From Rosemarie Jerome
Author: Stephanie Cowell
Claude and Camille: A Novel of Monet
This beautiful, bittersweet love story shows the impovished life of Impressionist painter, Claude Monet and his wife Camille-Leonie Doncieux. He left his seaside home and moved to Paris to make his fortune. She left her affluent home to become his muse, his wife, and to follow his dream. Wealth and fame alluded Monet for most of his adult life, but Camille endured the hardships and his bouts with depression as she loved him. The story depicts the Impressionist Movement in its infancy. The rejection and ridicule artists had to endure to gain acceptance and recognition in the insular art world was difficult. Near the end of his life Monet obtained his dream but his muse was no more.
Tag Archives: art
Cezanne’s Quarry
From Rosemarie Jerome
author: Pope, Barbara Corrado
Cezanne’s Quarry
Solange Vernet has been found murdered. A young inexperienced magistrate, Bernard Martin, investigates the crime. Who was the beautiful Solange? Was her murder a crime of passion? Is the spurned artist Paul Cezanne guilty? He has a violent temper and his paintings speak of dark, gruesome deeds. Or was it her lover, Darwinian scholar Charles Westbury, who in a jealous rage took her life? Martin is a charming character whose stubborn quest for justice makes him an unassuming hero. The Blood of Lorraine is the sequel which tells more of Martin’s tale.
Just Kids
From Ellen Druda
author: Smith, Patti
Just Kids
Patti Smith’s evocative memoir recounts her early days in New York City and her relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe. This National Book Award winning work is an accessible, easy read, yet full of imagery that stirs the imagination. From her childhood in New Jersey, we follow her across the river to a bohemian city life in the psychedelic 60′s, mingling with soon- to- be famous painters, writers, and musicians. This book will especially appeal to baby-boomers and music fans.
Priceless : how I went undercover to rescue the world’s stolen treasures
From Catherine Givens
author: Wittman, Robert K.
Priceless : how I went undercover to rescue the world’s stolen treasures
The new book, “Priceless”, by Robert K. Wittman is a fascinating memoir set in the dark world of art thievery and the black market. Wittman, a 20-year veteran of the FBI, founded the Bureau’s chronically understaffed Art Crime Team. Most FBI personnel, he explains, place a lower priority on the nabbing of art thieves, compared to the capturing of drug dealers and bank robbers. Meanwhile, deeply appreciative of the cultural significance of art, he immerses himself in the study of Art History, to sharpen his ability to act the part of an astute art dealer.
He colorfully relates the conflicts that arise when agents whose values
differ are pitted against each other by bureaucratic hierarchies. With
grace and wisdom, and a highly experienced eye on the prize, Wittman
navigates these obstacles, transcending would-be blockades to repeatedly recover the loot.
Time and again precious paintings and cultural artifacts, both domestic and international, are handed over by clueless crooks to undercover agents, as well as to Wittman. The effort expended by all the undercover law enforcement players is awe-inspiring. Meanwhile, the fact that our government places so little value on and assigns so few people to the recovery of stolen art is shocking. And it explains why art thieves and unscrupulous dealers abound, displaying increasing levels of audacity.
Full of action and suspense, this fast-paced book is bursting with
bigger-than-life villains, dumb and dumber criminals and unassuming heroes. It would make a fantastic movie. But I highly recommend the book: The author’s heartfelt revelations of his inner thoughts as he strives to return art to its rightful owners keep us rooting for him all the way.
Swan Thieves
From Catherine Given
author: Kostova, Elizabeth
Swan Thieves
As a favor to a friend, psychiatrist and amateur painter Andrew Marlow agrees to investigate the reason why well-known painter Robert Oliver violently attacked a canvas hanging in the National Gallery of Art. Marlow’s new patient is clearly angry and hopeless, refusing to eat or talk, unable to sleep.
In rich detail, Kostova deftly interweaves the saga of Oliver’s troubled relationships with Marlow’s serpentine investigation, which leads him into the passionate realm of 19th-Century Parisian artists.
Kostova’s previous book, a best-selling vampire novel entitled The Historian, garnered critical raves and a cult following.
She transports us deep within the quirky world of painters and academics, past and present. Swan Thieves offers the reader aesthetically mesmerizing and suspenseful prose sure to delight visual types and fans of psychologically deconstructed crime fiction.
Art of Learning
From Gina Scaglione:
I read The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin. He was the national chess champion and Push Hands champion as well. He is actually a terrfic writer and never made me feel inferior to him as he writes about how to be the best. I great self-help book.
Art and Physics
From Ellen Druda:
Art & Physics, by Leonard Shlain
I heard about the author after his recent death on a BoingBoing blog post, and decided to give him a try. I wasn’t disappointed. Shlain spends most of the book supporting his thesis about artists expressing ideas about light, space, and time years before the physicists express the same ideas using science and math. He takes us from the Greeks and Romans up through the 20th century, carefully paralleling the movements in painting and sculpture with the discoveries of Newton, Einstein, and beyond. Because the author was so well versed in art, he was able to explain some of the more intangible ideas in physics in terms that were a bit easier to picture. What does the world look like when you travel at the speed of light? Now I know.
What I loved about this book was the way it stretched my mind trying to grasp the connections, and the theories about the collective mind Shlain puts forth at the end of the book. A brave and brilliant work.
Golden Reads review
From Lynne Demestichas:
Feather man, by Rhyll McMaster
Our main character has had a troubled past, but tries to overcome her lack of confidence through her painting.We go on a life journey with her,as she meets all the wrong friends,and men in the art world.The story doesn’t sound interesting but Rhyll McMaster is truly a “master” in the literary sense. With beautiful descriptions and analogies of our character’s life, such phrases as ‘day breaking out of it’s shell’ and ‘lonely as a cloud’,bring this tale to life.I found myself copying down some of the most fascinating and explicit descriptions, combinations of words I never thought to piece together.If you enjoy this type of reading, this book will be really fun for you.
