The Sound of Sleat Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

The Sound of Sleat Book

It's hard to decide which aspect of painter Jon Schueler's painfully candid memoir is more fascinating: the unsparing depictions of his tormented relationships with women, or the nuts-and-bolts details of the art trade's byzantine financial dealings. In both cases, Schueler (1916-92) never minces words, nor does he let himself off the hook, since his unusual book includes the perspectives of lovers, collectors, and art dealers (via their letters to him) as well as his own (through correspondence and journal entries from 1957 through 1979). The painter is reticent concerning his aesthetic preoccupations, though the few words he writes about his feelings for nature, especially the wild coastline on Scotland's Sound of Sleat, are fervent and lucid. It's easy to see how Schueler came to be married five times and divorced four: his letters to women are seductively passionate, yet brutally honest about the fact that his first commitment will always be to his work. Color reproductions suggest that his art has been too glibly pigeonholed as "second-generation abstract expressionist," when in fact it has a luminous quality that transcends categorization. Leo Castelli and Willem de Kooning are among the many notables who make appearances, but this is one art-world memoir that doesn't rely on name-dropping for its punch. --Wendy Smith Read More

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  • Product Description

    Jon Schueler, an American Abstract Expressionist painter, came to painting late in life, taking his first classes in Los Angeles after he'd already married and begun a family. But under teachers Clyfford Still and Richard Diebenkorn at the California School of Fine Arts, he quickly discovered a talent and a love for painting that compelled him to move to New York, where he began to define and perfect his artistic vision.

    As an early protg of Leo Castelli, Schueler lived and worked among the country's most gifted artists: Mark Rothko, Joan Mitchell, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and many others. But when in the late 1950s nature became a stronger poetic force in his work, Schueler set off for Scotland. He discovered Mallaig, a town in the Western Highlands on the Sound of Sleat, where the dramatic landscape inspired his art and continued to influence him throughout his career.

    Over nearly thirty years, as he painted, Schueler worked on this book. In it, he struggled to uncover what it was that drove him to paint and wrestled with a conflict that confronts all artists--how to strike a balance between the need to create in solitude and the desire for human intimacy.

    The Sound of Sleat tells the story of a passionate life and offers a fascinating look at the New York art world of the fifties and sixties. It is an astonishing window on art, hope, despair, and creativity.

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