THE MEMORY PALACE OF ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER
The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner is both an unconventional biography of an exuberant and elusive woman and a lively personal tour of an idiosyncratic museum. Isabella Gardner’s high spirits and aesthetic pleasure, her women friends and female power, her friendships with the adventurers and aesthetes of her world, are all gathered into this engrossing investigation of patronage and passion. Blending biography, memoir, philosophy, and detective story, the book creates a relationship with the palace built “for the education and enjoyment of the public forever” by finding its own playfulness and freedom with the art and its owner. A witty and intimate quest for its subject, it loosens up the past and reminds us that we change our lives when we begin a relationship with art.
PRAISE & REVIEWS
What great pleasure this gorgeous little book has given me! It should be offered everywhere indeed, and at every museum shop on earth. Quite aside from finding it one of the best things of its kind I’ve ever read, I think it offers the freedom to think and to meditate, wandering through spaces that speak to sensibility. I loved the combination of felicitous language and current remark…Oh my goodness, what didn’t I love?
–Honor Moore
The Memory Palace of Isabella Stewart Gardner is a searching, sensitive, and engagingly witty meditation on a unique art collection set up as a death-defying memorial to the elusive character of the collector herself. It demonstrates an admirable ingenuity in crossing the boundaries of art and biography to create a unique biographical form.
–Lyndall Gordon
In her journey into the world of the willful and wonderful Isabella Stewart Gardner and her beloved and immutable museum, Patricia Vigderman has written a book of lyrical attention and poetic fluidity. Taking her leads from Gardner’s personality and life, she is as receptive to the offbeat and the forgotten as she is to the canonical.…This book makes it possible for us to feel we can touch not just a decisive 19th-century American moment but also an extraordinary and elusive person, while leaving the mystery at her center intact. After reading the book, no one will feel the same way about Gardner, her museum, and the relationship between contemporary art and the past.
–Michael Brenson
It is Vigderman who has constructed a memory palace on the site of Gardner’s museum. The pleasure the author takes in roaming the building and delving into archival material is palpable. We are taken on a tour past paintings, dishes, manuscripts, and letters, even stopping to look at gaps in the installation—empty frames that act as reminders of stolen Vermeers, Rembrandts, and Manets, each without one of those cards called fantômes that indicate a hope for the paintings’ return.
—Bookforum
Just as Marcel Duchamp made art from already existing objects, which became his ready mades, so collectors create total works of art by gathering together things they care about. And so, to continue the parallel, only a poetic response to a museum can do justice to that collection. This is most pleasurable book I have read, and I have read the literature, about an art museum. Even if you never get to Boston, you will love reading it.
–David Carrier, CAA Reviews
Patricia Vigderman, plays with the concept of the memory palace to produce a delightful and thought-provoking meditation on the meaning of biography and the nature of museology….[Her] rigorous insistence on understanding her subject as she really was rather than as a prefiguration of present-day concerns leads her to acknowledge a certain remoteness, and to rely as much as possible on testimony from Mrs. Gardner’s more voluble friends and associates, like the Adamses, Henry James, Bernard and Mary Berenson, and the Japanese savant Kakuzo Okakura, author of The Book of Tea. These Bostonians took culture very, very seriously indeed, and while they left behind thoughts and words…Mrs. Gardner left us Fenway Court. After reading this book, a visit there will never be the same.
—Art & Antiques