Solar Dance: Van Gogh, Forgery, and the Eclipse of Certainty
US $16.93
Condition:
Good
A book that has been read but is in good condition. Very minimal damage to the cover including scuff marks, but no holes or tears. The dust jacket for hard covers may not be included. Binding has minimal wear. The majority of pages are undamaged with minimal creasing or tearing, minimal pencil underlining of text, no highlighting of text, no writing in margins. No missing pages. See the seller’s listing for full details and description of any imperfections.
- Buy It NowSolar Dance: Van Gogh, Forgery, and the Eclipse of Certainty
Oops! Looks like we're having trouble connecting to our server.
Refresh your browser window to try again.
Shipping:
Free USPS Media MailTM.
Located in: Haltom City, Texas, United States
Delivery:
Estimated between Fri, May 23 and Thu, May 29 to 43230
Returns:
30 days returns. Buyer pays for return shipping. If you use an eBay shipping label, it will be deducted from your refund amount.
Payments:
Special financing available. See terms and apply now- for PayPal Credit, opens in a new window or tab
Earn up to 5x points when you use your eBay Mastercard®. Learn moreabout earning points with eBay Mastercard
Shop with confidence
Seller assumes all responsibility for this listing.
eBay item number:156713667730
Item specifics
- Condition
- Release Year
- 2012
- ISBN
- 9780674065673
- Publication Year
- 2012
- Format
- Hardcover
- Language
- English
- Book Title
- Solar Dance : Van Gogh, Forgery, and the Eclipse of Certainty
- Illustrator
- Yes
- Publisher
- Harvard University Press
- Genre
- Art, Philosophy, History
- Item Length
- 9.2 in
- Topic
- Individual Artists / General, History / Modern (Late 19th Century to 1945), Europe / Germany, Criticism & Theory, Modern / 20th Century, General
- Item Width
- 6.1 in
- Number of Pages
- 368 Pages
About this product
Product Identifiers
Publisher
Harvard University Press
ISBN-10
0674065670
ISBN-13
9780674065673
eBay Product ID (ePID)
111081753
Product Key Features
Book Title
Solar Dance : Van Gogh, Forgery, and the Eclipse of Certainty
Number of Pages
368 Pages
Language
English
Topic
Individual Artists / General, History / Modern (Late 19th Century to 1945), Europe / Germany, Criticism & Theory, Modern / 20th Century, General
Publication Year
2012
Illustrator
Yes
Genre
Art, Philosophy, History
Format
Hardcover
Dimensions
Item Length
9.2 in
Item Width
6.1 in
Additional Product Features
Intended Audience
Trade
LCCN
2011-050757
Reviews
Eksteins has a knack for pinpointing moments in the rise of Modernism that expose the deep social forces that have shaped our world...Our uncertainty about Van Gogh's work, he paradoxically suggests, is inextricably linked to the rupture of traditional ideology and morality that attracts us to the artist in the first place. Nowhere was the rupture more dramatic than in the final years of the Weimar Republic...With a saturation of cultural reference, Solar Dance conveys the heady atmosphere that made Berlin the first European capital to embrace the transforming potential of art in a secular age. Yet it also created the ideological void that ended in the rise of Hitler. Van Gogh was celebrated as a solitary genius whose paintings rebelled "against the formalism of the establishment" and made "the untamed decorative"; but the potential for fakery in his messy oeuvre, and for embellishment of his biography, risked introducing just the kind of "fantasy world of myth and mastery" that drew people to National Socialism--a process Eksteins recounts in the final part of the book., In Solar Dance: Van Gogh, Forgery, and the Eclipse of Certainty, Modris Eksteins takes us through a spectacular trial, as Wacker and his faked paintings were dragged in front of a German court to account for themselves. It's the captivating story of a changing world, of authenticity versus forgery, of money versus art, and the established order of experts and gallery owners and museum directors versus "the little guy.", Modris Eksteins's Solar Dance: Van Gogh, Forgery, and the Eclipse of Certainty tells the story of Wacker's deception and discovery, and of a cultural milieu eager to be taken in. He provides, in the early section, a lively but brief retelling of the familiar story of Van Gogh's tumultuous life and 1890 death. There follows a broad reconstruction of the artistic and cultural scene of Weimar-era Berlin--active, morally unmoored, gay, ripe for Nazi condemnation and takeover--and a