{"product_id":"touching-the-art-book-mattilda-bernstein-sycamore-9781593767358","title":"Touching the Art","description":"\u003cb\u003eFinalist for the Pacific Northwest Book Awards\u003cbr\u003e Finalist for the Washington State Book Awards\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e A daringly observant memoir about intergenerational trauma, fine art, and compartmentalization from a returning Soft Skull author and Lambda Literary Award winner\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e A mixture of memoir, biography, criticism, and social history, \u003ci\u003eTouching the Art\u003c\/i\u003e is queer icon and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's interrogation of the possibilities of artistic striving, the limits of the middle-class mindset, the legacy of familial abandonment, and what art can and cannot do.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Taking the form of a self-directed research project, Sycamore recounts the legacy of her fraught relationship with her late grandmother, an abstract artist from Baltimore who encouraged Mattilda as a young artist, then disparaged Mattilda's work as \"vulgar\" and a \"waste of talent\" once it became unapologetically queer.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e As she sorts through her grandmother Gladys's paintings and handmade paperworks, Sycamore examines the creative impulse itself. In fragments evoking the movements of memory, she searches for Gladys's place within the trajectories of midcentury modernism and Abstract Expressionism, Jewish assimilation and white flight, intergenerational trauma and class striving.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Sycamore writes, \"Art is never just art, it is a history of feeling, a gap between sensations, a safety valve, an escape hatch, a sudden shift in the body, a clipboard full of flowers, a welcome mat flipped over and back, over and back, welcome.\"\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e Refusing easy answers in search of an embodied truth, Sycamore upends propriety to touch the art and feel everything that comes through.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49753080430865,"sku":"NGR9781593767358","price":0.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50065065476369,"sku":"CIN1593767358VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51038326096145,"sku":"NIN9781593767358","price":0.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1593767358.jpg?v=1751088452","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/de-de\/products\/touching-the-art-buch-mattilda-bernstein-sycamore-9781593767358","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}