west valley art museum
Literary Feasts are a sumptuous treat for the senses. They tempt the pallet with gourmet cuisine, enchant the eyes with stunning masterpieces, captivate the ears with the sounds of the masters’ voices, touch the heart with stirring emotions and feed the soul with the ethos of creativity.
Mouthwatering Food | Decadent Desserts |
Literary Feasts are held on the second Friday of each month at the beautiful West Valley Art Museum. Each extraordinary event begins with a private reception in the grand foyer where guests will meet the author and have books signed while enjoying music, canapés and refreshments. From the grand foyer, guests will proceed to an elegant feast specially prepared by our Chef in relation to the featured book. The evening culminates as our famous authors mesmerize and enchant with intriguing tales of the hidden mysteries behind the world’s most famous paintings.
Luncheon of the Boating Party Author—Susan Vreeland Bestselling author Susan Vreeland has garnered international praise for her historical fiction on art-related themes. In her latest novel, Luncheon of the Boating Party, Vreeland brings to vivid life the fourteen subjects in Renoir’s painting. An actress, a mime, a journalist, an adventurer, a singer-flower seller, an art collector, a poet, a boatman, a baron, and a yachtsman-painter are among the characters you will meet. What is going on in their lives as they pose? How do the threads of their lives weave into the canvas? What secrets are they hiding? Luncheon of the Boating Party depicts the summer of 1880, an exuberant postwar time when social constraints were loosening, Paris was healing, and Parisians were bursting with a desire for pleasure. The fourteen people on the terrace overlooking the Seine enjoying this moment of la vie moderne are Renoir’s very real friends, whose lives unfold and connect during the course of the making of the painting. Instantly recognizable, beloved the world over, Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party serves as an icon of an age, a place, an art movement at its apogee, and an ideal of human desire and sociability.
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January 11, 2008
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Travel back with us to the terrace of La Maison Fournaise, twenty minutes west of Paris by train, where we drink champagne and cruise the Seine with the infamous members of the boating party.
Photo By: Shinji Yamamoto
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Susan Vreeland in front of Renoir’s Painting.
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Meet the Characters
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Gustave Caillebotte
Alphonsine Fournaise
Baron Raoul Barbier
Alphonse Fournaise
Wealthy painter, collector of Impressionist paintings, yachtsman, racer, close friend of Renoir.
Daughter of the owners of the Maison Fournaise; war widow.
Former cavalry officer and war hero, former mayor of Saigon, yachtsman, lover of race horses and ladies.
Son of the owner of Maison Fournaise, renter and builder of boats, jouster in the Fêtes Nautiques.
Paul Lhôte
Pierre Lestringuèz
Charles Ephrussi
Jules Laforgue
Wild adventurer, journalist, writer of short fiction, a close friend of Renoir.
Official at the Ministry of the Interior, dabbler in the occult, close friend of Paul.
Russian-born art collector, writer and director of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts.
Symbolist poet, journalist for La Vie Moderne, secretary to Charles Ephrussi.
Ellen Andrée
Angéle
Antonio Maggiolo
Jeanne Samary
Model for Degas as well as Renoir, mime in the Folies-Bergère.
Flower seller in outdoor market, model, singer.
Italian journalist for Le Triboulet.
Actress at the Comédie-Française.