loose but persistent argument that this period with its clash of values was the inflection point between the philosophical certainty of the 19th century and the doubt of the present...Eksteins's book does a fine job of chronicling the era's aesthetic confusion., Brilliant...Eksteins' deeply researched historical study tells the story of the Van Gogh forgeries that flooded the German art market in the 1920s and the way that the counterfeiting of masterpieces was part and parcel of a larger cultural breakdown that destroyed German democracy...Eksteins is among the most erudite and perspicacious of scholars. In explaining the forgeries of the 1920s, he gives us an eye-opening and wide-ranging history of the Van Gogh cult, finding unexpected evidence of the painter's spectral influence in everything from a novel written by Joseph Goebbels to the childhood of the scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer to the fall of the Berlin Wall...The story of Wacker's unlikely rise and equally quick unraveling makes for compulsive reading, made especially gripping by Eksteins' sure-handed unfolding of the narrative...Eksteins is a major historian and Solar Dance, like everything he writes, deserves a wide and attentive readership., Modris Eksteins's Solar Dance: Van Gogh, Forgery, and the Eclipse of Certainty tells the story of Wacker's deception and discovery, and of a cultural milieu eager to be taken in. He provides, in the early section, a lively but brief retelling of the familiar story of Van Gogh's tumultuous life and 1890 death. There follows a broad reconstruction of the artistic and cultural scene of Weimar-era Berlin'e"active, morally unmoored, gay, ripe for Nazi condemnation and takeover'e"and a loose but persistent argument that this period with its clash of values was the inflection point between the philosophical certainty of the 19th century and the doubt of the present'e¦ Eksteins's book does a fine job of chronicling the era's aesthetic confusion., Modris Eksteins's Solar Dance: Van Gogh, Forgery, and the Eclipse of Certainty tells the story of Wacker's deception and discovery, and of a cultural milieu eager to be taken in. He provides, in the early section, a lively but brief retelling of the familiar story of Van Gogh's tumultuous life and 1890 death. There follows a broad reconstruction of the artistic and cultural scene of Weimar-era Berlin'active, morally unmoored, gay, ripe for Nazi condemnation and takeover'and a loose but persistent argument that this period with its clash of values was the inflection point between the philosophical certainty of the 19th century and the doubt of the present'_¦ Eksteins's book does a fine job of chronicling the era's aesthetic confusion., Modris Eksteins 's subtle and engaging account of how Vincent van Gogh came to be strangled by his own success bestows a great gift: new strangeness. In 56 short sections, each linked to a van Gogh work, he interweaves the large fabric of culture, politics and money with the small, pedestrian tale of a man arrested in 1927 for offering 30 forged van Goghs for sale., Nowadays, van Gogh is no longer even an authentic madman; he is, instead, a textbook case of cultural over-determination, strangled by his own success. Modris Eksteins's subtle and engaging new book offers an account of how this came to be, and in telling it, Eksteins bestows a great gift: new strangeness...Eksteins tells his story in a suitably looping and layered manner, with many darts and artful reverses, using a range of knowledge and allusion reminiscent of his 1989 masterpiece, Rites of Spring., In a grand, rich, and incisive exploration, Eksteins examines van Gogh and the world of appearance, illusion, and fraud opened up by one of the century's most famous counterfeit cases: a trove of fake van Goghs that Berlin impresario Otto Wacker released onto the art market in the late 1920s. Eksteins introduces readers to a fascinating array of movers and shakers, from Van Gogh and Gauguin to the art dealer Paul Cassirer and his scandalous actress-wife Tilla Durieux, to Van Gogh's admirers, who included Joseph Goebbels, Bertolt Brecht, and Hermann Hesse. He explores the tawdry world of physical culture, inflationary economics, and experimental sexuality for which Weimar Berlin was the undisputed capital and moves his characters through the Edwardian peace of the pre-1914 era, into the world war, the shocking seasons of revolution, the tempests of the Weimar Republic, and finally into