Portrait of the Artist

Filled with passion, despair, conviction, and vision, the lives of these artists are as vivid as the works they've created.

 

1.		Balthus : A Biography by Nicholas Fox Weber
		Knopf Hardcover - 656 pages (October 1999)	Click here for more info	Avg. Customer Review:
Amazon.com Balthus is as multifaceted and spellbinding as its subject, the 20th-century painter whose canvasses have been likened both to those of the ethereal Piero della Francesca and sadomasochistic erotica. Biographer Nicholas Fox Weber quotes Oscar Wilde when discussing Balthus's most notorious painting,... Read more
2.		Rembrandt's Eyes by Simon Schama
		Knopf Hardcover - 640 pages (November 1999)	$50.00 Click here for more info	Avg. Customer Review:
Amazon.com The great 17th-century Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn left us so many arresting self-portraits, painted at every stage in his eventful life, that his distinctive face and bearing are a familiar part of the 20th-century cultural landscape, a recognizable presence in galleries across Europe and North... Read more
3.		Tamara De Lempicka : A Life of Deco and Decadence by Laura Claridge
		Clarkson Potter Hardcover - 448 pages (October 1999)	Click here for more info	No customer rating available (Be the first to review it)
Amazon.com With her couture clothes and movie-star good looks (she was frequently mistaken for Greta Garbo), Tamara de Lempicka seemed too glamorous to be a serious painter. Even in the years of her greatest success, 1925 to 1935, the luscious colors and highly wrought finishes of her portraits--a suspect... Read more
4.		Walker Evans by James R. Mellow
		Basic Books Hardcover - 600 pages (May 1999)	Click here for more info	Avg. Customer Review:
Amazon.com Before his death in 1997, James Mellow left one last gracefully written, sensitively nuanced biography to add to a shelf containing National Book Award winner Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times and a remarkable trilogy on seminal figures of the Lost Generation. Mellow's biography of photographer... Read more
5.		The Sound of Sleat by Jon Schueler, et al
		Picador USA Hardcover - 359 pages 1st picado edition (March 1999)	Click here for more info	Avg. Customer Review:
Amazon.com It's hard to decide which aspect of painter Jon Schueler's painfully candid memoir is more fascinating: the unsparing depictions of his tormented relationships with women, or the nuts-and-bolts details of the art trade's byzantine financial dealings. In both cases, Schueler (1916-92) never minces... Read more
6.	See picture	Shadows, Fire, Snow : The Life of Tina Modotti by Patricia Albers
		Clarkson Potter Hardcover - 304 pages 1 Ed edition (April 1999)	Click here for more info	Avg. Customer Review:
Amazon.com Tina Modotti's short, intense life (1896-1942) has sparked numerous biographies, but museum curator Patricia Albers's is the first to do true justice to Modotti's photography and to persuasively trace its roots in her personal experiences. Albers does a fine job nailing down the particulars of this... Read more
7.	See picture	Suzanne Valadon : The Mistress of Montmartre by June Rose, et al
		St Martins Pr (Trade) Hardcover - 304 pages (February 1999)	$27.95 $19.57 $8.38 Click here for more info	No customer rating available (Be the first to review it)
Amazon.com She posed for Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec; Degas was so impressed by her drawings that he became the first to purchase a work by this self-taught female artist. But though Suzanne Valadon (1865-1938) gloried in the carefree, bohemian artistic scene of Paris's Montmartre neighborhood in the 1880s and... Read more
8.	See picture	Basquiat : A Quick Killing in Art by Phoebe Hoban
		Penguin USA (Paper) Paperback - 400 pages (September 1999)	$12.76 $3.19 Click here for more info	Avg. Customer Review:
Amazon.com This minutely reported book is as much a portrait of the frenzied, prodigal New York art world of the 1980s as it is a biography of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died of a drug overdose at age 27 in 1988. Basquiat, one of very few African American artists to acquire an international reputation, left a... Read more
9.	See picture	Matisse : Father & Son by John Russell
		Harry N Abrams Hardcover - 464 pages (May 1999)	$27.97 $11.98 Click here for more info	Avg. Customer Review:
Amazon.com Author John Russell knew Pierre Matisse (1900-1989) personally, and after his death was invited to work in the legendary art dealer's archives. Among the treasure-trove of material was 34 years' worth of correspondence between Matisse and his father, the legendary French painter Henri Matisse... Read more
10.	See picture	From a High Place : A Life of Arshile Gorky by Matthew Spender
		Knopf Hardcover - 448 pages 1 Ed edition (May 1999)	Click here for more info	No customer rating available (Be the first to review it)
Amazon.com The powerful, agonized emotions that seethe beneath the surface of Arshile Gorky's paintings have deep roots in the particulars of his life, as this sensitive biography by his son-in-law reveals. Though Spender never knew Gorky (1905-48), his marriage to the artist's elder daughter connected him to... Read more
11.	See picture	Lives of the Great 20th-Century Artists by Edward Lucie-Smith
		Thames & Hudson Hardcover - 352 pages (September 1, 1999)	$45.00 $31.50 Click here for more info	Avg. Customer Review:
Amazon.com Just to thumb through Edward Lucie-Smith's Lives of the Great 20th Century Artists is to be overwhelmed by the vibrancy and range of styles, eras, and personalities that have shaped artistic and cultural perception throughout the last hundred years. Arguing that "twentieth-century artworks cannot be... Read more
12.	See picture	Surreal Lives : The Surrealists 1917-1945 by Ruth Brandon
		Grove/Atlantic Hardcover - 528 pages 1 Amer Ed edition (September 1999)	$32.50 $22.75 $9.75 Click here for more info	No customer rating available (Be the first to review it)
Amazon.com Playful, amusing, frivolous, and bizarre. As Ruth Brandon points out in the preface to her marvelous Surreal Lives, surrealism has passed into everyday life as a byword for the strange. However, as this wonderfully exhaustive book point outs, the intellectual and political drive behind the movement... Read more
13.	See picture	Slightly Out of Focus (Modern Library) by Robert Capa, et al
		Modern Library Hardcover - 240 pages (September 1999)	Click here for more info	Avg. Customer Review:
Amazon.com Robert Capa, the great photojournalist who is perhaps best known for his searing images of WWII, infused his autobiography with the same brio and warmth that he expressed in his now classic photographs. "Victory was pleasant and exhausting," the Hungarian-born American notes after the Allies'... Read more
14.	See picture	Eye to I: The Autobiography of a Photographer by Erwin Blumenfeld, et al
		Thames & Hudson Hardcover - 384 pages (June 1, 1999)	Click here for more info	Avg. Customer Review:
Amazon.com Although Erwin Blumenfeld would no doubt have emphatically denied it, his autobiography might be seen as an example of the trajectory of an artistic life brutally fashioned by the vicissitudes of 20th-century European history. Born in 1896 into a bourgeois Berlin Jewish family, he served in the... Read more
15.	See picture	Caravaggio : A Life by Helen Langdon
		Farrar Straus & Giroux (Juv) Hardcover - 432 pages 1st farrar edition (June 1999)	Click here for more info	No customer rating available (Be the first to review it)
Amazon.com Seventeenth-century painter Nicolas Poussin once said that Caravaggio came into the world to destroy painting. Helen Langdon's marvelous biography suggests that rather than destroying painting, the Milanese artist gave it a new lease on life. Upon his arrival in Rome, Caravaggio ended a tradition of... Read more

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