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If you need or want to know the truth, read this book. Hemingway sure made a seductive myth about himself. We don't fault him for improving on the truth. The Hemingway version is fun to read but this one is fun too.
By the way, Callaghan wrote an outstanding short story called "Luke Baldwin's Vow." You can see why Hemingway thought highly of him.
The incident gave me thought for The Tower & The River. What if Glenn hadn't resigned and decided to fight the system? Of course, I wrote my novel before Glenn decided to go back in space. In the novel I send Glenn, or Major Grant Thompson, USMC, as I called him, to Paris to join the office of the Naval Attache for propaganda reasons. His desire to return to space is the conflict that he has to resolve.
Essays on topics related to the subject are preceded by text written by the editor and exhibit curator, Cornelia Homberg, ("Vincent van Gogh's Avant-Garde Strategies"). Homberg suggests the 'petit boulevard' was both an avant garde artistic movement following the Impressionists and an actual commercial location in Paris at the end of the 19th Century. The Exhibit featured works by members of the avant garde group (Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat, Signac, Pissaro, Toulous-Latrec, Anquetin, Bernard and others "petit" artists).
Homberg challenges the notion that Vincent van Gogh always worked alone and that his art was a "one-off" as other critics have suggested. She says Van Gogh was a member of an artists colony located in the vicinity rue Lepic where he lived with his brother Theo (Montmartre area), that he may have coined the phrase "Petit Boulevard" (he discussed it with Theo in their letters following his removal to Arles), and he saw himself as a leader of this innovative group (which he hoped to bring to Arles as a "brotherhood" of artists).
In his essay entitled "The Cultural Geography of the Petit Boulevard" Richard Thomas describes the material dimensions of the place and time within which the "petit boulevard" artists worked. He describes the "off-off-Broadway/Bourbon Street" atmosphere of the bohemian artistic community -- a proletarian territory dominated by factories, caberets, taverns, le circque, brothels, and other down scale establishments (Chat Noir, Molin Rouge) where 'decadent iconograpy' was born. He says artists such as Toulouse Latrec, Steinlin, Willith, and others developed commercial prints depicting this mileau.
In the third essay, Elizabeth Childs describes the escape of Gauguin and Seurat to Pont Aven and Van Gogh to Arles following their Paris adventures. Here the artists hoped to reconnect with the timeless cycles of nature and leave the crass, commercial, class-ridden city behind. Childs says once Gauguin reached Pont Aven, the Celtic Catholic nature of Brittany spurred Gauguin to develop a medieval stain-glass cloisonnist style of art. She contrasts Gauguin's work with Van Gogh's 'rural' art which he based on a love of Japanese prints (by Hiroshege and others) and what he fancied to be Japanese culture, as well as the Barbizon style which included Daumier and Millet. In the last essay, John House discusses landscapes by Van Gogh (who influenced by his Dutch predecessor Rembrandt and the French Millet) as well as other artists of the period including Gauguin.
The book is filled beautiful reproductions of the paintings and other works included in the Exhibit (prints and photographs of the various items of art, the people involved, and the places they lived and worked). Sadly, one would have to do quite a bit of traveling to recapitulate the Exhibit, and then the synergistic effect would be missing. On the other hand, the book is a solid testament to the art that followed Impressionism. Although I had seen many of the paintings in their home museums (National Gallery, Chicago Art Institute, D'Orsay, Van Gogh Museum, etc.) I had not seen some of the works in private hands, nor the photographs of the period. This book is a valuable addition to my collection.
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