The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner
by Patricia Vigderman
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"A meditation on art and personality, Patricia Vigderman's exploration of Isabella Stewart Gardner's famous Boston museum radiates out from its subject to investigate Gardner's legacy of history and willfulness. Isabella Gardner's high spirits and aesthetic pleasure, her women friends and female power, her friendships with adventurers and aesthetes of her world, are gathered into this investigation of patronage and passion. Blending biography, memoir, philosophy, and detective story, The show more Memory Palace is more than a tribute to the museum and the woman; it is an altogether new genre. Vigderman's witty and intimate quest for her subject sets a literary precedent for the appreciation of artistic imagination. Loosening up the past, entering its mysteries and its memories, she reminds us that we change our lives when we begin a relationship with art."--BOOK JACKET. show lessTags
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Neither a biography nor a guide to the collection, but rather a meditation on the identity, the soul, of Isabella Stewart Gardner, this small volume is Vigderman's attempt to understand, through her collection, why Gardner collected what she did, why she displayed it the way she did, why she left it to the public the way she did.
This is a stroll through the Museum, pausing here and there, thinking about this piece or that. How does it fit with that piece over there? What might it have meant to Mrs. Gardner? Who urged her to acquire it and how was that person important to ISG? That is the structure of the book, in three parts, each broken down into smaller sections headed with the title of a work, its author and date. Something about show more that work inspires and speaks of the words that will follow. Thus, Helleu's Woman Threading a Needle calls forth thoughts of how ISG "threaded the needle" through a world where wealth and status did not necessarily allow a woman to "make her way into the kingdom of books" to one where she found "pleasant lifelong learning".
As Vigderman wanders through those rooms and corridors, she talks to us about Bernard Berenson, whose career ISG helped launch. We learn of art politics, and in-fighting in the lofty rooms of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. And, finally, Vigderman, joins old Boston and the clutter of Victoriana to the simplicity and grace of the Japanese tea ceremony through the figure of Okakura Kakuzō, first head of the MFA's Asian Arts department, and author of that book of philosophy, The Book of Tea. (The postscript, An Invitation to Tea, follows the form of the other three parts, but each subsection is headed with a caption of an illustration from the Kodansha International edition of that book.)
In the end, do we know more of Gardner than we did before we began? I think we do. Vigderman's digressive musings help to understand how ISG was both a product of, and a rebel against, her time and place.
Why this book is not available at the Gardner Museum's bookshop is beyond my comprehension. show less
This is a stroll through the Museum, pausing here and there, thinking about this piece or that. How does it fit with that piece over there? What might it have meant to Mrs. Gardner? Who urged her to acquire it and how was that person important to ISG? That is the structure of the book, in three parts, each broken down into smaller sections headed with the title of a work, its author and date. Something about show more that work inspires and speaks of the words that will follow. Thus, Helleu's Woman Threading a Needle calls forth thoughts of how ISG "threaded the needle" through a world where wealth and status did not necessarily allow a woman to "make her way into the kingdom of books" to one where she found "pleasant lifelong learning".
As Vigderman wanders through those rooms and corridors, she talks to us about Bernard Berenson, whose career ISG helped launch. We learn of art politics, and in-fighting in the lofty rooms of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. And, finally, Vigderman, joins old Boston and the clutter of Victoriana to the simplicity and grace of the Japanese tea ceremony through the figure of Okakura Kakuzō, first head of the MFA's Asian Arts department, and author of that book of philosophy, The Book of Tea. (The postscript, An Invitation to Tea, follows the form of the other three parts, but each subsection is headed with a caption of an illustration from the Kodansha International edition of that book.)
In the end, do we know more of Gardner than we did before we began? I think we do. Vigderman's digressive musings help to understand how ISG was both a product of, and a rebel against, her time and place.
Why this book is not available at the Gardner Museum's bookshop is beyond my comprehension. show less
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