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by Patricia Vigderman

Patricia Vigderman History and Criticism English

eBook The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner download

ISBN: 1932511431
Author: Patricia Vigderman
Publisher: Sarabande Books (February 1, 2007)
Language: English
Pages: 152
ePub: 1274 kb
Fb2: 1404 kb
Rating: 4.9
Other formats: docx txt lit mbr
Category: Literature
Subcategory: History and Criticism

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The Memory Palace of Isab. has been added to your Cart. The book then digressed into Ms. Vigderman's own soap boxes and tangents that had little to do with Isabella Stewart Gardner and more to do with Vigderman's own personal philosophies

The Memory Palace of Isab. Vigderman's own soap boxes and tangents that had little to do with Isabella Stewart Gardner and more to do with Vigderman's own personal philosophies. Throughout the book, the voice in the writing was alternately snarky/gossipy and han-thou. I think that Vigderman intended to come across as intellectual, but in the end she only came across as self-congratulatory, smug, and condescending.

Five Excerpts from The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner 2. C'EST MON PLASIR Inscription over central entrance portal When this nouveau European . The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner. C'EST MON PLASIR Inscription over central entrance portal When this nouveau European palace . Writing about the life of someone both long dead and flamboyant offers to be an ambiguous pleasure. On the one hand, the past is an impenetrable mystery; on the other, colorful evidence is irresistible. In the case of Isabella Stewart Gardner, the evidence even has its own institution: Fenway Court, the museum she built and filled, a very personal monument to art and to her own memory.

Patricia Vigderman grew up in Washington, . It should be offered everywhere indeed, and at every museum shop on earth.

Start by marking The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner as Want to Read .

Start by marking The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner as Want to Read: Want to Read savin. ant to Read. Lyndall Gordon What a great pleasure this gorgeous little book has given me!

What is known about the Isabella Stewart Gardner heist-the single largest property theft in the world. The return of the Gardner’s works remains a top priority. The Museum continues to actively investigate the theft and works in partnership with the FBI and the US Attorney’s Office

What is known about the Isabella Stewart Gardner heist-the single largest property theft in the world. The Museum continues to actively investigate the theft and works in partnership with the FBI and the US Attorney’s Office.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts, which houses significant examples of European, Asian, and American art. Its collection includes paintings, sculpture, tapestries, and decorative arts. It is originally the home of Isabella Stewart Gardner, whose will called for her art collection be permanently exhibited "for the education and enjoyment of the public forever". An auxiliary wing, adjacent to the original structure near the Back Bay Fens, was completed in 2012.

Isabella Gardner's high spirits and aesthetic pleasure, her women friends and female power, her friendships with the adventurers and aesthetes of her world, are gathered into this engrossing investigation of patronage and passion

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Isabella Gardner’s high spirits and aesthetic pleasure, her women friends and female power, her friendships with the adventurers and aesthetes of her world, are gathered into this engrossing investigation of patronage and passion. Read on the Scribd mobile app. Download the free Scribd mobile app to read anytime, anywhere.

Author of Possibilities and The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner. The Real Life of The Parthenon. rigorous insistence on understanding her subject as she really was rather than as a prefiguration of present-day concerns leads her to acknowledge a certain remoteness, and to rely as much as possible on.

