An Impersonation Of Angels

Brown's biography is the fullest, the most ambitious close-up of Le Petit Cocteau's seven decades to appear in English. Brown evidently scoured all libraries, periods, and sources (including Cocteau's correspondence and the various memoirs of his friends), giving the reader the incidents, events, and revelations of one of the foremost creative minds of the surrealist, avant-garde, and Dadaist movements; and one of the most influential figures in early 20th-century art as a whole. An Impersonation of Angels is of unequivocal importance.

This is a comprehensive, original and accessible account of all aspects of Jean Cocteau's work in the cinema. It is the first major study in English to appear for over forty years and casts new light on Cocteau's most celebrated films as well as those often neglected or little known.

George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye is a life of the gregarious American portrait, dance, fashion, and male nude photographer whose career spanned the late 1920s to 1955. From age 18, Lynes entered the cosmopolitan world of the American expatriate community in Paris when he became acquainted with the salon of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Intending to pursue a literary and small press publishing career, Lynes also began photographing authors like Stein, Jean Cocteau, André Gide, and Colette. Soon, he turned exclusively to photography, establishing himself as one of the premier fashion photographers in the Condé Nast stable, documenting the early ballets of George Balanchine, and pursuing his private obsession with seductive images of young male nudes almost never published in his time. Lynes's private life was as glamorous and theatrical as his images with their brilliant studio lighting and dramatic Surrealist set-ups. Barely out his teens, he met the publisher Monroe Wheeler who was already in a relationship with the emerging expatriate novelist Glenway Wescott. The peripatetic threesome maintained a polyamorous connection that lasted some 15 years. Their New York apartment became a mecca for elegant cocktail and name-dropping dinner parties. Their ménage-à-trois complicates our understanding of the pre-Stonewall gay closet. This biography, drawing upon intimate letters and an unpublished memoir of Lynes's life by his brother, writer and editor Russell Lynes, paints a portrait of the emerging influence of gays and lesbians in the visual, literary, and performing arts that defined transatlantic cosmopolitan culture and presaged later gay political activism.

This title defines the theory and practice of 'classicism' as practised in the 1920s by a number of composers, writers, and artists, setting it off against other movements of the period that are customarily grouped together under the general heading of 'modernism'. It argues that classicism is a more precise term than neo-classicism during this period, since every classicism from antiquity to the present shares certain common qualities as well as characteristics of its own time.

The comprehensive biography of the iconic twentieth-century American photographer Berenice Abbott, a trailblazing documentary modernist, author, and inventor. Berenice Abbott is to American photography as Georgia O’Keeffe is to painting or Willa Cather to letters. She was a photographer of astounding innovation and artistry, a pioneer in both her personal and professional life. Abbott’s sixty-year career established her not only as a master of American photography, but also as a teacher, writer, archivist, and inventor. Famously reticent in public, Abbott’s fascinating life has long remained a mystery—until now. In Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography, author, archivist, and curator Julia Van Haaften brings this iconic public figure to life alongside outlandish, familiar characters from artist Man Ray to cybernetics founder Norbert Wiener. A teenage rebel from Ohio, Abbott escaped first to Greenwich Village and then to Paris—photographing, in Sylvia Beach’s words, "everyone who was anyone." As the Roaring Twenties ended, Abbott returned to New York, where she soon fell in love with art critic Elizabeth McCausland, with whom she would spend thirty years. In the 1930s, Abbott began her best-known work, Changing New York, in which she fearlessly documented the city’s metamorphosis. When warned by an older male supervisor that "nice girls" avoid the Bowery—then Manhattan’s skid row—Abbott shot back, "I’m not a nice girl. I’m a photographer…I go anywhere." This bold, feminist attitude would characterize all Abbott’s accomplishments, including imaging techniques she invented in her influential, space race–era science photography and her tenure as The New School’s first photography teacher. With more than ninety stunning photos, this sweeping, cinematic biography secures Berenice Abbott’s place in the histories of photography and modern art, while framing her incredible accomplishments as a female artist and entrepreneur.

There is within all theological utterances something of the ridiculous, perhaps more so in Christianity, given its proclivity for the paradoxical and the childlike. Few theologians are willing to discuss how consent to the Christian doctrine often requires a faith that goes beyond reason. There seems to be a fear that the association of theology with the absurd will give fuel to the sceptic's refrain: 'You can't seriously believe in all that nonsense.' Josephine Gabelman considers the legitimacy of the sceptic's objection and explores the possibility that an idea can be contrary to rationality and also true and meaningful using the systematic analysis of central stylistic features of literary non sense such as Lewis Carroll's Alice stories. Gabelman sets up a nonsense theology by considering the practical and evangelical ramifications of associating Christian faith with nonsense literature and, conversely, the value of relating theological principles to the study of literary nonsense.Ultimately, Gabelman says, faith is always a risk and a strictly rational apologetic misrepresents the nature of Christian truth.