An illuminating exploration of the meaning of abstract
art by acclaimed art historian Kirk Varnedoe "What is
abstract art good for? What's the use-for us as individuals, or for
any society-of ...pictures of nothing, of paintings and sculptures or
prints or drawings that do not seem to show anything except
themselves?" In this invigorating account of abstract art since
Jackson Pollock, eminent art historian Kirk Varnedoe, the former
chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern
Art, asks these and other questions as he frankly confronts the
uncertainties we may have about the nonrepresentational art
produced in the past five decades. He makes a compelling argument
for its history and value, much as E. H. Gombrich tackled
representation fifty years ago in Art and Illusion ,
another landmark A. W. Mellon Lectures volume. Realizing that these
lectures might be his final work, Varnedoe conceived of them as a
statement of his faith in modern art and as the culminating example
of his lucidly pragmatic and philosophical approach to art history.
He delivered the lectures, edited and reproduced here with their
illustrations, to overflowing crowds at the National Gallery of Art
in Washington in the spring of 2003, just months before his death.
With brilliance, passion, and humor, Varnedoe addresses the
skeptical attitudes and misunderstandings that we often bring to
our experience of abstract art. Resisting grand generalizations, he
makes a deliberate and scholarly case for abstraction-showing us
that more than just pure looking is necessary to understand the
self-made symbolic language of abstract art. Proceeding decade by
decade, he brings alive the history and biography that inform the
art while also challenging the received wisdom about distinctions
between abstraction and representation, modernism and
postmodernism, and minimalism and pop. The result is a fascinating
and ultimately moving tour through a half century of abstract art,
concluding with an unforgettable description of one of Varnedoe's
favorite works. Please note: All images in this ebook are presented
in black and white and have been reduced in size.
As Spang explains, during the 1760s and 1770s, sensitive, self-described sufferers made public show of their delicacy by going to the new establishments known as "restaurateurs' rooms" to sip ...bouillons. But these locations soon became sites for extending frugal, politically correct hospitality and later became symbols of aristocratic greed.
As Spang explains, during the 1760s and 1770s, sensitive, self-described sufferers made public show of their delicacy by going to the new establishments known as "restaurateurs' rooms" to sip ...bouillons. But these locations soon became sites for extending frugal, politically correct hospitality and later became symbols of aristocratic greed.
Winner of the Louis Gottschalk PrizeWinner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize"Witty and full of fascinating details."-Los Angeles TimesWhy are there restaurants? Why would anybody consider eating ...alongside perfect strangers in a loud and crowded room to be an enjoyable pastime? To find the answer, Rebecca Spang takes us back to France in the eighteenth century, when a restaurant was not a place to eat but a quasi-medicinal bouillon not unlike the bone broths of today.This is a book about the French revolution in taste-about how Parisians invented the modern culture of food, changing the social life of the world in the process. We see how over the course of the Revolution, restaurants that had begun as purveyors of health food became symbols of aristocratic greed. In the early nineteenth century, the new genre of gastronomic literature worked within the strictures of the Napoleonic state to transform restaurants yet again, this time conferring star status upon oysters and champagne."An ambitious, thought-changing book.Rich in weird data, unsung heroes, and bizarre true stories."-Adam Gopnik, New Yorker"A pleasingly spiced history of the restaurant."-New York Times"A lively, engrossing, authoritative account of how the restaurant as we know it developed.Spang is.as generous in her helpings of historical detail as any glutton could wish."-The Times
From twenty-seven of today's leading writers, an anthology of original pieces on the author of Walden Features essays by Jennifer Finney Boylan • Kristen Case • George Howe Colt • Gerald Early • Paul ...Elie • Will Eno • Adam Gopnik • Lauren Groff • Celeste Headlee • Pico Iyer • Alan Lightman • James Marcus • Megan Marshall • Michelle Nijhuis • Zoë Pollak • Jordan Salama • Tatiana Schlossberg • A. O. Scott • Mona Simpson • Stacey Vanek Smith • Wen Stephenson • Robert Sullivan • Amor Towles • Sherry Turkle • Geoff Wisner • Rafia Zakaria • and a cartoon by Sandra Boynton The world is never done catching up with Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), the author of Walden, "Civil Disobedience, " and other classics. A prophet of environmentalism and vegetarianism, an abolitionist, and a critic of materialism and technology, Thoreau even seems to have anticipated a world of social distancing in his famous experiment at Walden Pond. In Now Comes Good Sailing, twenty-seven of today's leading writers offer wide-ranging original pieces exploring how Thoreau has influenced and inspired them—and why he matters more than ever in an age of climate, racial, and technological reckoning.Here, Lauren Groff retreats from the COVID-19 pandemic to a rural house and writing hut, where, unable to write, she rereads Walden; Pico Iyer describes how Thoreau provided him with an unlikely guidebook to Japan; Gerald Early examines Walden and the Black quest for nature; Rafia Zakaria reflects on solitude, from Thoreau's Concord to her native Pakistan; Mona Simpson follows in Thoreau's footsteps at Maine's Mount Katahdin; Jennifer Finney Boylan reads Thoreau in relation to her experience of coming out as a trans woman; Adam Gopnik traces Thoreau's influence on the New Yorker editor E. B. White and his book Charlotte's Web; and there's much more.The result is a lively and compelling collection that richly demonstrates the countless ways Thoreau continues to move, challenge, and provoke readers today.
Lines of inspiration, flowcharts of influence, family trees of shared DNA—these are material for graduate students to study and for writers to keep away from. But there are occasions when one writer ...so firmly declares allegiance to another, earlier writer that we look at the relation again, to see what, truly, is to be made of it. Suspicion rises at such self-assignments, since misdirection is the good writer’s lifeblood: Hemingway claims to have trained up on Tolstoy and Maupassant when he in fact trimmed up on Stephen Crane and Sherwood Anderson. “The anxiety of influence”—it’s become one of
Foreword Adam Gopnik
The Invention of the Restaurant,
01/2020
Book Chapter
When Rebecca Spang’s The Invention of the Restaurant appeared some twenty years ago, it set off explosions, ranging from firecracker to incendiary dimensions, in the admittedly smallish world of those ...who cared passionately about gastronomic history. I recall my friend, the now-much-missed Hungarian American restaurateur George Lang (of Café des Artistes fame), calling me from Budapest—where he had gone to reopen the once legendary but by then dilapidated restaurant Gundel—in genuine lamentation after reading the review I had written about Spang’s book for the New Yorker. “It seems as if I have gotten everything wrong!” he said; he
