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A01=Guy Davenport
A01=Judith Thurman
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A Balthus Notebook

English

By (author): Guy Davenport Judith Thurman

In his 1989 book on Balthusthe storied and controversial artist who worked in Paris throughout the twentieth centuryGuy Davenport gives one of the most nuanced, literary, and compelling readings of the work of this master. Reading it today highlights the change in perspectives on sexuality and nudity in art in the past thirty years.

Written over several years in his notebooks, Davenports distinct reflections on Balthuss paintings try to explain why his work is so radical, and why it has so often come under scrutiny for its depiction of girls and women. Davenport throws the lens back on the viewer and asks: is it us or Balthus who reads sexuality into these paintings? For Davenport, the answer is clear: Balthus may indeed show us periods in adolescent development that are uncomfortable to view, but the eroticization exists primarily on the part of the viewer.

Arguing that Balthuss figures are erotic only if we make them so, and that their innocence is more present than anything pornographic in them, Davenport posits that the paintings hold up a mirror to our own perversities and force us, difficultly, to confront them. He writes, The nearer an artist works to the erotic politics of his own culture, the more he gets its concerned attention. Gauguins naked Polynesian girls, brown and remote, escape the scandal of Balthuss, although a Martian observer would not see the distinction. Davenports critique helps us understand Balthus in our timessomething we need more than ever as we crucially confront sexual politics in visual art. See more
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Product Details
  • Weight: 100g
  • Dimensions: 108 x 178mm
  • Publication Date: 02 Jul 2020
  • Publisher: David Zwirner
  • Publication City/Country: United States
  • Language: English
  • ISBN13: 9781644230329

About Guy DavenportJudith Thurman

Guy Davenport (19272005) was born in Anderson South Carolina and educated at Duke Harvard and Merton College Oxford. He won the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a MacArthur Fellow. The author of over thirty books of fiction essay poetry and translations he was also a visual artist who frequently illustrated his own work. A selection of work from the American original polymath can be found in The Guy Davenport Reader (2013). Judith Thurman is a widely published literary critic cultural journalist and translator of poetry. She is the author of Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller (1982)which won the 1983 National Book Award for nonfiction and served as the basis for Sydney Pollacks movie Out of Africaand Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (1999) the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography and the Salon Book Award for biography. She began contributing to The New Yorker in 1987 and became a staff writer in 2000. Her story on Yves Saint Laurent was chosen for The Best American Essays of 2003. Lucas Zwirner is Head of Content at David Zwirner. He is known for creating the ekphrasis series dedicated to publishing short texts on visual culture by artists and writers rarely available in English. He has also written on numerous contemporary artists and translated books from German and French.

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