Christo, Turner, Alexander Calder & Edouard Manet

Christo and Jeane-Claude

For their sheer scale and breathtaking audacity, the works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude have made them amongst the most celebrated and controversial artists in the world.
Valley Curtain stretched 1,250 feet across a valley in Rifle, Colorado. Wrapped Coast covered a mile and a half of Australian coastline with a million square feet of fabric. The Umbrellas deployed 3,100 umbrellas in Japan and California, each nearly twenty feet tall. Surrounded Islands encircled eleven islands in Biscayne Bay, Florida, with six and a half million square feet of bright pink fabric. Wrapped Reichstag enveloped the entire German parliament in shimmering silver fabric.
Burt Chernow recounts their rise from relative obscurity to international renown, revealing both the sources of their art and the quite literal heights to which it has aspired. An epilogue by Wolfgang Volz, a longtime close collaborator of the artists, as well as their exclusive photographer, provides a fascinating insider's view at what it is like to work, and dream, with them. Christo and Jeanne-Claude is an indelible portrait of the artists, their work, and of an extraordinary couple.
Christo and Jeane-Claude: A Biography by Burt Chernow
St. Martin's Press, 2002

J.M.W. Turner by Sam Smiles

J.M.W. Turner is probably the greatest painter Britain has ever produced. Disturbingly original and astonishingly prolific, he rose from the obscurity of a barber's son to bequeath a rich and complex legacy. Paintings such as Rain, Steam and Speed have become British icons, and the phrase "Turner sky" is known to students of art around the world.
Despite this fame, or perhaps because of it, Turner's work has often been misunderstood, his intentions simplified. Here, Sam Smiles investigates Turner's artistic and literary influences, his political views, and the extraordinary evolution of his approach and techniques. Examining how Turner produced effects that lay beyond the competence of other artists - dissolving form, rendering diaphanous expanses of light, and using color with the utmost subtlety and control - the author Sam Smiles contradicts Turner's own claim that his only secret was "damned hard work."
In the process, Smiles retrieves the meaning of Turner's art from critical misconstruings. He finds in Turner not a recorder of light and landscape but a fascinating artist who foreshadowed modernism and used landscape to deliver profound ruminations on society, politics, technology, and the human condition. Turner's sophisticated artistic personality emerges, rendering his art more compelling than ever.
J.M.W. Turner by Sam Smiles
Princeton Univ Press, 2000, ISBN: 069107058X

Alexander Calder in Connecticut

Perhaps the most influential and best loved of all twentieth-century sculptors, Alexander Calder worked primarily in Connecticut for several decades after settling in a Roxbury farmhouse in 1933. Connecticut provided a richly stimulating creative environment for him in the critical years when he developed his unique mobiles and stabiles and established his artistic reputation. This intimate and engaging portrait of Alexander Calder, at work and at play, offers new insight into how his art was shaped by the state's landscape, his home and studio, his family, and the fascinating circle of artists, writers, curators, and collectors who befriended him.
Engaging and authoritative, this visual biography includes many previously unpublished photographs, documents, and reproductions of little-known art works. An account of the home and studio by Alexander S. C. Rower, Calder's grandson, and an affectionate tribute by Alexander Calder's neighbor, playwright Arthur Miller, complete the volume, produced in conjunction with a major exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford.
Calder in Connecticut by Alexander S.C. Rower
ISBN: 0847822494

Edouard Manet and the Sea

Edouard Manet (1832-1883) was passionate about the sea. Before becoming a painter, he spent six months at sea, and, like many Europeans of his era, he took numerous seaside holidays.
Edouard Manet made his public debut as a marine painter at the Paris Salon of 1864 with The Battle of the U.S.S. "Kearsarge" and the C.S.S. "Alabama," his dramatic depiction of a U.S. Civil War naval battle off the coast of France, and he continued to paint seascapes throughout his career. These extraordinary works clearly reflect his intimate knowledge of and love for maritime vessels and the sea.
Manet and the Sea is the first book to highlight the French master's beautiful and varied seascapes. Essays by leading scholars discuss how Edouard Manet completely overturned the established academic conventions of marine painting in France. His provocative approach was equal to that of his contemporary Gustave Courbet, and his bold and innovative techniques inspired many younger artists, including Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, James McNeill Whistler, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Essays on these and other artists place their seascapes in relation to Edouard Manet's pictures. This handsomely illustrated and designed book presents over one hundred paintings and drawings in full color. Anyone interested in the sea, maritime painting, nineteenth-century French painting, and particularly the role Edouard Manet played in the Impressionist revolution, will find this an essential book to own.
Manet and the Sea by Juliet Wilson-Bareau
ISBN: 0300101643

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