"The hidden past, of course, does not yield easily ..."

We are very pleased to announce the e-book publication of Patricia Vigderman's wonderful book, The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner! The book is a literary, philosophical, and personal look at the life of nineteenth-century art patron Isabella Stewart Gardner and the wonderfully eccentric museum she created in Boston. It consists of a series of fifty, interwoven, written vignettes. Each uses a particular object in the Gardner Museum's collection as a starting point, but Vigderman then smartly and often surprisingly diverges from there. Excerpted here is the second such vignette in the book. In its object selection and two brief paragraphs, it manages to capture so much of what makes Isabella Stewart Gardner and her museum so utterly fascinating to us today, that it convinced us immediately to publish the book. Enjoy!

Degas, La Sortie de Pesage [referred to as Leaving the Paddock], Pencil and watercolor on paper, 10 x 16 cm. Short Gallery, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. (Stolen, March 18, 1990.)

Leaving the Paddock

Faced with the difficulty of penetrating a past world using the eyes of the present, historians and biographers follow the clues left behind. In Mrs. Gardner’s case, there’s that huge footprint on the Fenway, but she also spent the mornings of her later years burning her personal papers so as to keep the snoops of the future from interpreting her life according to their own lights. This kind of effort to control public image inevitably invites speculation on what lies behind it. And then, if after death what’s left “for the education and enjoyment of the public forever” is an immense Venetian palazzo filled with priceless works of art arranged entirely according to private aesthetic purposes, and if further specified in this legacy is that nothing in it can be changed or moved or else the whole thing has to be auctioned off in Paris and the proceeds given to Harvard College, this is just asking for gossip from the future. These were her directives; her motives, like so much about her, are concealed. The combination keeps open the temptation to shake off her will, to fill in the blanks.

The hidden past, of course, does not yield easily, not least because telling its stories also requires translating its language into that of the present. And then, the telling itself becomes part of a larger struggle to dissolve the boundaries between past and present. Entering from the busy Fenway into the quiet light of her great courtyard is deceptively simple. Finding her and her days among the works in her high rooms is elusive, seductive, frustrating—finally self-surprising.

This season's big artist biography

In case you've somehow missed it, this season's "big artist biography"* is now out, Modigliani: A Life, by Meryle Secrest. Generally, and perhaps unsurprisingly given Secrest's rich body of work (including her 1979 book on collector and connoisseur Bernard Berenson, which is terrific) this new work is being generally well received, and for Modigliani or artist biography fans, seems well worth a read.

There are plenty of reviews to read as well, but Christopher Benfey in Slate captures the main critical points of many of them: "On the whole, Secrest seems more comfortable with details of Modigliani's life than with his art … But Secrest's primary aim is not a fresh take on Modigliani's art. Instead, she wishes to destroy, once and for all, what she calls the "legend" of his life." And ultimately, "it's not from the realm of legend that she wants to rescue Modigliani. She just wants a different legend, one that reflects better on the man she rightly admires."

Lance Esplund in the Wall Street Journal, is perhaps most critical of the biography, and more particularly of Modigliani's worthiness as a subject, concluding: "Unfortunately, Modigliani was at the center of one of the most inventive and turbulent periods in European art and history. Much more interesting things were happening in the lives and work of other artists, and in the city of Paris and the world at large, than in the life and art of Modigliani."

And for a different take, check out Brian Boucher's interview with Secrest in Art in America.

* Seemingly every spring and fall, Knopf publishes a single, big, artist biography that, like many of its books, gets the full-court press of book reviews and reading attention (Evans' Grant Wood last season, Wullschläger's Chagall not too long before that). We don't begrudge Knopf or the biographers for it, and many of the books have been extremely terrific (Richardson's Picasso, Spurling's Matisse) but still, it's a strange pattern.