BOOKED! (3)

BOOKED! (3)

“The world is so full of a number of things,
I ’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” –Robert Louis Stevenson

About a week ago I serendipitously stumbled upon a sale at the LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) store.  What luck! Despite the fact that I had just reorganized our books to make room for them all, I found myself perusing the bins of books on sale, and choosing four at $5.00 each. It can take just but this kind of experience to make us feel rich. In this and the next post, I share them with you…dear Readers and fellow passionate pursuers. My choices included discoveries and a “visit” from an old friend…

I had not heard of art historian Alessandra Comini, but now that I have her book, I hope to passionately pursue her writing.  “Her lively revisionist work in the history of women artists was acknowledged in 1995 by the Women’s Caucus for Art with the coveted Lifetime Achievement Award.”  –http://www.alessandracomini.com/biography.asp#

In Passionate Pursuit, by Comini.

Booklist: “This erudite, mostly engaging self-portrait charts the making of an art historian and
professional “seer,” whose passion and wit enabled her to become a noted teacher and scholar at Southern Methodist University. Comini helped unearth centuries of overlooked women in art and wrote landmark studies of the Austrian painter Egon Schiele and of musical iconography. For someone engaged in a life of the mind, she has lived much of it in motion, and the art of travel and close consideration of cultural context have been her keys to learning and teaching. She is at her riveting best when she reveals her discoveries about Schiele in his Vienna prison cell, Winckelmann in Rome and Trieste, the composer Edvard Grieg in Norway, and the painter Akseli Gallen-Kalella in Finland. Her short essays dazzle the most when they reveal her keen eye, such as when she discerns how the German artist Kathe Kollwitz, in a bust of herself, “used the resolute features of her own aging face as a spiritual topography for courage and resignation.”

I gave away an over-sized  book on Georgia O’Keeffe that I had for years before moving, in an effort to downsize. This little gem on Georgia will be easy to have, hold, and refer to. Written for children(?), it is easy to read, and packed with word and image.

Perhaps everyone’s (artist-identified or not) “old friend”,  O’Keeffe never ceases to be magical and inspirational.

As well as mysterious…

Her environment.

Her work.

Written in simple language, punctuated by photographs and images of O’Keeffe’s wide and  wondrous  work through the years, this find by Susan Goldman Rubin will ensure that wideness and wonder stay close at hand.

  Carl Larsson and Karin Bergoo Larsson were a Swedish husband and wife artist team who created an amazing home for themselves and their children, depicted in this book, Carl Larsson-garden.  This book will light up anyone moved by color, decorative painting, art, interior, surface and  garden design, architecture, or just the concept and expression of “home”.

I will explore this book, and the one below, in greater depth in my next post.

Intricate designs, whimsical figures of animals and people, and rows of heads with open mouths and earrings are some of the intriguing delights to be found in this LACMA publication from 1977!   I wish I could have seen this exhibition….

These are just a few of the rich treasures these books offer up.  They are the gifts that keep on giving…revealing more and more as they are perused, and revisited. I am looking forward to sharing further in the next post, though there is never enough time. Perhaps that is why many of us remain in “passionate pursuit”…