Background
Seigel, Jerrold Edward was born on June 9, 1936 in St. Louis. Son of William and Katherine (Ginsberg) Seigel.
( Marcel Duchamp is a founding figure of twentieth-centur...)
Marcel Duchamp is a founding figure of twentieth-century art and culture, the common source to which many contemporary movements trace their roots. His career has often been celebrated for its contradictions and discontinuities, its disparate parts unified only by their assault on the traditions of art. Jerrold Seigel offers a wholly different view, revealing a web of interrelated themes that unify Duchamp's work and tie it to his life. At the book's center is a reinterpretation of the famous "readymades," of which the urinal "Fountain" and the defaced Mona Lisa were the most shocking. By recovering their history, Seigel shows that their playful and rebellious surface veiled the meanings that linked them to Duchamp's pictures (especially the famous "Large Glass," here illuminated by a comprehensive new reading) and to his experiments with language. The result gives the artist's career the unity of a colorful and intricate puzzle. Behind that puzzle were the great modernist themes of isolation, perpetuated desire, and the imagined dissolution of the self. These themes entered Duchamp's mind both from his social and cultural environment and from the shaping experience of his family; around them were woven the patterns of working and loving that Seigel uncovers in his life. Duchamp emerges not just as a coherent, understandable personality, but as an exemplary one, his very eccentricities reflecting essential dimensions of modern experience. A mythic presence in modern culture, a hero whose story we tell for the sake of its valuable lessons, Duchamp opened the floodgates to a sea of questions about the nature and meaning of art. Seigel demands that we think again about these questions, and about the answers that Duchamp's heirs and followers have tried to give to them.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0520200381/?tag=2022091-20
( Exotic and yet familiar, rife with passion, immorality,...)
Exotic and yet familiar, rife with passion, immorality, hunger, and freedom, Bohemia was an object of both worry and fascination to workaday Parisians in the nineteenth century. No mere revolt against middle-class society, the Bohemia Seigel discovers was richer and more complex, the stage on which modern bourgeois acted out the conflicts of their social identities, testing the liberation promised by post-revolutionary society against the barriers set up to contain it. Turning life into art, Bohemia became a space where many innovative and original figures―some famous, some obscure―found a home.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801860636/?tag=2022091-20
Seigel, Jerrold Edward was born on June 9, 1936 in St. Louis. Son of William and Katherine (Ginsberg) Seigel.
Bachelor of Arts, Harvard University, 1958; Doctor of Philosophy, Princeton University, 1963.
Instructor, Princeton (New Jersey) U., 1962-1965; assistant professor, Princeton (New Jersey) U., 1965-1968; associate professor, Princeton (New Jersey) U., 1968-1978; professor of history, Princeton (New Jersey) U., 1978-1988; professor of history, New York University, New York City, since 1988; Kenan professor, since 1994. Visiting professor of history Maitre d'Etudes, Ecoles des hautes études, Paris, 1988-1994. Finalist National Book Critics Circuit, 1987.
( Exotic and yet familiar, rife with passion, immorality,...)
( Marcel Duchamp is a founding figure of twentieth-centur...)
( The combination of rhetoric and philosophy appeared in ...)
Member New York Institute for Humanities, Phi Beta Kappa.
Married Jayn Rosenfeld, August 28, 1966. Children: Micol, Jessica.