Examines the art scene of the late 1980s

Gallery Going: Four Seasons in the Art World

Arts & Photography

Perl, Jed

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Harcourt

Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years: 1898-1940

Humor & Entertainment

Yale University Press

Antoine Watteau, one of the most mysterious painters who ever lived, is the inspiration for this delightful investigation of the tangled relationship between art and life. Weaving together historical fact and personal reflections, the influential art critic Jed Perl reconstructs the amazing story of this pioneering bohemian artist who, although he died in 1721, when he was only thirty-six, has influenced innumerable painters and writers in the centuries since—and whose work continues to deepen our understanding of the place that love, friendship, and pleasure have in our daily lives. Perl creates an astonishing experience by gathering his reflections on this “master of silken surfaces and elusive emotions” in the form of an alphabet—a fairy tale for adults—giving us a new way to think about art. This brilliant collage of a book is a hunt for the treasure of Watteau’s life and vision that encompasses the glamour and intrigue of eighteenth-century Paris, the riotous history of Harlequin and Pierrot, and the work of such modern giants as Cézanne, Picasso, and Samuel Beckett. By turns somber and beguiling, analytical and impressionistic, Antoine’s Alphabet reaffirms the contemporary relevance of the greatest of all painters of young love and imperishable dreams. It is a book to savor, to share, to return to again and again.

Antoine's Alphabet: Watteau and His World

History & Criticism

KNOPF

The first biography of America's greatest twentieth-century sculptor, Alexander Calder: an authoritative and revelatory achievement, based on a wealth of letters and papers never before available, and written by one of our most renowned art critics. Alexander Calder is one of the most beloved and widely admired artists of the twentieth century. Anybody who has ever set foot in a museum knows him as the inventor of the mobile, America's unique contribution to modern art. But only now, forty years after the artist's death, is the full story of his life being told in this biography, which is based on unprecedented access to Calder's letters and papers as well as scores of interviews. Jed Perl shows us why Calder was--and remains--a barrier breaker, an avant-garde artist with mass appeal. This beautifully written, deeply researched book opens with Calder's wonderfully peripatetic upbringing in Philadelphia, California, and New York. Born in 1898 into a family of artists--his father was a well-known sculptor, his mother a painter and a pioneering feminist--Calder went on as an adult to forge important friendships with a who's who of twentieth-century artists, including Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque, and Piet Mondrian. We move through Calder's early years studying engineering to his first artistic triumphs in Paris in the late 1920s, and to his emergence as a leader in the international abstract avant-garde. His marriage in 1931 to the free-spirited Louisa James--she was a great-niece of Henry James--is a richly romantic story, related here with a wealth of detail and nuance. Calder's life takes on a transatlantic richness, from New York's Greenwich Village in the Roaring Twenties, to the Left Bank of Paris during the Depression, and then back to the United States, where the Calders bought a run-down old farmhouse in western Connecticut. New light is shed on Calder's lifelong interest in dance, theater, and performance, ranging from the Cirque Calder, the theatrical event that became his calling card in bohemian Paris to collaborations with the choreographer Martha Graham and the composer Virgil Thomson. More than 350 illustrations in color and black-and-white--including little-known works and many archival photographs that have never before been seen--further enrich the story.

Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years: 1898-1940 (A Life of Calder)

