Blaise Pascal had an extraordinary life and career. Renowned as a child prodigy, he engaged with the intellectual ferment surrounding the mathematician Father Mersenne before turning to his scientific experiments, his work on mathematics and construction of mechanical calculating machines, his correspondence with Pierre de Fermat and René Descartes, and his ‘Memorial’, a scrap of paper he always wore close to his heart on which he described an overwhelming religious experience.This...

Over the course of her long, highly distinguished career writing about literature and art, Mary Ann Caws has excavated, illuminated and examined in depth the most intriguing works and personalities of Symbolism, Dada, Surrealism and beyond. In these concise but always colourful and insightful articles, Caws brings us fresh portraits of the most famous figures and introduces us to writers and artists who merit more attention than they have received, with a special focus on female writers an...

From Southern roots to scholarly heights—one woman’s journey to find peace, purpose, and her place in the world.A neat and lavish, if constricting, childhood in the lush landscapes of North Carolina. Summers at a calm, remote beach house. A proper and religiously influenced prep school in Washington. Years at Bryn Mawr, an impulsive study trip to Paris, further education at Yale, married life, and divorced life. These are the settings for Mary Ann Caws’s p...

With an introduction by Arthur C. Danto.This book provides a fresh, engaging view into Picasso's life and art. Mary Ann Caws describes the artist's life thematically and chronologically, and also takes as focal points Picasso's relationships with his close friends as they changed over the years.Pablo Picasso invokes central places and characters in various periods of the artist's long and active life: in Barcelona; his time at the Bâteau-Lavoir in Paris; his work a...

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí y Domènech, Marquis of Pubol, was born in Catalonia on May 11, 1904, and died on January 23, 1989. Best known as a surrealist painter, his artistic output also included film, sculpture, photography and writing. Dalí is also notorious for his eccentric behaviour and his involvement with the Dada movement, which often drew more attention to himself than his art.In this new narrative exploration of Salvador Dalí, highly respected art and literary h...

Robert Motherwell was by far the most intellectual and articulate of the Abstract Expressionists. This book, written by a friend of the artist, the well-known writer and critic Mary Ann Caws, examines Motherwell’s way of thinking and writing in relation to his paintings. The artist, American by birth, yet simultaneously American and European in his way of visualizing and vocalizing artistic and philosophical traditions, always worked between these two poles, and it is this tension that imb...

Mina Loy was born in London in 1882, became American, and lived variously in New York, Europe and, finally, Aspen, Colorado, where she died in 1966. Flamboyant and unapologetically avant-garde, she was a poet, painter, novelist, essayist, manifesto writer, actress, and dress and lampshade designer. Her life involved an impossible abundance of artistic friends, performance and spectacular adventures in the worlds of Futurism, Christian Science, feminism, fashion, and everything modern and m...

First Published in 1991. Knowing any real city, and still more so, knowing what it is to know a city, may be as much about passive as about active experience. What we read in the field-that field of the city in all its bizarre mixture of culture and nature-is bound to determine, to some non-fictional extent, what we know of it, what we imagine it could be, what we fear it may be, or become. These essays are meant to be, albeit in their critical mode, the recountings of knowing something th...

Originally published in 1990, Women of Bloomsbury takes a fresh look at the lives of Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell, and Dora Carrington. Connected by more than bonds of friendship and artistic endeavour, the three women faced similar struggles. Juxtaposing their personal lives and their work, Mary Ann Caws shows us with feeling and clarity the pain women suffer in being artists and in finding – or creating – their sense of self. Relying on unpublished letters and diaries...

Cet ouvrage présente neuf artistes et écrivaines modernistes, connues ou moins connues, dans leur attitude de modernité : Judith Gautier, Dorothy Bussy, Suzanne Valadon, Emily Carr, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Dora Carrington, Isadora Duncan, Claude Cahun et Kay Boyle. Ces créatrices sont ici envisagées dans leur mode d’être historique, ce qui revient de fait à les détacher d’une pensée dualiste de l’altérité pour les resituer dans leur rapport de collaboration avec la réalité et l’actualité d...

"Bloomsbury on the Mediterranean," is how Vanessa Bell described France in a letter to her sister, Virginia Woolf. Remarking on the vivifying effect of Cassis, Woolf herself said, "I will take my mind out of its iron cage and let it swim.... Complete heaven, I think it." Yet until now there has never been a book that focused on the profound influence of France on the Bloomsbury group. In Bloomsbury and France: Art and Friends, Mary Ann Caws and Sarah Bird Wright reveal the crucial...

«Here is, we think, the point. It doesn't matter for what reason the writer or painter or lover destroys the creation: the real point is that destruction itself, like a gigantic statement. It is, in fact, something of an excitation, a stimulation to further thought: what is this ACTION about?» What do Stéphane Mallarmé, Antonin Artaud, Meret Oppenheim, Asger Jorn, Yoko Ono, Tom Phillips and Martin Arnold have in common? Whereas a wealth of critics have diagnosed contemporary art's preoccup...