tensions between high theory and low genre shaped criticism of novels and pictures alike, Art of the Everyday turns to four major novelists--Honoré de Balzac, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Marcel Proust--who strongly identified their work with Dutch painting. For all these writers, Dutch art provided a model for training themselves to look closely at the particulars of middle-class life. Yet even as nineteenth-century novelists strove to create illusions of the real by modeling their narratives on Dutch pictures, Yeazell argues, they chafed at the model. A concluding chapter on Proust explains why the nineteenth century associated such realism with the past and shows how the rediscovery of Vermeer helped resolve the longstanding conflict between humble details and the aspirations of high art.
Biographies of the main artists and a thematic gallery of the greatest paintings of the period, in one sumptuously illustrated volume.
In this book Michael North examines the Dutch Golden Age, when the Netherlands boasted Europe's greatest number of cities & its highest literacy rate, with unusually large numbers of publicly & privately owned art works, religious tolerance, etc.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award Finalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Named one of the Best Books of the Year by: O Magazine, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Seattle Times The definitive portrait of one of the American Century’s most towering intellectuals: her writing and her radical thought, her public activism and her hidden private face No writer is as emblematic of the American twentieth century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture. She was there when the Cuban Revolution began, and when the Berlin Wall came down; in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel, in besieged Sarajevo. She was in New York when artists tried to resist the tug of money—and when many gave in. No writer negotiated as many worlds; no serious writer had as many glamorous lovers. Sontag tells these stories and examines the work upon which her reputation was based. It explores the agonizing insecurity behind the formidable public face: the broken relationships, the struggles with her sexuality, that animated—and undermined—her writing. And it shows her attempts to respond to the cruelties and absurdities of a country that had lost its way, and her conviction that fidelity to high culture was an activism of its own. Utilizing hundreds of interviews conducted from Maui to Stockholm and from London to Sarajevo—and featuring nearly one hundred images—Sontag is the first book based on the writer’s restricted archives, and on access to many people who have never before spoken about Sontag, including Annie Leibovitz. It is a definitive portrait—a great American novel in the form of a biography.
A powerful history of Jewish art collectors in France, and how an embrace of art and beauty was met with hatred and destruction In the dramatic years between 1870 and the end of World War II, a number of prominent French Jews—pillars of an embattled community—invested their fortunes in France’s cultural artifacts, sacrificed their sons to the country’s army, and were ultimately rewarded by seeing their collections plundered and their families deported to Nazi concentration camps. In this rich, evocative account, James McAuley explores the central role that art and material culture played in the assimilation and identity of French Jews in the fin-de-siècle. Weaving together narratives of various figures, some familiar from the works of Marcel Proust and the diaries of Jules and Edmond Goncourt—the Camondos, the Rothschilds, the Ephrussis, the Cahens d'Anvers—McAuley shows how Jewish art collectors contended with a powerful strain of anti-Semitism: they were often accused of “invading” France’s cultural patrimony. The collections these families left behind—many ultimately donated to the French state—were their response, tragic attempts to celebrate a nation that later betrayed them.