Mary Pratt
320 pages
Published: October 3, 2023
Non-Fiction / Biography & Memoir
Hardcover: 9781773101729 $40.00
Mary Pratt’s art has captivated millions of Canadians. Her luminescent paintings capture reality in a way that few artists have been able to achieve — the chip in a glass bowl, the play of light across a dish-strewn supper table, the vulnerability of a naked woman. Replete with symbolism, Pratt’s work elevates the traditional still life by transforming the everyday into the iconic.
Published: October 3, 2023
Non-Fiction / Biography & Memoir
Hardcover: 9781773101729 $40.00
Mary Pratt’s art has captivated millions of Canadians. Her luminescent paintings capture reality in a way that few artists have been able to achieve — the chip in a glass bowl, the play of light across a dish-strewn supper table, the vulnerability of a naked woman. Replete with symbolism, Pratt’s work elevates the traditional still life by transforming the everyday into the iconic.
Art historian Anne Koval wrote Mary Pratt: A Love Affair with Vision in close consultation with Pratt. The book is informed by extensive interviews with the artist, and her family, friends, and colleagues and by unprecedented access to Pratt’s archival holdings at Mount Allison University. This in-depth study of Pratt’s life and work explores the complex issues of gender, feminism, and realism in Canadian art, resulting in a richly layered biography of an artist who redefined the visual culture of her period and whose art and life intersect in varied and surprising ways.
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Author
Anne Koval is Professor of Art History, Museum and Curatorial Studies at Mount Allison University. She is the author of Mary Pratt: A Love Affair with Vision, Whistler in His Time, and the co-author of James McNeill Whistler: Beyond the Myth. She has written on Anna Torma for the Textile Museum of Canada and her writing on contemporary art has appeared in several edited volumes, including Stitching the Self: Identity and the Needle Arts, More Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women, and The Radcliffe Line and Other Geographies: Sarindar Dhaliwal, which includes a series of ekphrastic poems by Koval. She has curated exhibitions at the Owens Art Gallery, the Mendel Art Gallery, the Banff Park Museum, and the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, which included the work of Ed Pien, Merle McMaster, D’Arcy Wilson, Diana Thorneycroft, Aganetha Dyck, Barb Hunt, Jeannie Thib, Janice Wright Cheney, Cindy Sherman, and Sylvia Plath.
Reviews
“Anne Koval's biography of Mary Pratt sings in sympathy with its subject. This intimate and engaging portrait of one of Canada's greatest artists collapses the boundaries between biographer and biographee to produce a remarkable symbiosis of voice and vision.” — Helen Humphreys, author of Field Study: Meditations on a Year at the Herbarium
“Koval writes with precision, compassion, and deep understanding of the complexity of what it means to be a woman, a daughter, a mother, a wife, an artist. She goes beyond the myths and tropes that surround Mary Pratt’s life and art, as she draws upon Pratt’s piercing intelligence and her remarkable, felt understanding of the mundane. She shows that, for Pratt, art was an act of love, one that couldn’t exist without sacrifice.” — Mireille Eagan, editor of Future Possible: An Art History of Newfoundland and Labrador
“Koval writes with precision, compassion, and deep understanding of the complexity of what it means to be a woman, a daughter, a mother, a wife, an artist. She goes beyond the myths and tropes that surround Mary Pratt’s life and art, as she draws upon Pratt’s piercing intelligence and her remarkable, felt understanding of the mundane. She shows that, for Pratt, art was an act of love, one that couldn’t exist without sacrifice.” — Mireille Eagan, editor of Future Possible: An Art History of Newfoundland and Labrador
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