Welcome to Shelf Talkers! I'm Mic. I'm Suzanne.
And last week after we had our
discussion we usually
put the books back that we've been
talking about. And we found ourselves
just kind of walking in the art section
here at the Downtown Branch and Suzanne
came up with this brilliant idea
of why don't we talk about our four
favorite paintings.
To help illustrate the kind of art books
that are in our collection.
So that's what we're going to talk about
today. Um,
my first one, my favorite,
is "Vernon Lee" a painting by John Singer
Sargent,
very famous portrait artist. And I'm
about to show you the pictures the
camera operator is...
quietly this is the
painting. Is that helpful? "Vernon Lee" done
about 1881.
As you're probably familiar with John
Singer Sargent was well known for his
portraits.
And this is an example of one of those.
He tended to do very realistic ones, um,
not ideological, but in this case it was
very candid.
Very quick motions. I like those that's
one of the things i like about Vermeer
as I'll show....
A bit more impressionist than his
other paintings and he tended to use
whatever style fit the mood.
I think then the one specific style. If I
lived
in an, uh, Renaissance Italy I would be an
art patron and just pay people to paint
my portraits and just hang them all over my house.
Because I would love to
to have a portrait because could you
imagine having a portrait of yourself
painted
by somebody. I mean that's a lot of time
and effort. I can't stand to be filmed
so I don't think I would like it.
I don't know...
I would just like to have the the final
product to hang on my wall so I could be
like 'that artist made that for me!'
But the reason I like this one, um, it's
called "Vernon Lee" which was the
pseudonym
that this writer went by. Her actual name,
I always forget,
was Violet Paige. She was a writer. She
wrote about Italian Renaissance art.
Oh! She lived in Nice about the same time
that Sargent did so they were friends
and had been friends for a long time.
Following artist friends apparently.
And if you're interested in other books
by and about Sargent,
let me put this over here, we do have
"Sargent's Women: Four Lives Behind the
Canvas" by Donna M. Lucey, and we have
"The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris" 
by David McCullough.
Both will give you more insight into not
only that artist, but other artists at
that time.
So, what's next? Oh! So,
another of my favorite paintings is
about, uh, a not so
well-known artist from the Dutch golden
age period.
Her name was Judith Leyster and this
took place about
1639. She did,
let me show you the painting, it's called
"The Last Drop" which is a very good
description of this
painting. Can you see it? Um, this was.
She was an interesting artist. She did,
she was the daughter of a
a brew person called there was a bruce
um brewman.
Brewmaster? Yes, very good. So she did
what you would call
genre painting at that time. She did
happy musicians, raucous groups at breweries,
and this one.
Uh, based on the details from the
painting was taken the night before Lent.
And it seems like people drank to make
up for the fact that they were about to
have to abstain for a period of
time. (laughs) This is, I guess, you would say they
would they love doing genre and talking
about
things that were actually happening in
daily life at that time.
But there was always a bit of a social
statement going on
and in this case the consequences of
overindulgence.
The two are so over indulged
that they don't realize the presence of
the skeleton
holding ominously an hourglass in one
hand
and a skull in the other. I love her work.
I like the use of light in hers. 
Yes.
A little gossip about the painting,
somebody later on didn't like the
skeleton so they painted over it.
Oh!! It was until later when they did some
scientific work that they found it.
Well, I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri/
Kansas. And one of the favorite artists
at my, um,
museum that I grew up with called The
Nelson-Atkins Museum,
was Thomas Hart Benton, a muralist.
I think you would call him, uh,
uh, what would you call man,
sort of a regionalist, I think. He focused
mainly
on average Americans and their daily
life,
but he did it in such a way that it's
hard to describe him.
And this is the painting that I really
like, wasn't at the museum.
He loved murals. Murals are very heavy!
This one's called "Achelous and Hercules"
and
it's talking about the famous battle
where Hercules and Achelous is taking, um, during the
flooding season.
He would take the image of a bull
and in the battle Hercules would tear
off one of the horns to kill it.
And that became the Horn of Plenty.
So, this, Benton loved the Midwest.
So here he's talking about how the
Corps of Engineers were trying to
tame the Missouri River. And it also
talks about Truman's
Marshall Plan and sending abundance of
food over to Europe.
And he always tells a story in his
paintings.
