Just Passing Through
A Seven-Decade Roman Holiday: The Diaries and Photographs of Milton Gendel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
One of Vanity Fair’s Best Books of 2022
“Milton Gendel had the good fortune to live a wildly entertaining life in Rome—a charmed, romantic period he captured in diaries and photos. Milton had the further good fortune to have Cullen Murphy bring this vanished dolce vita to life.” —Graydon Carter, coeditor of Air Mail
A never-before-seen treasure trove of photos and diary entries from the celebrated photographer Milton Gendel that bring Rome’s midcentury heyday to life.
“I’m just passing through,” Milton Gendel liked to say whenever anybody asked him what he was doing in Rome. Even after seven decades in the Eternal City, from his arrival as a Fulbright Scholar in 1949 until his death in 2018 at the age of ninety-nine, he refused to be pigeonholed. He was always an American—never an “expat,” never an émigré—but he couldn’t leave, so deep were his ties, and this dual bond left an indelible imprint on his life and art.
Born in New York City to Russian immigrants, Gendel first made his way to Meyer Schapiro’s classroom at Columbia University and then to Greenwich Village, where he and his friend Robert Motherwell joined the circle of surrealists around Peggy Guggenheim and André Breton. But it was Rome that earned his enduring fascination—the city supplied him with endless outlets for his curiosity, a series of dazzling apartments in palazzi, the great loves of his life, and the scores of friendships that made his story inextricably part of the city’s own.
Gendel did much more than just pass through, instead becoming one of Rome’s foremost documentarians. He spoke Italian fluently, worked for the industrialist Adriano Olivetti, and sampled the latest currents of Italian art as a correspondent for ARTnews. And he was an artist in his own right, capturing the lives of Sicilian peasants and British royals alike on film and showing his photographs at the Roman outpost of the Marlborough Gallery. Then there were his diaries, a casement window thrown open onto a who’s who of artists, writers, and socialites sojourning in the city that remained, for Gendel, the Caput Mundi: Mark Rothko, Princess Margaret, Alexander Calder, Anaïs Nin, Gore Vidal, Martha Gellhorn, Muriel Spark. His longtime home on the Isola Tiberina was the nerve center of the dolce vita generation, whose comings and goings and doings he immortalized in both words and images.
Here, for the first time in print, are Gendel’s diaries, together with his photographs, selected and edited by Cullen Murphy. Just Passing Through brings together the most striking artifacts of one of the past century’s richest and most expansive lives, salted with wit and insight into the figures who defined an era.
Includes black-and-white photographs
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Abundantly illustrated with the late photographer Gendel's images, these diary entries show off his fabulously wealthy and cultured milieu of socialites, royalty, artists, fellow American expats, among them Peggy Guggenheim, Mick Jagger, Gore Vidal, Evelyn Waugh, Princess Margaret, and Queen Elizabeth. It's an intimate series of snapshots and vignettes of the gilded 1970s-era Rome that Gendel (1918–2018) inhabited. His remarks are as candid as his photographs: Salvador Dalí was a "splendid figure with his joke mustache," but Balthasar Klossowski de Rola (director of the French Academy in Rome) was a "Lizard with a high IQ." Gendel's passion for art permeates, as he takes in J. Paul Getty's mansion or offers a damning review of the 1972 Venice Biennale. Never intended "for public consumption," per Murphy, Gendel's writings are sharp and casual (the Queen Mother gets noted "QM"). Though detailed enough to be a bit niche for general readers, those who know the art world will delight in these fresh and often funny notes on some of the 20th century's most well-known cultural figures.