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Unstill Life
Gabrielle Selz
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Description for Unstill Life
Hardcover. Luminous and revealing, a daughter's memoir of the art world and a larger-than-life father. Num Pages: 352 pages, 50 illlustrations. BIC Classification: ACXJ; BGFA; BM. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 209 x 150 x 29. Weight in Grams: 526.
Gabrielle Selz grew up in a home full of the most celebrated artists of the 1960s and 1970s: Rothko, de Kooning, Tinguely, Giacometti and Christo. Her father, Peter Selz, was the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. Selz’s father was vibrant and freewheeling but his enthusiasm for both women and art took its toll on their family life. When her father left to direct his own museum in California, her writer mother Thalia Selz, moved with her children into the utopian community of Westbeth but her parents continued ... Read morea tumultuous affair that lasted for forty years.
Weaving her family narrative into the story of twentieth-century art and culture, Selz paints a portrait of a charismatic man, the generation of artists he championed and the daughter whose life he shaped.
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Product Details
Publisher
WW Norton & Co United States
Place of Publication
New York, United States
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
About Gabrielle Selz
Gabrielle Selz has published in magazines and newspapers including More magazine, the New York Times, Newsday and Fiction. She writes regularly on art for the Huffington Post. She lives in Southampton, New York.
Reviews for Unstill Life
"A beautiful, compelling memoir, a testament to art, to love, to life and all its losses and joys."
Frederic Tuten, author of Self Portraits "Reading Gabrielle Selz's telling of the exhilarating twentieth-century decades when American art remade itself is like sitting to one side at a New York opening with someone who knows every story inside out. No one ... Read morehas died and all the living are here, too: Max Beckmann, Karel Appel, Carolee Schneeman, Alberto Giacometti, Mark Rothko and so many others whirl past, as at the center, the writer's complicated parents, the visionary and philandering MoMA curator Peter Selz and the beautiful writer Thalia Cheronis, hold our attention. Informed by the author's tenderness and longing, Unstill Life has the vitality of witness and the intimacy of memoir at its best."
Honor Moore, author of The Bishop's Daughter "This intimate look at the art world's movers and shakers is from the perspective of the younger daughter of Peter Selz, a major curator and museum director... It's an exuberant tale of artists from Rothko to Christo that makes the reader marvel that neither the daughter nor her mother ever rejected the rascal who both animated and complicated their lives."
Gail Levin, biographer of Edward Hopper, Judy Chicago, and Lee Krasner "Life inspires art inspires life-all of which inspire Gabrielle Selz's sparkling memoir of her brilliant but chaotic family. In Unstill Life, the art and people ricochet off each other, wreaking havoc but also encouraging everyone to live more intense, artistic lives."
Charlotte Rogan, author of The Lifeboat "For a first book it's impressive; actually for a second or third book it would still be a contender, with lean engaging prose, an alertness for detail, and her consummate storytelling. One of the season's surprises."
James Croak "A poignant, poetic, vivid picture of a New York populated by debaucherous dreamers, Selz's memoir is personal, brave, and touches not only on the complicated and intricate love her parents had for each other and their children, but also an epic time in American art history."
Royal Young "Selz's reminiscences of coming of age amidst an explosion of creativity and social change are clear-eyed, sympathetic-and sometimes heartbreaking." "[A] page-turner [with a] unique point of view... Beautifully told and compelling."
John Seed "Candid and captivating... Unstill Life personalizes the modern art world and makes it feel immediate, not a painting on a museum wall."
Francis Dinkelspiel "[A] candid daughter-father memoir... [Selz's] evocation of her father's long life explores the bittersweet intersection of modern art and modern family, and the collateral damage of the sexual revolution."
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