A vivid look at the intense emigree art world of Paris between the Wars and two of its most striking figures: Russian Jewish painter Chaim Soutine and his contemporary Marc Chagall
For a couple of decades before World War II, a group of immigrant painters and sculptors, including Amedeo Modigliani, Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine and Jules Pascin dominated the new art scene of Montparnasse in Paris. Art critics gave them the name "the School of Paris" to set them apart from the French-born (and less talented) young artists of the period. Modigliani and Chagall eventually attained enormous worldwide popularity, but in those earlier days most School of Paris painters looked on Soutine as their most talented contemporary. Willem de Kooning proclaimed Soutine his favorite painter, and Jackson Pollack hailed him as a major influence. Soutine arrived in Paris while many painters were experimenting with cubism, but he had no time for trends and fashions; like his art, Soutine was intense, demonic, and fierce. After the defeat of France by Hitler's Germany, the East European Jewish immigrants who had made their way to France for sanctuary were no longer safe. In constant fear of the French police and the German Gestapo, plagued by poor health and bouts of depression, Soutine was the epitome of the tortured artist. Rich in period detail, Stanley Meisler's Shocking Paris explores the short, dramatic life of one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century.
Examines the photojournalism of Heinrich Hoffman, the personal photographer of Adolf Hitler, and the impact Hoffman's photos had on events during the early years of World War II.
The only reporter present at the mythic Paris Tasting of 1976 for the first time introduces the eccentric American winemakers and records the tremendous aftershocks of this historic event that changed forever the world of wine. The Paris Tasting of 1976 will forever be remembered as the landmark event that transformed the wine industry. At this legendary contest—a blind tasting—a panel of top French wine experts shocked the industry by choosing unknown California wines over France’s best. George M. Taber, the only reporter present, recounts this seminal contest and its far-reaching effects, focusing on three gifted unknowns behind the winning wines: a college lecturer, a real estate lawyer, and a Yugoslavian immigrant. With unique access to the main players and a contagious passion for his subject, Taber renders this historic event and its tremendous aftershocks—repositioning the industry and sparking a golden age for viticulture across the globe. With an eclectic cast of characters and magnificent settings, Judgment of Paris is an illuminating tale and a story of the entrepreneurial spirit of the new world conquering the old.
One of The Christian Science Monitor’s Best Nonfiction Books of 2018 “An engrossing read…a historically and psychologically rich account of the young Picasso and his coteries in Barcelona and Paris” (The Washington Post) and how he achieved his breakthrough and revolutionized modern art through his masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. In 1900, eighteen-year-old Pablo Picasso journeyed from Barcelona to Paris, the glittering capital of the art world. For the next several years he endured poverty and neglect before emerging as the leader of a bohemian band of painters, sculptors, and poets. Here he met his first true love and enjoyed his first taste of fame. Decades later Picasso would look back on these years as the happiest of his long life. Recognition came first from the avant-garde, then from daring collectors like Leo and Gertrude Stein. In 1907, Picasso began the vast, disturbing masterpiece known as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Inspired by the painting of Paul Cézanne and the inventions of African and tribal sculpture, Picasso created a work that captured the disorienting experience of modernity itself. The painting proved so shocking that even his friends assumed he’d gone mad, but over the months and years it exerted an ever greater fascination on the most advanced painters and sculptors, ultimately laying the foundation for the most innovative century in the history of art. In Picasso and the Painting That Shocked the World, Miles J. Unger “combines the personal story of Picasso’s early years in Paris—his friendships, his romances, his great ambition, his fears—with the larger story of modernism and the avant-garde” (The Christian Science Monitor). This is the story of an artistic genius with a singular creative gift. It is “riveting…This engrossing book chronicles with precision and enthusiasm a painting with lasting impact in today’s art world” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), all of it played out against the backdrop of the world’s most captivating city.
Drawing upon a vast body of historical scholarship, Casey Harison's Paris in Modern Times provides the first detailed academic history of Paris in the modern age. Chronologically surveying Paris's history from the Old Regime of the late-18th century through to the present day, this book explores the social, economic, political and cultural developments that come together to tell the story of this iconic city. Each chapter has an introduction and illuminating 'sidebars' that touch upon the ways in which Parisian history has intersected with wider changes in France and beyond. The text, which also includes a wealth of images, maps, and a further reading section, takes the opportunity to place Paris and its history in a broader French, Atlantic and global historical context in order to cover an essential aspect of what has been such an important city the world over. Paris in Modern Times is vital reading for anyone seeking to know more about the history of Paris or the history of France since the French Revolution.
