Boca Rococo

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Annie Cohen-Solal

"Mark Rothko was not only one of the most influential American painters of the twentieth century; he was a scholar, an educator, and a deeply spiritual human being. Born Marcus Yakovlevich Rotkovitch, he emigrated from the Russian Empire to the United States at age ten, already well educated in the Talmud and carrying with him bitter memories of the pogroms and persecutions visited upon the Jews of Latvia. Few artists have achieved success as quickly, and by the mid-twentieth century, Rothko's artwork was being displayed in major museums throughout the world. In May 2012 his painting Orange, Red, Yellow was auctioned for nearly $87 million, setting a new Christie's record. Author Annie Cohen-Solal gained access to archival materials no previous biographer had seen. As a result, her book is an extraordinarily detailed portrait of Rothko the man and the artist, an uncommonly successful painter who was never comfortable with the idea of his art as a commodity"--

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Meryle Secrest

The widely admired biographer of Bernard Berenson and of Kenneth Clark gives us now a complete and complex portrait of an American titan, Frank Lloyd Wright. Meryle Secrest shows us Frank Lloyd Wright in full scale - the brilliant, outrageous, fascinating man; the giant who changed modern architecture; the standard-bearer for the new, quintessentially American vision; the artist who never, during a seventy-year career, abandoned his principles of design; the radical, the. Bohemian - the visionary who was one of the central figures of twentieth-century American culture, society and politics. We see Frank Lloyd Wright's Midwestern boyhood - the son of a Harvard-educated preacher/musician/circuit rider ... his seven-year apprenticeship with the great Louis Sullivan ... his three marriages - the first at twenty-one to a Chicago society woman and dutiful wife; the second to a woman slightly mad; the third to a fiercely independent woman: an. Acolyte of Gurdjieff, a dancer, a woman who was Wright's counterpart and peer. We see Wright's evolution from impeccably dressed young architect, living in the right suburb, cultivating rich clients, to true bohemian living by his own rules. Meryle Secrest follows the course of Wright's struggle against all that was middlebrow in America - his opposition to the architectural trend that resulted in "coffin-like houses and topless towers" and his insistence on expressing. The unique in human experience. We see Wright creating his famous and seminal houses, among them the Winslow house he designed at age twenty-seven ... his long-dreamed-of Taliesin (when it burned to the ground, set blaze by an insane servant, Wright rebuilt it on the same spot) ... the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (the only building left standing after the 1923 earthquake) ... the famous Fallingwater ... the mammoth and idiosyncratic Guggenheim Museum in New York ... Meryle Secrest is. The first biographer to have full access to the Frank Lloyd Wright Archives. Her life of the architect, more than five years' work and illustrated with 121 photographs, is a stunning feat of biographical narrative, sustained analysis and compassionate insight. With her extraordinary grasp of the man and his art, she gives us Frank Lloyd Wright close up - a creature of boundless energy and indomitable appetite for experience, a man whose limitless belief in his own. Rightness carried him through bankruptcy, arrest, fire, divorce and years of social ostracism. A riveting portrait of a genius.

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R. Tripp Evans

He claimed to be “the plainest kind of fellow you can find. There isn’t a single thing I’ve done, or experienced,” said Grant Wood, “that’s been even the least bit exciting.” Wood was one of America’s most famous regionalist painters; to love his work was the equivalent of loving America itself. In his time, he was an “almost mythical figure,” recognized most supremely for his hard-boiled farm scene, American Gothic, a painting that has come to reflect the essence of America’s traditional values—a simple, decent, homespun tribute to our lost agrarian age. In this major new biography of America’s most acclaimed, and misunderstood, regionalist painter, Grant Wood is revealed to have been anything but plain, or simple . . . R. Tripp Evans reveals the true complexity of the man and the image Wood so carefully constructed of himself. Grant Wood called himself a farmer-painter but farming held little interest for him. He appeared to be a self-taught painter with his scenes of farmlands, farm workers, and folklore but he was classically trained, a sophisticated artist who had studied the Old Masters and Flemish art as well as impressionism. He lived a bohemian life and painted in Paris and Munich in the 1920s, fleeing what H. L. Mencken referred to as “the booboisie” of small-town America.

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Giorgio Vasari

In his Lives of the Artists of the Italian Renaissance, Vasari demonstrated a literary talent that outshone even his outstanding abilities as a painter and architect. Through character sketches and anecdotes he depicts Piero di Cosimo shut away in his derelict house, living only to paint; Giulio Romano's startling painting of Jove striking down the giants; and his friend Francesco Salviati, whose biography also tells us much about Vasari's own early career. Vasari's original and soaring vision plus his acute aesthetic judgements have made him one of the most influential art historians of all time.