I Am the Most Interesting Book of All
I Am the Most Interesting Book of All

Author: Marie Bashkirtseff

Publisher: Chronicle Books (CA)

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 486

ISBN-13:

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Marie Bashkirtseff's diary is one of the great journals of all time: a Russian girl, transplanted to France, begins a little diary at the age of fourteen. Eleven years later, upon her death, she has written thousands and thousands of pages, creating an obsessively detailed monument to her own life. "...because I hope that I will be read...I am absolutely sincere. If this hook is not the exact, absolute, strict truth, it has no reason to be". But Bashkirtseff was betrayed by her own family. The diary, published posthumously in 1887, was expurgated, sanitized, and denuded. Marie's mother made sure that none of her daughter's more radical opinions - and more importantly, their strange family history - appeared in the diary's pages. Even so, it was hailed as the true portrait of a woman by the French press, and Bashkirtseff was alternately canonized as a misunderstood genius and damned as a self-absorbed misfit. Now, in this new translation, Phyllis Howard Kernberger has returned to the original text - Marie's notebooks, held in the Bibliotheque Nationale. Her scrupulous, decades-long research has unearthed the true self-portrait that Marie Bashkirtseff hoped to reveal. Marie was enraptured with her own beauty, enraged by the constraints of society (especially for women), and determined to achieve success and fame at any cost, and her diary is a vivid portrait of a free-thinking woman born before her time. Working straight from the source, Kernberger has revived the honest image of Marie - in a seductively funny, warmly personal, and thoroughly mesmerizing account of a life lived to its fullest.

Women Artists in Paris, 1850-1900
Women Artists in Paris, 1850-1900

Author: Laurence Madeline

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2017-01-01

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0300223935

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Paris was the epicenter of art during the latter half of the nineteenth century, luring artists from around the world with its academies, museums, salons, and galleries. Despite the city's cosmopolitanism and its cultural stature, Parisian society remained strikingly conservative, particularly with respect to gender. Nonetheless, many women painters chose to work and study in Paris at this time, overcoming immense obstacles to access the city's resources. 'Women Artists in Paris, 1850-1900' showcases the remarkable artistic production of women during this period of great cultural change, revealing the breadth and strength of their creative achievements. Guest Curator Laurence Madeline (Chief Curator at Musées d'art et d'histoire, Geneva) has selected close to seventy compelling paintings by women of varied nationalities, ranging from well-known artists such as Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, and Rosa Bonheur, to lesser-known figures such as Kitty Kielland, Louise Breslau, and Anna Ancher.

Overcoming All Obstacles
Overcoming All Obstacles

Author: Jane R. Becker

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 184

ISBN-13: 9780813527567

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Overcoming All Obstacles: The Women of the Académie Julian is the first book to examine late nineteenth-century Paris's most famous training ground for the leading women artists of the period. The Académie Julian was founded in Paris in 1868, initially to prepare students for entry to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the nineteenth-century's preeminent art school. Because women could not study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts until 1897, Julian itself became an international equivalent for many of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century's most important women artists. Not only does Overcoming All Obstacles introduce the reader to many works by women artists-both famous and lesser known-but the essays offer a cultural and historical context in which to appreciate their art. Gabriel Weisberg's essay concentrates on the rigorous training methods enforced by Rodolphe Julian and the teachers at the Academy. Jane Becker explores the competitive environment of the Julian Academy as it affected the Ukrainian painter Marie Bashkirtseff and the Swiss painter Louise-Catherine Breslau. Essays by Catherine Fehrer, the leading scholar of the Académie Julian, and Tamar Garb, an art historian who focuses on the training of women artists, give us a richer understanding of the Académie Julian's place in the sphere of art education in late nineteenth-century Paris. Generously illustrated with both color and black-and-white images, this volume includes documentary photographs and caricatures that have never before been reproduced. The core of the book draws on the large collection of the Académie Julian Del Debbio, the Académie Julian's successor institution in Paris. This publication accompanied an exhibition organized by the Dahesh Museum in New York that opened after its exhibition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown. The exhibition subsequently continued to the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis.

The Mirror and the Palette
The Mirror and the Palette

Author: Jennifer Higgie

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-10-05

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1643138049

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A dazzlingly original and ambitious book on the history of female self-portraiture by one of today's most well-respected art critics. Her story weaves in and out of time and place. She's Frida Kahlo, Loïs Mailou Jones and Amrita Sher-Gil en route to Mexico City, Paris or Bombay. She's Suzanne Valadon and Gwen John, craving city lights, the sea and solitude; she's Artemisia Gentileschi striding through the streets of Naples and Paula Modersohn-Becker in Worpswede. She's haunting museums in her paint-stained dress, scrutinising how El Greco or Titian or Van Dyck or Cézanne solved the problems that she too is facing. She's railing against her corsets, her chaperones, her husband and her brothers; she's hammering on doors, dreaming in her bedroom, working day and night in her studio. Despite the immense hurdles that have been placed in her way, she sits at her easel, picks up a mirror and paints a self-portrait because, as a subject, she is always available. Until the twentieth century, art history was, in the main, written by white men who tended to write about other white men. The idea that women in the West have always made art was rarely cited as a possibility. Yet they have - and, of course, continue to do so - often against tremendous odds, from laws and religion to the pressures of family and public disapproval. In The Mirror and the Palette, Jennifer Higgie introduces us to a cross-section of women artists who embody the fact that there is more than one way to understand our planet, more than one way to live in it and more than one way to make art about it. Spanning 500 years, biography and cultural history intertwine in a narrative packed with tales of rebellion, adventure, revolution, travel and tragedy enacted by women who turned their back on convention and lived lives of great resilience, creativity and bravery.

Daybook
Daybook

Author: Anne Truitt

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2023-07-06

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 1398526649

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A beautiful new edition of the cult classic that counts Zadie Smith and Rachel Kushner among its fans – with a new introduction by Celia Paul. ‘I am an artist. Even to write it makes me feel deeply uneasy.’ Renowned American artist Anne Truitt kept this illuminating and inspiring journal between 1974-8, determined to come to terms with the forces that shaped her art and life. She recalls her childhood on the eastern shore of Maryland, her career change from psychology to art, and her path to a sculptural practice that would ‘set colour free in three dimensions’. She reflects on the generous advice of other artists, watches her own daughters’ journey into motherhood, meditates on criticism and solitude, and struggles to find the way to express her vision. Resonant and true, encouraging and revelatory, Anne Truitt guides herself – and her readers – through a life in which domestic activities and the needs of children and friends are constantly juxtaposed against the world of colour and abstract geometry to which she is drawn in her art. Beautifully written and a rare window on the workings of a creative mind, Daybook showcases an extraordinary artist whose insights generously and succinctly illuminate the artistic process. 'Truitt wrote as she sculpted, returning to the past again and again to find fresh truths.' The New Yorker ‘This miracle of a book will inspire artists for generations to come.’ Celia Paul