Author: Ratcliff, Carter

Brand: Abbeville Press

Color: Multicolor

Edition: 1

Features:

• Abbeville Press

Binding: Hardcover

Number Of Pages: 256

Release Date: 01-09-2001

Details: Product Description Sargent's enduring popularity has prompted a thoughtful reappraisal by prominent art critic Carter Ratcliff, who shows us the surprising breadth of the artist's work. Never before has a book so thoroughly represented that variety: 110 lavish color plates and more than 200 halftones convey the brilliance of his portraits, the exuberance of his watercolors, the stately pomp of his murals. It is perhaps the watercolors that are most exciting to contemporary eyes — bold, spontaneous, and vividly hued, they have a breathtaking immediacy. Born in Florence in 1856 to American parents, Sargent spent a nomadic childhood before going to Paris to study painting. He learned quickly and by the 1880s had begun the steady climb to fame that ultimately placed him at the center of his world, with a circle of friends and rivals that included Henry James, Claude Monet, and James McNeill Whistler. When Sargent died in 1925, a childhood companion wrote in her memorial that "the summing up of a would-be biographer must, I think be: He painted." It is the strikingly beautiful results of that lifelong devotion to his art that glow throughout the pages of this incomparable book. Review "Not just another art history book, no title in recent memory recalls with such exactitude the style of an era that. in retrospect, has become increasingly golden.... The book and its prose shimmer." — The New York Times "Never before have Sargents talents been so gloriously displayed as they are here. Quite simply, this... is a stunner, a book as satisfyingly extravagant as a Sargent portrait." — Christian Science Monitor "John Singer Sargent by Carter Ratcliff is that rare beast, a truly lively, tangy biography of an artist, with layouts and reproductions that do the paintings proud." — Newsday "The spontaneity, elegance, and grace that characterize Sargents work are everywhere evident on these large, luminous pages. . . . A visual delight." — Art and Antiques About the Author Carter Ratcliff is a leading art critic and contributing editor of Art in America. Among his many books are Botero, Andy Warhol, Komar and Melamid, and The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Post-War American Art. He has taught at the School of Visual Arts and Hunter College and lectured at a variety of institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. PROLOGUE: Point of View A work of art, a flourish of manners, even “the faintest hints of life” could strike Henry James with the force of “revelation.” He always stood ready to be impressed, though his standards were so high he was often let down. James was a connoisseur of disappointment, but only reluctantly; when he found reason to hope, he celebrated. Of John Singer Sargent’s Lady with a Rose, 1882 (plate 90), he wrote: “it offers the slightly ‘uncanny’ spectacle of a talent which on the very threshold of its career has nothing more to learn. It is not simply precocity in the guise of maturity—a phenomenon we very often meet, which deceives us only for an hour; it is the freshness of youth combined with the artistic experience, really felt and assimilated, of generations…” James had no difficulty seeking out this new talent, for the world of expatriate Americans was heavily populated but tightly knit. James and Sargent met in Paris, sometime during the early 1880s. In a letter to his friend Grace Norton, James said: “The only Franco-American product of importance here strikes me as young John Sargent the painter, who has high talent, a charming nature, artistic and personal, and is civilized to his finger-tips. He is perhaps spoilable—though I don’t think he is spoiled. But I hope not, for I like him extremely; and the best of his work seems to me to have in it something exquisite. Two years after Sargent’s critical triumph at the Salon of 1882 with his Lady with a Rose, he sent only one picture to the Salon—hi

Package Dimensions: 13.3 x 11.3 x 1.2 inches

Languages: English