Talking to a Portrait: Tales of an Art Curator

Behind the scenes at the world's major art museums, the life of a curator can be thrilling, amusing, disappointing--but never boring.

In these fifteen essays we encounter artists falling in and out of love, family tragedies, the creation of the Stanley Cup, the secrets of Tiffany, Antiques Roadshow, a rootless baroness, the design craze for aluminum, small Japanese boxes called kogos, watercolour sketchbooks of the Canadian north, a beautiful prayer room in Montreal, gondolas flying through windows in Venice, and Moscovites who love Goldfinger.

Pepall's stories sparkle with clarity and leave one with a sense that art is an amazing, worthwhile, occasionally mysterious human activity.

Archival black and white photographs and colour plates--including Edwin Holgate's Ludivine, one of the most beloved and recognizable Canadian portraits ever painted--make this book a must-have for art lovers, students, academics, museum-goers and readers interested in the role art plays in the creation of our lives.

Author: Rosalind Pepall
Publisher: Vehicule Press
Published: 07/15/2020
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.79lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.40w x 0.70d
ISBN13: 9781550655414
ISBN10: 1550655418
BISAC Categories:
- Art | Museum Studies
- Biography & Autobiography | Artists, Architects, Photographers

About the Author
In a career spanning over thirty years, first as Curator of Canadian Art, and then Senior Curator of Decorative Arts at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Rosalind Pepall helped to plan and organize dozens of major exhibitions and authored several exhibition catalogues. Based in Montreal, she is a consultant, conference speaker, and writer in the field of art.