And do you see the usually very vivid
colors?
The figures are often writhing and very
sculpted. I love his work.
I like things that tell stories. 
I had never heard of him until you
chose him, and after looking at the
art book so... I just really. (laughs)
And last but not least,
my favorite of all time that I've never
discovered until
when I started working at the bookstore
here in town.
The painting in here is called "Vertumnus"
by Gisueppe Arcimboldo.
And I guess you would call him a
fanciful portraiture person. And that
is called "Vertumnus." Arcimboldo was
really, like, I was as a child very into
nature studies. So he didn't start that
at the beginning of his career, but after
a while he started to do some
interesting portraits where he used
animals, plants, fruits, vegetables,
um, in a very fanciful way and in this
case he's doing Rudolf II,
who was this patron, and it wasn't very
popular at the time.
This is supposed to illustrate like
returnness.
The bountiful results
of Rudolph's reign which could be
interesting.
I know, I just, this book is called "The
Masters of Deception" by Al Seckel.
It also talks about Escher and
other illusionists
and I just love his work too. I really
like the painting on the front of that
book where it's the
the ship that's clouds and a ship and
a bridge. Oh yeah, yeah,
that's I really like that one too.
Okay that's all I have now. Before we go
to mine, I just really want to point out
all of her bookmarks.
So one of them was a post-it note, um, one
of them was a due date card,
one of them is a number flash card.
There's a test you can take to tell what
kind of reader or person you are based
on whatever bookmark happens... 
Oh my gosh how
old is this?!
This is our logo from several logos
ago. So I just I brought somebody that's what
I just said when I saw the flash card, we have to talk about this. (laughs)
Okay so for my art books, um,
I also chose artists that I was, uh,
fond of.
Uh, my first one is Caravaggio. This is a
really neat art book. It's from DK so
there's not really like an author or an
editor
but what's really neat about it is they
take some of his paintings and dissect
them
and explain like how it was constructed.
They'll pull out details and everything
so there's also sections in here where
they talk about the golden ratio and
everything.
Which i find... it's so important to how
they
the paintings became classics.
Something at that time that we don't
understand now.
Yes, but it's also so important like I
can't paint
for to save my life but i love
photography.
And a lot of the same concepts of
photography
are in classic paintings and so this
will sort of break it down. And I chose
this one because I just one of the
things i love about Caravaggio
is his detail on faces and it's
it might be kind of hard to see because
this book is really small i wish it was
bigger.
Um, but the detail of Mary and Jesus that just to me she looks
so peaceful and kind holding
her her child while there's all this
stuff going on around.
I just I love it. I love the furrowed
brow. I love
the the face the sleeping child like
just his detail
is just phenomenal and so um I've always
been a fan
I've seen a lot of Caravaggio's painting
highly detailed.
What I didn't realize was how crazy his
life was.
So, I was looking for a book to go with
it and i found this
biography, um, from
let's see, Peter Robb called "M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio"
and dude's life was crazy. Like you think
artists get into some stuff but like
Caravaggio,
there is death; there is love ;there is on
the run.
Let's see, uh, "Rob presents Caravaggio's
death in a gripping scenario of sexual
vendetta,
betrayal, ambush, and state collusion."
So, who knew. So I thought that was
a very interesting uh biography of a man
that I apparently knew absolutely
nothing about.
So one of the artists that I've always
been a fan of for as long as I can
remember
is Monet. Uh, his
water lily paintings you see everywhere
and I've just
always been so just enthralled by his
impressionist style.
And I was so amazed to find this one.
This is
"Monet by Himself" edited by Richard
Kendall.
And what's great about this is it
is narrated with letters written
by Claude Monet to friends and family
discussing his work discussing his life
and then it's illustrated with some of
the work. Like
there's one is it the one, that I marked?
No it's not of course.
Uh, there's one where he's writing about
his wife having just passed and he had
made a painting of her on her deathbed.
So there's letters where he talks about
how bereft he is and
how he's just so distraught over his
wife's death and then there's the
painting.
It really puts it in a whole different
context. But the painting I
marked so when I think Monet I think of
his gardens.
And the painting I marked is actually a
portrait that he had done.
"Madame Gaudibert" I think I just
butchered that. I apologize all you
British speakers.
