Unstill Life: A Daughter's Memoir of Art and Love in the Age of Abstraction (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780393239171)

In 1958, soon after Gabrielle Selz was born, she, her parents and her sister moved to New York, where her father, Peter Selz, would begin his job as the chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. What followed was a whirlwind childhood spent among art and artists in the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. Gabrielle grew up in a home full of the most celebrated artists of the day: Rothko, de Kooning, Tinguely, Giacometti, and Christo, among others.

Poignant and candid, Unstill Life is a daughter's memoir of the art world and a larger-than-life father known to the world as Mr. Modern Art. Selz offers a unique window into the glamour and destruction of the times: the gallery openings, wild parties and affairs that defined one of the most celebrated periods in American art history. Like the art he loved, Selz's father was vibrant and freewheeling, but his enthusiasm for both women and art took its toll on family life. When her father left MoMA and his family to direct his own museum in California, marrying four more times, Selz's mother, the writer Thalia Selz, moved with her children into the utopian artist community Westbeth. Her parents continued a tumultuous affair that would last forty years.

Weaving her family narrative into the larger story of twentieth-century art and culture, Selz paints an unforgettable portrait of a charismatic man, the generation of modern artists he championed and the daughter whose life he shaped.

Author: Gabrielle Selz
ISBN-10: 0393239179
ISBN-13: 9780393239171
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Language: English
Published: 05/05/2014
Pages: 352
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.83lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.50w x 1.10d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 04/14/2014
Booklist 05/01/2014 pg. 72