Yiddish Paris explores how Yiddish-speaking emigrants from Eastern Europe in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s created a Yiddish diaspora nation in Western Europe and how they presented that nation to themselves and to others in France. In this meticulously researched and first full-length study of interwar Yiddish culture in France, author Nicholas Underwood argues that the emergence of a Yiddish Paris was depended on "culture makers," mostly left-wing Jews from Socialist and Communist backgrounds who created cultural and scholarly organizations and institutions, including the French branch of YIVO (a research institution focused on East European Jews), theater troupes, choruses, and a pavilion at the Paris World's Fair of 1937. Yiddish Paris examines how these left-wing Yiddish-speaking Jews insisted that even in France, a country known for demanding the assimilation of immigrant and minority groups, they could remain a distinct group, part of a transnational Yiddish-speaking Jewish nation. Yet, in the process, they in fact created a French-inflected version of Jewish diaspora nationalism, finding allies among French intellectuals, largely on the left.
Winner of the Association of Dress Historians Book of the Year Award, 2021 In 1939, fashion became an economic and symbolic sphere of great importance in France. Invasive textile legislation, rationing and threats from German and American couturiers were pushing the design and trade of Parisian style to its limits. It is widely accepted that French fashion was severely curtailed as a result, isolated from former foreign clients and deposed of its crown as global queen of fashion. This pioneering book offers a different story. Arguing that Paris retained its hold on the international haute couture industry right throughout WWII, eminent dress historians and curators come together to show that, amid political, economic and cultural traumas, Paris fashion remained very much alive under the Nazi occupation – and on an international level. Bringing exciting perspectives to challenge a familiar story and introducing new overseas trade links out of occupied France, this book takes us from the salons of renowned couturiers such as Edward Molyneux and Robert Piguet, French Vogue and Le Jardin des Modes and luxury Lyon silk factories, to Rio de Janeiro, Denmark and Switzerland, and the great American department stores of New York. Also comparing extravagant Paris occupation styles to austerity fashions of the UK and USA, parallel industrial and design developments highlight the unresolvable tension between luxury fashion and the everyday realities of wartime life. Showing that Paris strove to maintain world dominance as leader of couture through fashion journalism, photography and exported fashion forecasting, Paris Fashion and World War Two makes a significant contribution to the cultural history of fashion.
This book presents a narrative and photographic journey of the hotels and apartments where James Joyce lived for twenty years in 1920s and 1930s Paris. In June 1920, at the age of 38, the Irish author sought a city where he could finish Ulysses—one of the finest literary works in history. He arrived in Paris on the recommendation of Ezra Pound on 8 July and stayed for 20 years. With Nora, fifteen-year-old Giorgio and thirteen-year-old Lucia, he moved in and out of 18 residences in five arrondissements in Paris. Which arrondissements did he prefer? Which residence was the first place with the luxury of a telephone? Who did he entertain, and where was he most productive and creative? This book is both a guide for the armchair wanderer and a roadmap for Joyce aficionados in Paris. It provides new insights into Joyce’s life in Paris, based around the changing locations, styles, and sizes of his residences, depending upon the fluctuations of his finances. This book is a rich collection of information about each residence with an historical account of the duration, cost, lifestyle, and cultural atmosphere amid the significance of the social times.
This book turns a compelling new lens on thinking about the history of Paris and photography. The invention of photography changed how history could be written. But the now commonplace assumptions--that photographs capture fragments of lost time or present emotional gateways to the past--that structure today's understandings did not emerge whole cloth in 1839. Focusing on one of photography's birthplaces, Paris and the Cliché of History tells the story of how photographs came to be imagined as documents of the past. Author Catherine E. Clark analyzes photography's effects on historical interpretation by examining the formation of Paris's first photo archives at the Musée Carnavalet and the city's municipal library, their use in illustrated history books and historical exhibitions and reconstructions such as the 1951 celebration of Paris's 2000th birthday, and the public's contribution to the historical record in amateur photo contests. Despite the photograph's growing importance in these forums, it did not simply replace older forms of illustration, visual documentation, or written text. Photos worked in complex and shifting relation to other types of pictures as photographers, popular historians, and publishers built on the traditions and iconography of painting and engraving in order to both document the past scientifically and objectively and to reconstruct it romantically. In doing so, they not only influenced how Parisians thought about the city's past and how they pictured it; they also ensured that these images shaped how Parisians lived their own lives--especially in deeply charged moments such as the Liberation after World War II. This history of picturing Paris does not simply reflect the city's history: it is Parisian history.