From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, a fascinating exploration of the life and work of one of America’s most famous and enigmatic postwar visual artists Mark Rothko, one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century, was born in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in 1903. He immigrated to the United States at age ten, taking with him his Talmudic education and his memories of pogroms and persecutions in Russia. His integration into American society began with a series of painful experiences, especially as a student at Yale, where he felt marginalized for his origins and ultimately left the school. The decision to become an artist led him to a new phase in his life. Early in his career, Annie Cohen-Solal writes, “he became a major player in the social struggle of American artists, and his own metamorphosis benefited from the unique transformation of the U.S. art world during this time.” Within a few decades, he had forged his definitive artistic signature, and most critics hailed him as a pioneer. The numerous museum shows that followed in major U.S. and European institutions ensured his celebrity. But this was not enough for Rothko, who continued to innovate. Ever faithful to his habit of confronting the establishment, he devoted the last decade of his life to cultivating his new conception of art as an experience, thanks to the commission of a radical project, the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. Cohen-Solal’s fascinating biography, based on considerable archival research, tells the unlikely story of how a young immigrant from Dvinsk became a crucial transforming agent of the art world—one whose legacy prevails to this day. About Jewish Lives: Jewish Lives is a prizewinning series of interpretative biography designed to explore the many facets of Jewish identity. Individual volumes illuminate the imprint of Jewish figures upon literature, religion, philosophy, politics, cultural and economic life, and the arts and sciences. Subjects are paired with authors to elicit lively, deeply informed books that explore the range and depth of the Jewish experience from antiquity to the present. In 2014, the Jewish Book Council named Jewish Lives the winner of its Jewish Book of the Year Award, the first series ever to receive this award. More praise for Jewish Lives: “Excellent.” – New York times “Exemplary.” – Wall St. Journal “Distinguished.” – New Yorker “Superb.” – The Guardian

Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel (Jewish Lives)

Arts & Photography

Cohen-Solal, Annie

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

A fascinating exploration of the life and work of one of America’s most famous and enigmatic postwar visual artists Mark Rothko, one of the greatest painters of the twentieth century, was born in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in 1903. He immigrated to the United States at age ten, taking with him his Talmudic education and his memories of pogroms and persecutions in Russia. His integration into American society began with a series of painful experiences, especially as a student at Yale, where he felt marginalized for his origins and ultimately left the school. The decision to become an artist led him to a new phase in his life. Early in his career, Annie Cohen-Solal writes, “he became a major player in the social struggle of American artists, and his own metamorphosis benefited from the unique transformation of the U.S. art world during this time.” Within a few decades, he had forged his definitive artistic signature, and most critics hailed him as a pioneer. The numerous museum shows that followed in major U.S. and European institutions ensured his celebrity. But this was not enough for Rothko, who continued to innovate. Ever faithful to his habit of confronting the establishment, he devoted the last decade of his life to cultivating his new conception of art as an experience, thanks to the commission of a radical project, the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas. Cohen-Solal’s fascinating biography, based on considerable archival research, tells the unlikely story of how a young immigrant from Dvinsk became a crucial transforming agent of the art world—one whose legacy prevails to this day.

"A beguiling read, as ingenious as it is ambitious . . . See Picasso and Paris shimmering with new light." --Mark Braude, author of Kiki Man Ray: Art, Love, and Rivalry in 1920s Paris Born from her curated exhibition of Pablo Picasso's work in Paris, biographer Annie-Cohen Solal's Picasso the Foreigner presents a bold new understanding of the artist's tempestuous relationship with his adopted homeland: France. Winner of the 2021 Prix Femina Essai Before Picasso became Picasso--the iconic artist now celebrated as one of France's leading figures--he was constantly surveilled by the police. Amidst political tensions in the spring of 1901, he was flagged as an anarchist by the security services--the first of many entries in what would become an extensive case file. Though he soon became the leader of the cubist avant-garde, and became increasingly wealthy as his reputation grew worldwide, Picasso's art was largely excluded from public collections in France for the next four decades. The genius who conceived Guernica as a visceral statement against fascism in 1937 was even denied French citizenship three years later, on the eve of the Nazi occupation. In a country where the police and the conservative Académie des Beaux-Arts represented two major pillars of the establishment at the time, Picasso faced a triple stigma--as a foreigner, a political radical, and an avant-garde artist. Picasso the Foreigner approaches the artist's career and work from an entirely new angle, making extensive use of fascinating and long-understudied archival sources. In this groundbreaking narrative, Picasso emerges as an artist ahead of his time not only aesthetically but politically, one who ignored national modes in favor of contemporary cosmopolitan forms. Cohen-Solal reveals how, in a period encompassing the brutality of World War I, the Nazi occupation, and Cold War rivalries, Picasso strategized and fought to preserve his agency, eventually leaving Paris for good in 1955. He chose the south over the north, the provinces over the capital, and craftspeople over academicians, while simultaneously achieving widespread fame. The artist never became a citizen of France, yet he enriched and dynamized its culture like few other figures in the country's history. This book, for the first time, explains how. Includes color images

