From Publishers Weekly
Edouard Manet (1832-1883), whose paintings depict noncommunication between intimates, unspoken secrets and the pretense of bourgeois propriety, led a life of camouflage and deception, according to this compelling, if often conjectural, biography. When the French painter turned 20, his 22-year-old mistress, Dutch piano teacher Suzanne Leenhoff, gave birth to a son whom she named Leon-Edouard Koella. Throughout her life, Leenhoff bizarrely insisted that Leon was her brother; she and Manet (who lived with Leon and his mistress) married in 1863, and the painter became the boy's godfather, yet Brombert builds a plausible case that Leon was actually Manet's unacknowledged biological son. She is less convincing in arguing that Manet and his sister-in-law, painter Berthe Morisot, held mutual unfulfilled romantic longings for each other, or that Manet, often criticized as a neutral, apolitical observer, was in fact a "political animal" with center/left sympathies. Even so, her startling, intimate biography brilliantly links Manet's complex personality and hidden personal life to his art. Brombert is author of Christina: Portrait of a Princess and translator of Francis Ponge. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
From Library Journal
This is the first full-length biography of painter Edouard Manet in English since the translation of Henri Perruchot's Manet in 1962. Manet's importance to the development of art, both as an early, if reluctant, leader of the impressionist movement and his interactions with a wide range of writers, most importantly Zola and Baudelaire, are explored in great detail here. Brombert, a cultural historian, provides extensive information about Manet's world and the importance of 19th-century Paris to the formation of Manet's personal and artistic life. Unfortunately, Brombert's telling of Manet's life is often slow-moving and chronologically confusing. Manet's paintings and his relationship with his sister-in-law Berthe Morisot are examined with a piercing Freudian eye, sometimes to the detriment of a careful art-historical analysis as is provided in works like Harry Rand's Manet's Contemplation at the Gare Saint-Lazare (Univ. of California, 1987). Recommended with reservations for most collections.?Martin R. Kalfatovic, Smithsonian Inst. Libs., Washington,
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
