Rachel Cohen is the author of A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, winner of the PEN/Jerard Fund Award. Her essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Believer, Best American Essays, and many other publications. She teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She keeps a notebook on looking at paintings at http://rachelecohen.com.
"A highly sympathetic and graceful portrait of Bernard Berenson,
the art connoisseur and dealer who remade himself into a work of
art, priced and priceless, which he protected, cultivated, and even
at times bartered: Rachel Cohen's Bernard Berenson is an
illuminating tale of this self-transformation, its successes and
pitfalls, told with stalwart compassion."--Brenda Wineapple, author
of Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise,
1848-1877
*Brenda Wineapple*
"An insightful, richly detailed account of Bernard Berenson’s
brilliant transformation from an immigrant Jew and son of a tin
peddler into a connoisseur of Italian Renaissance painting and a
dealer in secret partnership with Joseph Duveen. With the keen gaze
that Berenson brought to a picture, Rachel Cohen analyzes his
high-wire act of self-invention against the glittering,
aristocratic, anti-Semitic world of art collecting."--Cynthia
Saltzman
*Cynthia Saltzman*
"Cohen draws a psychological portrait of a man guided by passionate
aesthetic ideals and tortured by the compromises in the world of
commerce that he felt compelled to make. . . . If you live in an
American city, there's a good chance that you can go to a museum
today and see an exquisite Sienese Madonna, or a Venetian Holy
Family, or a Florentine portrait. You have Berenson—and his
collector-acolytes—to thank."—Hugh Eakin, Wall Street Journal
*Wall Street Journal*
"The most dynamic biography yet of the groundbreaking art historian
Bernard Berenson...Cohen investigates Berenson’s contradictions,
metamorphoses, and dramatically unconventional life with vivacious
authority. . . . Cohen deftly channels the sweeping intensity of
Berenson’s aesthetic ecstasy, hard-won expertise, surprising
adventures, and vital legacy.”—Booklist, Starred Review
*Booklist, Starred Review*
"In her remarkable biography, Cohen approaches Berenson's life as a
panorama full of artifice and profundity, whose brilliant flashes
of color are inextricable from its substrates of shadow. The book
leaves an indelible impression, not merely in the way it catalogues
Berenson's accomplishments and failings, but also in its dissection
of the struggle between desire and alienation that characterizes
American art—and life—to this day."—Thomas Micchelli, Bookforum
*Bookforum*
Book of the Week“[As] Rachel Cohen, the author of this elegantly
written biography. . . .nicely puts it, Berenson was ‘a person
whose capacity for metamorphosis approached that of a
moth.’”—Martin Gayford, The Sunday Telegraph
*The Sunday Telegraph*
“Rachel Cohen’s unobtrusively and thoroughly well written short
volume skilfully negotiates the contradictory sides of Berenson’s
character – the aesthete and the huckster; the man who lived only
for art and the man who very much liked to surround himself with
the appurtenances of wealth.”—Sam Leith, The Spectator
*The Spectator*
“Rachel Cohen has written an admirable short life...[and] a
touching portrait”—James Stourton, Literary Review
*Literary Review*
"Berenson's extraordinary and colorful life—from his humble birth
in Lithuania, to Harvard and thence to his august and influential
position as a critic and art historian, to the renowned splendor of
his Florentine villa I Tatti—makes a rich and compelling subject.
Ms. Cohen's remarkable book affords the occasion also for
rumination upon self-invention and authenticity, upon the making of
the man, and of taste, too."—Claire Messud, Wall Street Journal
*Wall Street Journal*
“Rachel Cohen who has written an extremely thoughtful and readable
biography of Berenson”—Charles Saumarez-Smith, Apollo Magazine
*Apollo Magazine*
Chosen as a highly recommended book by the Boston Authors Club in
2014.
*Boston Authors Club*
"An absorbing new biography."—Jewish Daily Forward
*Jewish Daily Forward*
‘This book proves to be a remarkably balanced treatment of a
profoundly complicated and compelling life.’—Robert Simon,
Burlington Magazine
*Burlington Magazine*
"An irresistibly readable and accessible account of this
complicated character, who could be by turns brilliant and petty,
generous toward others and scornful of himself, an inveterate
philanderer and a staunch husband."—Ann Landl, ARTnews
*ARTnews*
Shortlisted for the 2015 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize 2014
*Jewish Quarterly*
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