Portrait Of A Man

Author: Georges Perec
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1782060952
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Book Description
Gaspard Winckler, master forger, is trapped in a basement studio on the outskirts of Paris, with his paymaster's blood on his hands. The motive for this murder? A perversion of artistic ambition. After a lifetime lived in the shadows, he has strayed too close to the sun. Fittingly for such an enigmatic writer, Portrait of a Man is both Perec's first novel and his last. Frustrated in his efforts to find a publisher, he put it aside, telling a friend: 'I'll go back to it in ten years when it'll turn into a masterpiece, or else I'll wait in my grave until one of my faithful exegetes comes across it in an old trunk.' An apt coda to one of the brightest literary careers of the twentieth century, it is - in the words of David Bellos, the 'faithful exegete' who brought it to light - 'connected by a hundred threads to every part of the literary universe that Perec went on to create - but it's not like anything else that he wrote.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Author: James Joyce
Publisher: The Floating Press
ISBN: 1775417891
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 395

Book Description
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is semi-autobiographical, following Joyce's fictional alter-ego through his artistic awakening. The young artist Steven Dedelus begins to rebel against the Irish Catholic dogma of his childhood and discover the great philosophers and artists. He follows his artistic calling to the continent.

Portrait Of The Artist As An Old Man

Author: Joseph Heller
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1849836515
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
Imagine an author who has become a legend in his own lifetime - all because of the novel he wrote in the first flush of youth. Novelist Eugene Pota is a cultural icon of the twentieth century, struggling to write what will be the last novel of his career. But what to write about when, like so many noted authors before him, all of Pota's output since that first, landmark novel has been scrutinized and dissected - and found wanting? PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST, AS AN OLD MAN follows Pota's efforts to settle on a subject for his final work. In his search, Heller - through Pota - pays homage to his favourite authors and discusses the problems that have plagued so many writers whose later works failed to live up to the successes of their first: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, Jack London, Joseph Conrad, to name but a few. It is a rare and enthralling look into the artist's search for creativity, a search that comes at a point in life when impotence - both sexual and spiritual - has become a frustrating fact. Joseph Heller must have known that this would be his final novel; it stands as a fitting testament to the life and works of a leading light in modern literature.

Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man

Author: Norman Mailer
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780349108322
Category : Artist couples
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Book Description
The author sets out to capture Picasso's early life in this biography, exploring the originality of his art and ambition. At the heart of the interpretation is Picasso's first great love, Fernande Olivier, with whom the artist lived for seven years - a period which included his most revolutionary works. Fernande is given her own voice by way of excerpts from her candid memoirs. Including the artist's friendships with Apollonaire and Gertrude Stein, the book evokes the atmosphere of bohemian life in Paris in the early 1900s.

Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud

Author: Martin Gayford
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
ISBN: 0500770794
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 189

Book Description
“An extraordinary record of a great artist in his studio, it also describes what it feels like to be transformed into a work of art.” —ARTnews Lucian Freud (1922-2011), widely regarded as the greatest figurative painter of our time, spent seven months painting a portrait of the art critic Martin Gayford. The daily narrative of their encounters takes the reader into that most private place, the artist’s studio, and to the heart of the working methods of this modern master—both technical and subtly psychological. From this emerges an understanding of what a portrait is, but something else is also created: a portrait, in words, of Freud himself. This is not a biography, but a series of close-ups: the artist at work and in conversation at restaurants, in taxis, and in his studio. It takes one into the company of the painter for whom Picasso, Giacometti, and Francis Bacon were friends and contemporaries, as were writers such as George Orwell and W. H. Auden. The book is illustrated with many of Lucian Freud’s other works, telling photographs taken by David Dawson of Freud in his studio, and images by such great artists of the past as van Gogh and Titian who are discussed by Freud and Gayford. Full of wry observations, the book reveals the inside story of how it feels to pose for a remarkable artist and become a work of art.

Charles James

Author: Michele Gerber Klein
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
ISBN: 0847861457
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
Inspired by the discovery of long-overlooked interviews conducted just before his death, this is the first biography of the visionary fashion designer Charles James. Christian Dior described him as the inspiration for the “New Look.” Salvador Dalí called his work “soft sculpture,” and Virginia Woolf exclaimed, “He is a genius.” As George Bernard Shaw tells us, only unreasonable men change the world. This portrait of the life and times of Charles James—winner of two Coty awards, and the subject of a 2014 Metropolitan Museum of Art show—draws on the glamour of Europe in the 1930s, and the dazzle of New York City from the ’40s through the ’70s as it travels with James from his birth to privilege in England in 1906 and follows his career through his complex and turbulent relationships with exceptional women such as Elsa Schiaparelli and Eleanor Lambert, ending with his penurious death in New York’s fabled Chelsea Hotel. As engrossing as a novel, as dramatic as grand opera, James’s story will provoke, rivet, and inspire.

Mandela's Way

Author: Richard Stengel
Publisher: Crown Archetype
ISBN: 0307460681
Category : Conduct of life
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
"Time" magazine editor Stengel, who collaborated with Mandela on his bestselling autobiography, distills Mandela's wisdom into 15 vital life lessons that have the power to deepen lives.

Portrait of a Man with Red Hair

Author: Hugh Walpole
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Gothic literature
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Book Description
Depicts the malign influence of a manipulative, insane father on his family and others.

Self-portrait

Author: Man Ray
Publisher: Penguin Classics
ISBN: 9780141195506
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
In this remarkable autobiography, Man Ray - painter, photographer, sculptor, film maker and writer - relates the story of his life, from his childhood determination to be an artist and his technical drawing classes in a Brooklyn high school, to the glamorous and heady days of Paris in the 1940s, when any trip to the city 'was not complete until they had been "done" by Man Ray's camera'. Friend to everyone who was anyone, Ray tells everything he knows of artists, socialites and writers such as Matisse, Hemingway, Picasso and Joyce, not to mention Lee Miller, Nancy Cunard, Alberto Giacometti, Gertrude Stein, Dali, Max Ernst and many more, in this decadent, sensational account of the early twentieth-century cultural world.

Chicken

Author: David Henry Sterry
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1593765673
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 174

Book Description
I walk all the way up Hollywood Boulevard to Grauman's Chinese Theatre: past tourists snapping shots; wannabe starlets sparkling by in miniskirts with head shots in their hands and moondust in their eyes; rowdy cowboys drinking with drunken Indians; black businessmen bustling by briskly in crisp suits; ladies who do not lunch with nylons rolled up below the knee pushing shopping carts full of everything they own; Mustangs rubbing up against muscular Mercedes and Hell's Angels hogs. It's a sick twisted Wonderland, and I'm Alice. Here is a story like no other: The unforgettable chronicle of a season spent walking the razor-sharp line between painful innocence and the allure of the abyss. David Sterry was a wide-eyed son of 1970s suburbia, but within his first week looking for off-campus housing on Sunset Boulevard he was lured into a much darker world — servicing the lonely women of Hollywood by night. Chicken—the word is slang for a young male prostitute—revisits this year of living dangerously, in a narrative of dazzling inventiveness and searing candor. Shifting back and forth from tales of Sterry's youth—spent in the awkward bosom of a disintegrating dysfunctional family—to his fascinating account of the Neverland of post—sixties sexual excess, Chicken teems with Felliniesque characters and set pieces worthy of Dionysus. And when the life finally overwhelms Sterry, his retreat from the profession will leave an indelible mark on readers' minds and hearts.