Jed Perl was born in New York and studied art history and painting at Columbia University. Since 1994 he has been the art critic at The New Republic. His books include Paris Without End, Eyewitness, and New Art City- Manhattan at Mid-Century. He lives in Manhattan.
Antoine's Alphabet
“. . . Anyone who loves this great painter, or who enjoys seeing a
lively mind in action, will find pleasure and instruction in Perl’s
book . . . In Antoine’s Alphabet Perl aptly sums up [the] haunting
quality at the heart of Watteau’s work . . .”
-Washington Post Book World
“Perl’s glittering, shardlike essays encompass everything from
penetrating studies of individual pictures to meditations on
‘painting’s primal power.’”
-The New Yorker
“Jed Perl writes precisely and ecstatically. Antoine’s Alphabet is
a history and a fairy tale, a work of criticism, and a work of
art.”
-Jonathan Safran Foer
“Perl’s exquisitely composed study . . . [is] a carefully
researched book of rare beauty and provocation.”
-Publishers Weekly
"Perl's exquisitely written labor of love outdoes even Walter Pater
in its ability to capture Watteau's elusive magic. Leaving
academics knee-deep in footnotes, Perl soars off into the empyrean,
the better to evoke Watteau's gorgeous silken, subliminally
melancholic world. Perl's dazzling asides and vignettes amount to a
wonderfully deep and rounded portrayal of this great master."
-John Richardson
“. . . Perl marshals his considerable interpretative acuity and
extraordinary gift for fresh language . . . The ebullience,
mischief, and discernment of this artful lexicon perfectly embody
the shimmer and steeliness of Watteau’s incisive drawings and
paintings. Works we’ll never view lightly again.”
-Booklist
“‘. . . Watteau allows this trenchant thinker–arguably our best art
critic writing today–to show, for once, his own hand. The book
gambles and wins. In this capricious cross-pollination of history
and memoir, Jed Perl does not merely show us how to live. Like
Watteau, he illuminates the struggle to feel fully alive.”
-The New York Sun
“. . . Perl, in his element, is incomparable. . . . [His] signature
flourish is the description that begins modestly, indisputably,
building steadily until the reader finds himself peering
exhilarated over a cliff of purest speculation. . . . Perl is
straining for Proust-territory here, composing sentences . . . that
are rolled up like a sock–we can’t tell figure from ground, but
somehow, wonderfully, it works. And what’s more–he’s right.”
-The New York Observer
“Why does Watteau touch us with such immediacy? Why is his
imaginary world . . . so familiar, why does it speak to us so
directly? You will discover the answer to these and many other
questions in Jed Perl's delicious Antoine's Alphabet, a book that
casts a spell and is a declaration of love for this giant among
painters.”
-Pierre Rosenberg
“Learned, elegant, and quietly passionate, this small book is a
testament to the pleasures, insights, and ongoing ambiguities that
come from years of looking at the work of a single painter. But
most of all, it is a personal work of deep feeling, and as I read
it, it made me happy.”
-Siri Hustvedt
“This elegant and exhilarating little book is a rhapsodical roller
coaster slung between eighteenth-century Paris and contemporary
Manhattan with Antoine Watteau as its focal point. It swoops from
Helen of Troy to Katharine Hepburn, Boucher to Beardsley and
Beckett. In between these leaps and lunges it contemplates
Watteau’s paintings with an imaginative steadiness that quickens
and clarifies their cloudy power.”
-Hilary Spurling
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