A Picnic in October

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A Picnic in October
A Picnic In October
A Picnic in October

A Picnic in October
Eve Bunting
Manufacturer: Voyager Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0152050655

The annual charity fête at Backwater Hall in Mortshire is disrupted by the mysterious death of Lord Wherewithal and the theft of the Lisping Elbow. Confusion and misgivings abound. And, alas, the Earl of Thump's stuffed thisby is found disemboweled by the edge of the lake. Dr. Belgravius and his nephew, Luke Touchpaper, attempt to tie the loose ends together and wonder why Miss Underfold was seen wearing a hat decorated with black lilies. And why was Victoria Scone dancing the tango with Horace Gollop in The Soiled Dove?

Edward Gorey creates an intriguing and sharply mordant world and leaves us his own mystery-what has happened to the missing Night Bandage, volume two of the Mortshire secrets?

”[Durante's] guidebook is a perfect walking-tour accompaniment to help New Yorkers and visitors find, identify and better appreciate statues famous and obscure (honoring, among others, the `father of gynecology' and the general who had an unremarkable military and business career but composed taps, the bugle call). . . . Durante winsomely places 54 monuments in historical and artistic perspective. We learn that a trumpet is an allegory for announcing fame, that the monument to Admiral Farragut in Madison Square Park altered the course of American sculpture, that the figure with the winged hat atop Grand Central Terminal is Mercury and that the statue of Atlas at Rockefeller Center was reviled when it was unveiled in 1937 because it supposedly resembled Mussolini. Let's hope Ms. Durante follows up in the other four boroughs.”
—The New York Times

” Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan is a primer on getting to know our city's monuments. . . . Each entry has a uniform structure. It contains a photo, vital stats (year dedicated, size, materials), an `About the Sculpture' section, and an `About the Subject' section, as well as a carefully chosen boxed quotation culled from an old book or newspaper that pertains to the subject. . . . Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan is well written, well researched, well thought-out, funny, and often refreshingly original, and will help any interested New Yorker know about the wondrous monuments that dot the city.”
—New York Sun

”Anyone whose curiosity has ever been piqued by the peculiar mixture of historical statues that ornament the grounds of Central Park will find Outdoor Monuments by Dianne Durante a satisfying read. . . . The entries provide background on each work's origin, explaining, for example, how a statue of the medieval Polish king Jagiello came to be in New York alongside more predictable allegorical and American patriotic figures. A brief history of the subject is also provided, including enough lively anecdotes and obscure facts to entice all readers.”
—Sculpture Magazine

Stop, look, and discover—the streets and parks of Manhattan are filled with beautiful historic monuments that will entertain, stimulate, and inspire you. Among the 54 monuments in this volume are major figures in American history: Washington, Lincoln, Lafayette, Horace Greeley, and Gertrude Stein; more obscure figures: Daniel Butterfield, J. Marion Sims, and King Jagiello; as well as the icons of New York: Atlas, Prometheus, and the Firemen's Memorial. The monuments represent the work of some of America's best sculptors: Augustus Saint Gaudens' Farragut and Sherman, Daniel Chester French's Four Continents, and Anna Hyatt Huntington's Jose Marti and Joan of Arc.

Each monument, illustrated with black-and-white photographs, is located on a map of Manhattan and includes easy-to-follow directions. All the sculptures are considered both as historical mementos and as art. We learn of furious General Sherman court-martialing a civilian journalist, and also of exasperated Saint Gaudens' proposing a hook-and-spring device for improving his assistants' artistic acuity as they help model Sherman. We discover how Lincoln dealt with a vociferous Confederate politician from Ohio, and why the Lincoln in Union Square doesn't rank as a top-notch Lincoln portrait. Sidebars reveal other aspects of the figure or event commemorated, using personal quotes, poems, excerpts from nineteenth-century periodicals (New York Times, Harper's Weekly), and writers ranging from Aeschylus, Washington Irving, and Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi to Mark Twain and Henryk Sienkiewicz.

As a historical account, Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A Historical Guide is a fascinating look at figures and events that changed New York, the United States and the world. As an aesthetic handbook it provides a compact method for studying sculpture, inspired by Ayn Rand's writings on art. For residents and tourists, and historians and students, who want to spend more time viewing and appreciating sculpture and New York history, this is the start of a unique voyage of discovery.

Though I have never met or spoken to the author, the fact that such a seemingly sensible man is sympathetic to these reports (and indeed has been an eyewitness to many of the events) is a great testament to their seriousness and importance.

The Southeast Asian archipelago includes numerous islands that are strewn with stone monuments and statues. Some of these carvings date back to an ancient past that is almost impossible to calculate. Others are but a few decades old.

A number of these sculptures reach such an impressive size that they might almost rival the well-known giant carvings of Easter Island. Yet the surprising stone works of Island Southeast Asia remain relatively unknown to the general public and connoisseurs alike.

For reasons that are hard to explain, Western museums have long overlooked this form of "primitive art." Only in the past few years has the situation changed as a few important institutions in Germany, Belgium and the United States added a Batak rider statue or a large ritual seat from Nias to their collections.

For nearly a quarter of a century the Barbier-Mueller Museum has striven to assemble a coherent collection of these monolithic monuments. It is worth recalling that this museum put together in 1981, under the auspices of the Indonesian government, the "Art of Archaic Indonesia" show which was mounted in Geneva, Brooklyn and Dallas. Although other events have since enabled art lovers to learn more about the archipelago's stone sculptures, never has a single exhibition been devoted entirely to this art-- until today. Happily, that shortcoming is a thing of the past.

Since its foundation twenty-one years ago, the Barbier-Mueller Museum of Primitive Art has earned for itself an international renown thanks to the exhibition catalogues and art books that the museum has published focusing on certain parts of its collection.

Numerous traveling exhibitions have been organized in collaboration with several major museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Asia Society of New York, the Rotterdam Museum or the National Museum of Taiwan.

The Barbier-Mueller Museum is a private non-profit institution that aims to conserve, study and publish a family art collection that first took shape during World War I and which an abiding acquisitions policy has continued to enrich. This growing collection now contains some 5,500 sculptures, fabrics, ornaments and pieces of jewelry from Oceania, Africa, the Americas and Southeast Asia. The public is periodically invited to discover the many facets of this collection, while long-term loans to other museums are regularly arranged.