And then there was war, and another war, and a sprinkling of successful books under various pseudonyms like Tania Blixen (for Anglophone audiences) and Isak Dinesen (for German-speakers). Then, fate threw her to a coffee farm in Africa, where she experienced financial ruin, infidelity, illness, death of her second big love, and a disgraced return to the native shores. Reared in a conservative monarchist family in a stately manor house on the outskirts of Copenhagen, she fell in love with some kind of a dashing equestrian, but, rejected, married his rogue twin brother instead. Jeffrey Weiss is director of the Dia Art Foundation.Karen Christenze von Blixen-Finecke had a complicated but colourful life. Stuckey is a specialist in Impressionist and modern art. Richard Shiff is Chair in Art and directs the Center for the Study of Modernism at the University of Texas, Austin. Simon Kelly is associate curator of European painting and sculpture at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City.

Stephen Bann is professor of the history of art at the University of Bristol. Eik Kahng is curator of 18th- and 19th-century art at the Walters Art Museum. Through beautiful illustrations and essays by leading scholars, this book ultimately shows how the 19th-century invention of photography and film-with their intrinsic attributes of repetition-did not diminish the traditional medium of painting but rather propelled it in new directions.

By making multiples of closely related subject matter in their paintings, the authors argue, these painters challenged an aesthetic based on the notion of an inimitable, unique masterpiece. In works by Ingres, Delaroche, Gérôme, Corot, Millet, Monet, Cézanne, Degas, and Matisse, the reader can compare closely related versions of some of the most familiar imagery of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In this innovative project, the authors show that the phenomenon of repetition appears as a radical element in early modern painting, long before its embrace by 20th-century high modernism. Today serial imagery dominates all forms of visual media, from advertising to conceptual sculpture.

Babette's feast karen blixen