Mary Vaudoyer was scarcely out of childhood when she observed to her mother that the only things that really mattered in life were clothes and philosophy. That statement proved to define the course of Mary's extraordinary life. Born in 1918, Mary joined the Special Operations Executive at the outbreak of the Second World War, meeting Sir Winston Churchill and dealing with top-secret documents. She went on to carry out vital work preparing undercover agents for dangerous missions in France. After the war Mary married a member of a prominent family of French architects and spent most of the rest of her life in France. In the post-war years she developed a passion for haute couture and became a collector of fabulous garments, gowns, dresses and coats. In the 1990s she published Le Livre de la Haute Couture, a comprehensive work on fashion and the great designers, which became a best-seller on both sides of the Channel. Whisper of Truth is her story.
Mary Vaudoyer was scarcely out of childhood when she observed to her mother that the only things that really mattered in life were clothes and philosophy. That statement proved to define the course of Mary's extraordinary life. Born in 1918, Mary joined the Special Operations Executive at the outbreak of the Second World War, meeting Sir Winston Churchill and dealing with top-secret documents. She went on to carry out vital work preparing undercover agents for dangerous missions in France. After the war Mary married a member of a prominent family of French architects and spent most of the rest of her life in France. In the post-war years she developed a passion for haute couture and became a collector of fabulous garments, gowns, dresses and coats. In the 1990s she published Le Livre de la Haute Couture, a comprehensive work on fashion and the great designers, which became a best-seller on both sides of the Channel. Whisper of Truth is her story.
Mary Vaudoyer was scarcely out of childhood when she observed to her mother that the only things that really mattered in life were clothes and philosophy. That statement proved to define the course of Mary's extraordinary life. Born in 1918, Mary joined the Special Operations Executive at the outbreak of the Second World War, meeting Sir Winston Churchill and dealing with top-secret documents. She went on to carry out vital work preparing undercover agents for dangerous missions in France. After the war Mary married a member of a prominent family of French architects and spent most of the rest of her life in France. In the post-war years she developed a passion for haute couture and became a collector of fabulous garments, gowns, dresses and coats. In the 1990s she published Le Livre de la Haute Couture, a comprehensive work on fashion and the great designers, which became a best-seller on both sides of the Channel. Whisper of Truth is her story.
Marcel Proust offered the twentieth century a new psychology of memory and seeing. His novel In Search of Lost Time was written in the modern age of photography and art history. In Looking Back One Learns to See: Marcel Proust and Photography is an intellectual adventure that brings to light Proust’s visual imagination, his visual metaphors, and his photographic resources and imaginings. The book features over 90 illustrations. Mary Bergstein highlights various kinds of photography: daguerreotypes, stereoscopic cards, cartes-de-visite, postcards, book illustrations, and other photographic mediums. Portraiture, medical photography, spirit photography, architectural photography, Orientalism, ethnographic photography, and fin-de-siècle studies of Botticelli, Leonardo, and Vermeer, are considered in terms of Proust’s life and work. The net is cast wide, and each image under discussion has been researched with subtle attention to art, literature, and cultural history. This scholarly study in literature and visual culture will be a delight, too, for general readers who love photography or Proust. Mary Bergstein is professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at the Rhode Island School of Design. She won the 2012 “Courage to Dream” book prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association for, Mirrors of Memory: Freud, Photography, and the History of Art (Cornell 2010). She has published numerous books and articles on art and visual culture from Italian Renaissance sculpture to contemporary photography.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
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