the Nazi era. Eksteins illuminates how a world of norms and expertise gave way to an unanchored, turbulent world in which art, creativity, and expression redefined political and cultural desire. More than simply an astute historical and cultural observation, Solar Dance offers a remarkable intellectual voice that drives a thesis about the compelling, appalling status of authenticity and illusion in the twentieth century., Solar Dance vividly captures the large within the small. Van Gogh, or more precisely the cult and myth of Van Gogh, is central to our concept--so well-established we have forgotten how new it is--of the artist as tortured outsider and of art as the quintessential medium of protest and anger. And the virtually unknown Otto Wacker also turns out, in Eksteins's hands, to be a harbinger of our era of ceaseless copying and remixing, and our own crisis of authenticity., Brilliant...Ecksteins' deeply researched historical study tells the story of the Van Gogh forgeries that flooded the German art market in the 1920s and the way that the counterfeiting of masterpieces was part and parcel of a larger cultural breakdown that destroyed German democracy...Eksteins is among the most erudite and perspicacious of scholars. In explaining the forgeries of the 1920s, he gives us an eye-opening and wide-ranging history of the Van Gogh cult, finding unexpected evidence of the painter's spectral influence in everything from a novel written by Joseph Goebbels to the childhood of the scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer to the fall of the Berlin Wall...The story of Wacker's unlikely rise and equally quick unraveling makes for compulsive reading, made especially gripping by Eksteins' sure-handed unfolding of the narrative...Eksteins is a major historian and Solar Dance, like everything he writes, deserves a wide and attentive readership., Eksteins ambitiously surveys several features of late-19th- and 20th-century culture. He narrates the oft-told tale of struggling avant-garde artist Vincent van Gogh, whose 'value' is realized only after his death. In this lively discussion of the fragmentation and uncertainty of cultural canons in an age of dissolving traditional values, Ecksteins, author of the acclaimed Rites of Spring (1989), brings his erudition and knowledge of European cultural history to bear on the diverse visual and intellectual threads of the 20th century, weaving a tale that is part detective story and part probing cultural analysis. His cast of characters range from the Dutch artist who serves as the central 'sun' around which orbits the denizens of high and low culture, to the critically important early-20th-century German art critic and van Gogh biographer Julius Meier-Graefe, to the late-20th-century U.S. pop singer Don McLean, composer of the huge hit 'Vincent' ('Starry, Starry Night'). The myriad of fascinating links tying the painter to so many aspects of 20th- and 21st-century culture are, indeed, quite remarkable. With his sure command of the literature, Eksteins tells an intriguing tale of art and cultural authenticity., Eksteins brings the exuberance and precariousness of the age, and of Berlin itself, to life with detail, wit, and a marvelously researched cast of characters. Coupled with the intriguing treatment of van Gogh as an amalgam of artist and celebrity, the component parts of which cannot be treated separately, this makes for fascinating reading., In 1932 Berlin, a young man named Otto Wacker stood trial for art fraud and forgery of a number of Van Gogh paintings. The victim, Berlin's cultural scene, enabled the fraud as much as it suffered from it. Eksteins has interwoven a discussion of artistry--Van Gogh's vision of reality and his doubts about himself and the world--with an examination of the aspirations and volatility of the short-lived Weimar republic and the emergence of Nazism. Following World War I, Germany was economically devastated, despairing, and in a state of denial; and Berlin adopted Van Gogh as its iconic figure. The sudden "discovery" of a trove of unknown Van Goghs, which had supposedly been in the possession of a Russian collector, found a willing market in the city. When Wacker's fraud was discovered, it shattered Berliners' faith in reliable standards and innate value...This is a fascinating story, combining art history with social commentary and political acumen. Interwar Germany is well drawn and the search for purpose and meaning is one all readers will recognize.
