Patricia Vigderman
Autore di The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner
Sull'Autore
Fonte dell'immagine: Photo by Susan Wilson, from author's website
Serie
Opere di Patricia Vigderman
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Nome canonico
- Vigderman, Patricia
- Sesso
- female
- Luogo di residenza
- Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
- Istruzione
- Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, USA
Tufts University (PhD.) - Attività lavorative
- author
professor
art historian - Relazioni
- Hyde, Lewis (husband)
Utenti
Recensioni
Statistiche
- Opere
- 3
- Utenti
- 57
- Popolarità
- #287,973
- Voto
- 2.5
- Recensioni
- 1
- ISBN
- 5
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 ISG "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 to the simplicity and grace of the Japanese tea ceremony through the figure of Okakura Kakuzō, 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.… (altro)