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

The concluding volume to the first biography of one of the most important, influential, and beloved twentieth-century sculptors, and one of the greatest artists in the cultural history of America--is a vividly written, illuminating account of his triumphant later years. The second and final volume of this magnificent biography begins during World War II, when Calder--known to all as Sandy--and his wife, Louisa, opened their home to a stream of artists and writers in exile from Europe. In the postwar decades, they divided their time between the United States and France, as Calder made his first monumental public sculptures and received blockbuster commissions that included Expo '67 in Montreal and the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Jed Perl makes clear how Calder's radical sculptural imagination shaped the minimalist and kinetic art movements that emerged in the 1960s. And we see, as well, that through everything--their ever-expanding friendships with artists and writers of all stripes; working to end the war in Vietnam; hosting riotous dance parties at their Connecticut home; seeing the "mobile," Calder's essential artistic invention, find its way into Webster's dictionary--Calder and Louisa remained the risk-taking, singularly bohemian couple they had been since first meeting at the end of the Roaring Twenties. The biography ends with Calder's death in 1976 at the age of seventy-eight--only weeks after an encyclopedic retrospective of his work opened at the Whitney Museum in New York--but leaves us with a new, clearer understanding of his legacy, both as an artist and a man.

Calder: The Conquest of Space: The Later Years: 1940-1976 (A Life of Calder)

As art critic for The New Republic, Jed Perl is renowned for combining a passion for art and a skepticism about the current art establishment with an ability to write about art in the context of our larger culture. In this collection of essays, including two written especially for this book, he delivers a brilliant mixture of first-rate art criticism and politically informed insight into the true workings of the American art world.Perl offers incisive analysis into the marketing mentality that dominates today's museums, the poverty of academic criticism, and the changing expectations of the gallery-going public. He re-evaluates the old masters, and turns an avid, unprejudiced eye on the works of his contemporaries. He laments the collapse of a gallery culture that once allowed artists to develop slowly, and argues for a radical reassessment of the way art is presented to—and is viewed by—the public.

Eyewitness: Reports From An Art World In Crisis

Basic Books

From one of our most widely admired art critics comes a bold and timely manifesto reaffirming the independence of all the arts--musical, literary, and visual--and their unique and unparalleled power to excite, disturb, and inspire us. As people&nbsp;look to the arts to promote a particular ideology, whether radical, liberal, or conservative, Jed Perl argues that the arts have their own laws and logic, which transcend the controversies of any one moment. "Art's relevance," he writes, "has everything to do with what many regard as its irrelevance." Authority and Freedom will find readers from college classrooms to foundation board meetings--wherever the arts are confronting social, political, and economic ferment and heated debates about political correctness and cancel culture. &nbsp; Perl embraces the work of creative spirits as varied as Mozart, Michelangelo, Jane Austen, Henry James, Picasso, and Aretha Franklin. He contends that the essence of the arts is their ability to free us from fixed definitions and categories. Art is inherently uncategorizable--that's the key to its importance.&nbsp;Taking his stand with&nbsp;artists and thinkers ranging from W. H. Auden to Hannah Arendt, Perl defends works of art as adventuresome dialogues, simultaneously dispassionate and impassioned. He describes the fundamental sense of vocation--the engagement with the tools and traditions of a medium--that gives artists their purpose and focus. Whether we're experiencing a poem, a painting, or an opera, it's the interplay between authority and freedom--what Perl calls "the lifeblood of the arts"--that fuels the imaginative experience. This book will be essential reading for everybody who cares about the future of the arts in a democratic society. &nbsp;

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

First Edition. A fine copy in a near fine dust jacket. The dust jacket is faded at its spine, spine seams and the upper edges of the panels. Rubs to its upper corners.

Paris Without End: On French Art Since World War I

North Point Pr

Briefly discusses Man Ray's approach to photography and gathers a selection of his portraits, nudes, abstracts, and still lifes

Man Ray (Masters of Photography, 8)

Photography & Video

Aperture

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

Books by Perl, Jed

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

Gallery Going: Four Seasons in the Art World

Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years: 1898-1940

Antoine's Alphabet: Watteau and His World

Calder: The Conquest of Time: The Early Years: 1898-1940 (A Life of Calder)

Antoine's Alphabet: Watteau and His World

Calder: The Conquest of Space: The Later Years: 1940-1976 (A Life of Calder)

Eyewitness: Reports From An Art World In Crisis

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

Paris Without End: On French Art Since World War I

Man Ray (Masters of Photography, 8)