Gregory Curtis
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3.2 Courtesy of Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris
4.1 Photograph by Pierre Petit (1832–1909), Archives Larousse, Paris, France/Bridgeman Art Library
4.2 Courtesy of Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris
5.1 Courtesy of Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Berlin
5.2 Roger Viollet/Getty Images
5.3 Courtesy of Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris
7.1 Venus de Milo with Drawers, (1936) Plaster. 1970 replica of 1936 sculpture. 355⁄8 × 1213⁄16 × 133⁄8′. Collection of the Salvador Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida. Copyright 2003 Salvador Dalí Museum, Inc. © Salvador Dalí, Gala-Salvador Dalí Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
7.2 Courtesy of Whitford Fine Art, London, copyright Clive Barker
7.3 Musée de la publicité, Paris. All Rights Reserved
7.4 Musée de la publicité, Paris. All Rights Reserved
GREGORY CURTIS
Disarmed
Gregory Curtis was editor of Texas Monthly from 1981 until 2000. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Fortune, Time, and Rolling Stone, among other places. A graduate of Rice University and San Francisco State College, he currently lives in Austin with his wife and four children.
Acclaim for
GREGORY CURTIS’s
Disarmed
“Part thriller, part art history, part rumination on the Greeks.… Curtis writes faster and better than just about any academic art historian.”
—Newsweek
“Absorbing.… Enormously entertaining.… Curtis is a writer of generous wit, who packs his book with delicious portraits of the scholars, writers, artists and politicians who contributed to the mythologizing of the Venus de Milo.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“An engaging and engrossing book. It makes one want to head right off to Paris, to that long gallery in the Louvre, and have a look again.”
—Larry McMurtry
“Curtis does a solid job of presenting art history as narrative non-fiction, moving the statue swiftly across many epochs and giving a taste of what it meant to each.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Fascinating, scholarly, surprising, and extremely entertaining.”
—Jan Morris
“Gripping.… [Curtis] disassembles each argument with the cranky urgency of a contemporary critic. And when he’s cleared the marble dust he takes his own crack at telling Venus’s story.”
—Forbes FYI
“A memorable, fascinating, thrilling book. In vivid prose based on research of great integrity, he makes us see new depths beneath the statue’s beauty. He has created a work that will endure in your memory like the statue itself.”
—Robert A. Caro
“In this colorful history of the statue and the riddles surrounding her, Curtis breathes warm life into this icon of female inscrutability.”
—Men’s Journal
“I found Disarmed completely compelling. After a while, I started to think that the book would wind up getting, via a single sculpture, to everything—and it very nearly does: art, sex, politics, religion. It’s even, for me, in an oblique way, about war and ‘disarmament.’ What a subtle, clever, nuanced work.”
—David Shields
“Riveting.… Brisk and brilliant.… Highly readable, well-researched and even passionate.… Lush, learned, and surprisingly entertaining.… A stunning debut.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Disarmed will be a startling book for readers expecting a dutiful art history lesson about a statue. It is instead a fiery and eccentric story, in whose pages all sorts of unforgettable characters fight for possession not just of the Venus de Milo herself, but of the tranquil, eternal, maddeningly elusive ideal of human perfection she represents.”
—Stephen Harrigan
“Sparkling.… Deliciously convoluted.… Curtis … renews our appreciation for a masterpiece as beautiful as it is mysterious.”
—Booklist
“A fascinating tale admirably told.”
—Rosamond Bernier
“Lively and engaging.… Very readable and enlightening.… Curtis’s story is filled with … striking and compelling characters.”
—The Trenton Times