So the reason I chose this one is
because
when I think of Monet I guess I'm
thinking of his later period where he
was going blind and so everything's kind
of fuzzy
and very impressionistic. This is just
the sumptuousness of the fabric like you
can tell
the the folds in the fabric the detail
of the texture on her shawl.
I just didn't know Monet was capable of
doing that and so it was really
interesting for me to to see that and to
read the letters and everything. I just
thought that was a really
book. Then to go with it we've got one
called
"Mad Enchantment: Cluade Monet and the Painting of the Water Lillies" by Ross
King.
This is about Monet's later life.
Everybody had kind of
counted him out and then he came back
with what's considered some of his most
famous work
of the water lillies. And so this kind of
details
that. And so it's a very interesting read.
My next artist is another Dutch master
to go with Leyster.
It's Vermeer. Um, I was fortunate enough
to get to see an exhibit of his work in
Atlanta
several years ago. And it was
magic. It wasn't just Vermeer. It was a
group of Dutch masters
but what I love about Vermeer
it's sort of the same thing you said
about Sargent where he's capturing
candid moments.
And so this one is "Officer and Laughing
Girl."
Yeah look at him like it just captures a
moment.
It's that he's in shadow you can just
barely see his face
but you can tell the conversation is
something enjoyable because she's
clearly laughing.
And the light coming through the window
and the detail on the map. So apparently
I didn't realize until I read this art
book in this handy dandy little
section right here somebody found the
historical map
that that is based off of and it is
incredibly accurate
in Vermeer's painting. So it's just
Vermeer
captured detail and light in such a way
it feels like they could almost walk off
the the painting. And they're hundreds of
years old.
And that just to me was
so amazing and the book that I chose to
go with it is an
interesting one it's called "Vermeer's
Camera." And it
theorizes that Vermeer used a
pinhole camera obscura to
capture this scene before he painted it.
The details.
That's how he got the light so spot
on perfect and the detail so spot on
perfect.
There's not a lot of proof it's a good
theory
uh, but it would make sense so I just I
thought that was very interesting.
So that would be even more fascinating
if you didn't. Yeah
and he just was painting. I don't know, um,
but his paintings are beautiful and this
is a beautiful book.
Because they're big. I like when I have
an art book, I like big paintings. I want
to pretend like I can just dive in.
And for my last one is Gustav Klimt.
He was a art nouveau artist ,um,
and this book has so many paintings. I
had a really hard time picking
just one. I ended up going with
this one which is study for "Allegory of
Tragedy"
and I just, I just loved it. I loved
Klimt's portraits with I feel like they
show
the personality as well as the person's
like features. And it just, I just love it.
I love the
hint of gold; the black and white. I just,
I could not resist that one. So that, that
was the one
I chose to highlight. But really all of
Klimt's work
is just absolutely beautiful. Um,
for the book to go with it.
This is very interesting. I did not know
all of this about.
Uh, the painting. So this one is called
"The Lady in Gold"
by Anne-Marie O'Connor and it's about a
particular painting by Klimt.
It's the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer.
Um, so Adele Bloch-Bauer was a
Jewish socialite in Vienna
and she hosted salons. She was a big
patron of the arts.
So Klimt painted a portrait of her. Well
when
the Nazis took over they didn't want to
get rid of this beautiful portrait. So
they stole it,
renamed it, and put it on display as an
example
of German greatness. So the  Bloch-Bauers
were have, had to sue to get it back
after the war. And to give it back its
true name which is the "Portrait
of Adele Bloch-Bauer." And so this is the
story
of of that painting from
inception to theft to
return to the original family. So
it's it's a fascinating story that
I didn't know anything about.
So, uh, I think that's all my art books
but I just, I just love
art. And so looking at all of these books
was just a delight.
And we have, uh, the library system has
quite a collection.
And we've just received some donated
books that i'm going through so
we should be adding to the collection as
well. Now if you really want to get into
this and you're into
courses, we do have some Great Courses
that deal with the topics.
We have "Masterpieces of American Art," uh, "The Dutch Masters: The Age of
Rembrandt," and "A History of European Art."
If you really really want to get into
the subject matter.
Yeah those all look good. So I think
that's all we have this week.
Um, I enjoyed it. Yes! And um, we'll see you
next time!
Bye!