“A searching, sensitive, and engagingly witty meditation.” —Lyndall Gordon “What a great pleasure this gorgeous little book has given me! It should be offered everywhere indeed, and at every museum shop on earth.”—Honor Moore A fascinating meditation on art and personality, Patricia Vigderman’s exploration of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s famous Boston museum radiates out from its subject to investigate Garnder’s legacy of luxury and willfulness. Isabella Gardner’s high spirits and aesthetic pleasure, her women friends and female power, her friendships with the adventurers and aesthetes of her world, are gathered into this engrossing investigation of patronage and passion. Blending biography, memoir, philosophy, and detective story, The Memory Palace is more than a tribute to the museum and the woman; it is an altogether new genre. Vigderman’s witty and intimate quest for her subject sets a literary precedent for the appreciation of artistic imagination. Loosening up the past, entering its mysteries and its memories, she reminds us that we change our lives when we begin a relationship with art. Patricia Vigderman grew up in Washington, D.C., and Europe. She graduated from Vassar College, after which a circuitous course led her through editing, translating, freelance journalism, teaching, marriage, motherhood, divorce, a doctoral dissertation (on nineteenth-century novels as film, as history, and as autobiography), and a lot of time in museums. Her recent writing has appeared in The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, Northwest Review, Raritan, Seneca Review, and Southwest Review. She divides her year between Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Gambier, Ohio, where she teaches in the English department at Kenyon College. She is married to the writer Lewis Hyde.

Comments: (4)

Doomwarden

Neither a biography nor a guide to the collection, but rather a meditation on the identity, the soul, of Isabella Stewart Gardner, this small volume is Vigderman's attempt to understand, through her collection, why Gardner collected what she did, why she displayed it the way she did, why she left it to the public the way she did.

This is a stroll through the Museum, pausing here and there, thinking about this piece or that. How does it fit with that piece over there? What might it have meant to Mrs. Gardner? Who urged her to acquire it and how was that person important to ISG? That is the structure of the book, in three parts, each broken down into smaller sections headed with the title of a work, its author and date. Something about that work inspires and speaks of the words that will follow. Thus, Helleu's Woman Threading a Needle calls forth thoughts of how Gardner "threaded the needle" through a world where wealth and status did not necessarily allow a woman to "make her way into the kingdom of books" to one where she found "pleasant lifelong learning".

As Vigderman wanders through those rooms and corridors, she talks to us about Bernard Berenson, whose career ISG helped launch. We learn of art politics, and in-fighting in the lofty rooms of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. And, finally, Vigderman, joins old Boston and the clutter of Victoriana with the simplicity and grace of the Japanese tea ceremony through the figure of Okakura Kakuzo, first head of the MFA's Asian Arts department, and author of that book of philosophy, The Book of Tea. (The postscript, An Invitation to Tea, follows the form of the other three parts, but each subsection is headed with a caption of an illustration from the Kodansha International edition of that book.)

In the end, do we know more of Gardner than we did before we began? I think we do. Vigderman's digressive musings help to understand how ISG was both a product of, and a rebel against, her time and place.

Why this book is not available at the Gardner Museum's bookshop is beyond my comprehension.

Waiso

I have a few words for you: Pompous. Presumptuous. Pretentious. Ponderous. I'm an admirer of Isabella Stewart Gardner and a frequent visitor to the museum, so I was hoping that this book would refresh some of the details that I'd heard during the tours and lectures, and perhaps teach me something new. In addition, the concept of a more free-form, organic approach to studying Gardner's life, as promised by the book description, was intriguing to me. The concept was excellent, but the delivery was awful. I was so disappointed. Instead, Vigderman devoted the first few chapters of the book to arrogantly and systematically trashing Gardner's other biographers. Post-trashing, the writing was aimless; instead of using the documents and accounts of Gardner's friends to fill in the blanks of an intriguing life, they only served to misdirect and confuse. The book then digressed into Ms. Vigderman's own soap boxes and tangents that had little to do with Isabella Stewart Gardner and more to do with Vigderman's own personal philosophies. Throughout the book, the voice in the writing was alternately snarky/gossipy and pursed-lips-holier-than-thou. I think that Vigderman intended to come across as intellectual, but in the end she only came across as self-congratulatory, smug, and condescending. Sadly, the story of Isabella got lost in the nonsense.

Note: I am not an author (rival or otherwise), I read the entire book before posting my review, and I have never given a 1-star review before. I just want other potential buyers to be forewarned about this book before they purchase.

Ausstan

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