Picasso the Foreigner: An Artist in France, 1900-1973

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

From a description of Sartre's hitherto unknown father to the painful last moments of Sartre's declining years, this biography incorporates previously untold aspects of Sartre's private and political life

SARTRE: A LIFE

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Pantheon

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

1st 2014 Thames and Hudson Ltd new edition hardcover new book In stock shipped from our UK warehouse

New York Mid-Century /anglais

Thames&Hudson

Shortly after the Civil War, a resurgent America strode brashly onto the hallowed ground of the Paris salon to present its most distinguished painters in the Exposition Universelle of 1867. Their offereings included majestic Western waterfalls, magnificent portraits, sprawling landscapes--the cream of a nation ready to assert itself culturally as it had begun to do so economically. The Americans sat back to bask in anticipated applause. But their confidence would be shattered when the luminaries of the French Academy condemned the spectacle as being unworthy of the great nation that had produced it. The rebuke provoked widespread soulsearching in America: Why was the land of Melville and Poe unable to produce paintings of comparable power? How was it to claim a place among nations producing art of real consequence? In this magnificent historical panorama, Annie Cohen-Solal shows how American pragmatism furnished the solution: Learn from the best. The French were then the undisputed masters of painting, and so to France the Americans went in hordes, apprenticing themselves in the studios of reknowned masters--Gérôme, Cabanel, and others--or founding colonies such as the legendary one at Pont-Aven. From the seeds of their individual efforts would grow an extraordinary crop, one that included not only the great--Whistler, Cassatt, Sargent--but a legion of artists of all ranks who collectively pushed forward a bold new American enterprise. In two generations, Paris would be eclipsed, and the greatest French artists would begin coming to New York to be at the new center of everything. Meticulously researched and presented as a captivating story, this book tells the saga of the rise of American artists as we have never had it before: a surging transatlatic ebb and flow of cultural energies, driven by innumberable fascinating individuals--painters, collectors, critics, titans of industry--some of them now famous, others forgotten. Informed throughout by the author's unique perspective as a scholar, a writer, and a cultural diplomat, Painting American offers an utterly new understanding of one of the greatest changes in cultural history.

Painting American: The Rise of American Artists, Paris 1867-New York 1948

KNOPF

From a description of Sartre's hitherto unknown father to the painful last moments of Sartre's declining years, this biography incorporates previously untold aspects of Sartre's private and political life

Sartre

Minerva

Leo Castelli reigned for decades as America’s most influential art dealer. Now Annie Cohen-Solal, author of the hugely acclaimed Sartre: A Life (“an intimate portrait of the man that possesses all the detail and resonance of fiction”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times), recounts his incalculably influential and astonishing life in Leo and His Circle. After emigrating to New York in 1941, Castelli would not open a gallery for sixteen years, when he had reached the age of fifty. But as the first to exhibit the then-unknown Jasper Johns, Castelli emerged as a tastemaker overnight and fast came to champion a virtual Who’s Who of twentieth-century masters: Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein, Warhol, and Twombly, to name a few. The secret of Leo’s success? Personal devotion to the artists, his “heroes”: by putting young talents on stipend and seeking placement in the ideal collection rather than with the top bidder, he transformed the way business was done, multiplying the capital, both cultural and financial, of those he represented. His enterprise, which by 1980 had expanded to an impressive network of satellite galleries in Europe and three locations in New York, thus became the unrivaled commercial institution in American art, producing a generation of acolytes, among them Mary Boone, Jeffrey Deitch, Larry Gagosian, and Tony Shafrazi. Leo and His Circle brilliantly narrates the course of one man’s power and influence. But Castelli had another secret, too: his life as an Italian Jew. Annie Cohen-Solal traces a family whose fortunes rose and fell for centuries before the Castellis fled European fascism. Never hidden but also never discussed, this experience would form the core of a guarded but magnetic character possessed of unfailing old-world charm and a refusal to look backward—traits that ensured Castelli’s visionary precedence in every major new movement from Pop to Conceptual and by which he fostered the worldwide enthusiasm for American contemporary art that is his greatest legacy. Drawing on her friendship with the subject, as well as an uncanny knack for archival excavation, Annie Cohen-Solal gives us in full the elegant, shrewd, irresistible, and enigmatic figure at the very center of postwar American art, bringing an utterly new understanding of its evolution.

Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli

From a description of Sartre's hitherto unknown father to the painful last moments of Sartre's declining years, this intimate portrait incorporates previously untold aspects of Sartre's private, political, and literary life, in a new edition of the acclaimed biography, honoring the centennial of Sartre's birth. Reprint.

Jean-Paul Sartre: A Life (Lives of the Left)

Professionals & Academics

New Press, The

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cohen-Solal, Annie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Cohen-Solal, Annie

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cohen-Solal, Annie. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel (Jewish Lives)

Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel (Jewish Lives)

Picasso the Foreigner: An Artist in France, 1900-1973

SARTRE: A LIFE

SARTRE: A LIFE

New York Mid-Century /anglais

Painting American: The Rise of American Artists, Paris 1867-New York 1948

Sartre

Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli

Jean-Paul Sartre: A Life (Lives of the Left)