[DOC] The Veneering Book (A Fine Woodworking Book) by David Shath Square in Arts-Photography

Description

ldquo;People like us . . . have different rights; different values than do ordinary people because we have different needs which put us . . . above their moral standards.rdquo; mdash;ModiglianiAmedeo (ldquo;Beloved of Godrdquo;) Modigliani was considered to be the quintessential bohemian artist; his legend almost as infamous as Van Goghrsquo;s. In Modiglianirsquo;s time; his work was seen as an oddity: contemporary with the Cubists but not part of their movement. His work was a link between such portraitists as Whistler; Sargent; and Toulouse-Lautrec and that of the Art Deco painters of the 1920s as well as the new approaches of Gauguin; Ceacute;zanne; and Picasso.Jean Cocteau called Modigliani ldquo;our aristocratrdquo; and said; ldquo;There was something like a curse on this very noble boy. He was beautiful. Alcohol and misfortune took their toll on him.rdquo;In this major new biography; Meryle Secrest; one of our most admired biographersmdash;whose work has been called ldquo;enthrallingrdquo; (The Wall Street Journal); ldquo;rich in detail; scrupulously researched; and sympathetically writtenrdquo; (The New York Review of Books) mdash;now gives us a fully realized portrait of one of the twentieth centuryrsquo;s master painters and sculptors: his upbringing; a Sephardic Jew from an impoverished but genteel Italian family; his going to Paris to make his fortune; his striking good looks (ldquo;How beautiful he was; my god how beautiful;rdquo; said one of his models) . . . his training as an artist . . .and his influences; including the Italian Renaissance; particularly the art of Botticelli; Nietzschersquo;s theories of the artist as Uuml;bermensch; divinely endowed; divinely inspired; the monochromatic backgrounds of Van Gogh and Ceacute;zanne; the work of the Romanian sculptor Brancusi; and the primitive sculptures of Africa and Oceania with their simplified; masklike triangular faces; elongated silhouettes; puckered lips; low foreheads; and heads on exaggeratedly long necks. We see the ways in which Modiglianirsquo;s long-kept-secret illness from tuberculosis (it almost killed him as a young man) affected his work and his attitude toward life ; how consumption caused him to embrace fatalism and idealism; creativity and death; and how he used alcohol and opium with laudanum as an antispasmodic to hide the symptoms of the disease and how; because of it; he came to be seen as a dissolute alcoholic.And throughout; we see the Paris that Modigliani lived in; a city in dynamic flux where art was still a noble cause; how Modigliani became part of a life in the streets and a world of art and artists then in a transforming revolution; Monet; Ceacute;zanne; Degas; Renoir; et al.mdash;and others more radicalmdash;Matisse; Derain; etc.; all living within blocks of one another.Secrestrsquo;s book; written with unprecedented access to letters; diaries; and photographs never before seen; is an extraordinary revelation of a life lived in art . . . Here is Modigliani; the man and the artist; seemingly shy; delicate; a man on a desperate mission; masquerading as an alcoholic; cheating death again and again; and calculating what he had to do in order to go on working and concealing his secret for however much time remained . . .From the Hardcover edition.