Antoine's Alphabet (eBook)

Jed Perl (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2008 | 1. Auflage
224 Seiten
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (Verlag)
978-0-307-27045-0 (ISBN)

Infos

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 Czanne, 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.

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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.

Textauszug

AActors. For Watteau, life is a casting call, an audition, a rehearsal, a coaching session, an intermission, an opening-night party, a day spent in idleness after the play has shut down. Although Watteau's paintings are saturated with the life of the theater--with figures in theatrical costumes, with theatrical gestures, with richly decorated porticoes and loggias that suggest the contained world of the stage--the more I look at his paintings, the more forcibly it's brought to mind how few of his characters are actually onstage. The strictly delimited world of the stage is too readily comprehensible to really interest Watteau. An actor on a stage is a personality, a figure, and Watteau is fascinated, above all else, by the impossibility of ever being sure of who you are, at least for more than a very brief time. He is a master of in-between situations, less interested in life as a stage than in the preparations for going onstage, or how actors feel after they've made their exits. It's not the performer in performance so much as the mentality of the performer that fascinates him. He's obsessed with maskings and unmaskings, with grand gestures and whispered asides, with the moment of disarming honesty that is set in sharp contrast to the actor's generally armored personality. And he views such behavior--the histrionics and the feints, the approaches and the withdrawals--not as characteristic of actors in particular but as typical of men and women in general.

Antony. At the time of his death in 1721 at the age of thirty-six, Watteau was a famous figure in Paris, with his share of devoted friends. The nuggets of reliable information about his life, however, are few and far between, so that every attempt to construct a biography from what scattered facts there are appears bound to fail. In accounts of Watteau's life, the artist himself is always at best caught in the process of disappearing from view, and it is the genius of Walter Pater's portrait of Watteau, 'A Prince of Court Painters,' that in assembling and readjusting some of the facts of the artist's life, this English essayist whose work is at once so luxuriant and so severe, constructs a fable about Watteau that is truer to what we feel when we're looking at his paintings and drawings than a more straightforward account could possibly be. Published in 1885 in Macmillan's Magazine and later included in the collection Imaginary Portraits, Pater's essay is a masterpiece of oblique storytelling. By relating the triumphs of Watteau's Parisian career from the vantage point of a childhood friend, a young woman who remains in what amounts to the backstage or offstage world of Watteau's hometown of Valenciennes in northeastern France, Pater imagines Watteau himself as the archetypal in-between figure. For Marie-Marguerite, the narrator of the story, this man whom she knows as Antony and with whom she has been in love since they were children appears to be at home neither in the Valenciennes that he left to make his fortune and to which he occasionally returns nor in the glittery Parisian world that Marie-Marguerite can barely comprehend.

Pater's portrait, subtitled 'Extracts from an Old French Journal,' is a craftily constructed story, and not the least of the craft has to do with the fact that Pater's fictional journal keeper was also a real person whose surname happened to be Pater. Marie-Marguerite was the daughter of the Valenciennes sculptor Antoine Pater, who was a friend of Watteau's. Marie-Marguerite, in Walter Pater's telling, is watchful, discriminating, gently sentimental, fiercely insightful, a bit of a goody-goody, a bit of a priss. She is far too passionate and intelligent...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 9.9.2008
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile
• Themenwelt: Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Malerei / Plastik
• ISBN-10: 0-307-27045-9 / 0307270459
• ISBN-13: 978-0-307-27045-0 / 9780307270450