Dewey Edition
23
Dewey Decimal
943.085
Synopsis
Art dealer Otto Wacker'e(tm)s 1932 sensational trial in Berlin for selling fake Van Goghs leads Eksteins to a unique narrative of a collapsing Weimar Germany, the rise of another misfit, Adolf Hitler, and the replacement of nineteenth-century certitude with twentieth-century doubt., In Modris Eksteins's hands, the interlocking stories of Vincent van Gogh and art dealer Otto Wacker reveal the origins of the fundamental uncertainty that is the hallmark of the modern era. Through the lens of Wacker's sensational 1932 trial in Berlin for selling fake Van Goghs, Eksteins offers a unique narrative of Weimar Germany, the rise of Hitler, and the replacement of nineteenth-century certitude with twentieth-century doubt. Berlin after the Great War was a magnet for art and transgression. Among those it attracted was Otto Wacker, a young gay dancer turned art impresario. His sale of thirty-three forged Van Goghs and the ensuing scandal gave Van Gogh's work unprecedented commercial value. It also called into question a world of defined values and standards that had already begun to erode during the war. Van Gogh emerged posthumously as a hero who rejected organized religion and other suspect sources of authority in favor of art. Self-pitying Germans saw in his biography a series of triumphs-over defeat, poverty, and meaninglessness-that spoke to them directly. Eksteins shows how the collapsing Weimar Republic that made Van Gogh famous and gave Wacker an opportunity for reinvention propelled a third misfit into the spotlight. Taking advantage of the void left by a gutted belief system, Hitler gained power by fashioning myths of mastery. Filled with characters who delight and frighten, "Solar Dance" merges cultural and political history to show how upheavals of the early twentieth century gave rise to a search for authenticity and purpose.
LC Classification Number
DD239.E39 2012
Item description from the seller
Popular categories from this store
Seller feedback (12,794)
- 1***a (287)- Feedback left by buyer.Past monthVerified purchaseAA++! great seller , reasonable price ! shipped fast and packaged well for protection , was in exactly as described condition , very pleased , thanks so much !!
- g***g (1340)- Feedback left by buyer.Past 6 monthsVerified purchaseItem as described. Great value for a quality book. Exceptionally careful packing ensured that the book arrived undamaged. I highly recommend this seller.Mere Christianity Gift Edition , Lewis, C. S. , (#156451457511)
- n***1 (28)- Feedback left by buyer.Past 6 monthsVerified purchaseExcellent seller, book arrived promptly in solid package, exactly as described, great value!In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 3: The Guermantes Way , Proust, Marcel , (#156485363945)
Product ratings and reviews
Most relevant reviews
- May 10, 2025
Interesting history
Verified purchase: YesCondition: Pre-OwnedSold by: mtwyouth
More to explore :
- Dance Textbooks,
- Dance Textbooks in English,
- Dance Paperback Textbooks,
- A Dance with Dragons Fiction Fiction & Nonfiction Books,
- Dance Study Paperbacks Prep,
- Dance Study Guides & Test Prep,
- Dance Nonfiction Books in English Signed Fiction Books,
- Art & Culture Nonfiction Dance Fiction & Nonfiction Books,
- Dance Nonfiction Books in Russian Illustrated Fiction Books,
- Nonfiction Books & Fiction Dance 1950-1999 Publication Year
Popular categories from this store
Seller feedback (12,794)
- 1***a (287)- Feedback left by buyer.Past monthVerified purchaseAA++! great seller , reasonable price ! shipped fast and packaged well for protection , was in exactly as described condition , very pleased , thanks so much !!
- g***g (1340)- Feedback left by buyer.Past 6 monthsVerified purchaseItem as described. Great value for a quality book. Exceptionally careful packing ensured that the book arrived undamaged. I highly recommend this seller.Mere Christianity Gift Edition , Lewis, C. S. , (#156451457511)
- n***1 (28)- Feedback left by buyer.Past 6 monthsVerified purchaseExcellent seller, book arrived promptly in solid package, exactly as described, great value!In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 3: The Guermantes Way , Proust, Marcel , (#156485363945)