west valley art museum | café on the avenue | literary
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Northern France River Cruise Vacation Package
Join the Boating Party on an Unforgettable Seine River Cruise Ahh . . . April in Paris Combine passion and the good life with art, culture, and brilliant landscapes, and you will have Northern France with Paris, the grand “City of Lights,” at its epicenter. Paris provides the perfect start and end to your Northern France journey. The city offers legendary surprises at every turn – from the iconic Eiffel Tower to the famed Champs Elysée to the grand Notre Dame Cathedral. Small towns, beaches and fishing boats provide the perfect backdrop to inspire great art. From the charming French village of Conflans Ste Honorine, we take you to a favored region for artists of the Impressionist Period – Cezanne, Degas, and especially Van Gogh. The village of Auvers-sur-Oise is the site that Van Gogh immortalized on his canvases: Auberge Ravoux, Church of Auvers-sur-Oise, and Wheat Fields. While in Rouen, you will visit the stunning gothic cathedral of Rouen, and the countryside – all immortalized so vividly by Monet on his canvases. You will travel to Honfleur, a charming French harbor town favored by artists such as Gustave Courbet and Claude Monet, who painted its fishing boats and slate-covered houses. And of course, you will experience Monet’s home in his beloved village of Giverny, where you will see the familiar Japanese bridge and water garden shaded by weeping willows, with its pond still full of water lilies that so inspired this Master’s work. You will walk the beaches of Normandy where the Allied forces landed during World War II’s D-Day Invasion – a day crucial to victory, and you will see the site where Joan of Arc was martyred. All of this and so much more, on one unforgettable, awe-inspiring journey that you will not want to miss. Art lovers will thrill at visiting the Impressionists’ villages and homes – so inspirational and often represented in their works. Students of history will be awestruck by the D-Day memorial sites, and the site of Joan of Arc’s martyrdom. Nature lovers will marvel at the scenery of Northern France’s countryside. Price Includes: • 7-night cruise in an outside stateroom on the elegant Grand River Baroness • Classical European cuisine with unprecedented service and elegance • Complimentary wine during dinner, and bottled water in your stateroom • 7 shore excursions with English speaking guides • Captain’s Welcome & Farewell Dinners • Enriching onboard entertainment and insightful lectures Arrivals/Departures Paris to Paris (Flight to Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport available at additional cost.) Departing: April 12, 2008 Returning: April 19, 2008
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Cost: $2,549 pp Members $2,849 pp Non-Members
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Strapless John Singer Sergeant and the Fall of Madam X Author—Deborah Davis The subject of John Singer Sargent's most famous painting was twenty-three-year-old New Orleans Creole Virginie Gautreau, who moved to Paris and quickly became the “it girl” of her day. A relative unknown at the time, Sargent won the commission to paint her; the two immediately recognized in each other a like-minded hunger for fame. Unveiled at the 1884 Paris Salon, Gautreau’s portrait generated the attention she cravedbut it led to infamy rather than stardom. Sargent had painted one strap of Gautreau’s dress dangling from her shoulder, suggesting either the prelude to or the aftermath of sex. Her reputation irreparably damaged, Gautreau retired from public life, destroying all the mirrors in her home. Drawing on documents from private collections and other previously unexamined materials, and featuring a cast of characters including Oscar Wilde and Richard Wagner, Strapless is a tale of art and celebrity, obsession and betrayal. Slip on you little black dress and join us for an evening of romance, intrigue and infamy.
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February 8, 2008
The Wayward Muse Author—Elizabeth Hickey Pulled straight from the canvasses of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Wayward Muse paints a vivid portrait of the mysterious and beautiful Jane Burden, the Pre-Raphaelite icon. A stableman’s daughter raised in the slums of Oxford, England, seventeen-year-old Jane is convinced of her own homeliness. She is unusually tall and very thin, with a long, pale, sad face and a mass of coarse, unruly hair. Her family and neighbors consider her ugly and despair of her finding a husband. But her fortunes forever change when she is discovered by the charismatic and irreverent painter, Rossetti. His fellow artist Edward BurneJones persuades Jane’s grasping mother to allow her to pose, for a fee, as Guenevere in a series of murals. The modeling sessions change Jane’s life, introducing her to a group of young artists, writers, and craftsmen who called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
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March 14, 2008
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Jane is swept into the artist’s world as model and muse and falls madly in love with Rossetti. When he abruptly leaves Oxford with no plans to return, brokenhearted Jane settles for a stable, if passionless, marriage to his soft-spoken protégé, William Morris – the man who would go on to become the father of the British Arts and Crafts Movement. Jane resigns herself to life as a respectable wife and mother, exchanging the slop bucket for intricate needlepoint, willing away the memories of Rossetti and what could have been. But Rossetti and Jane are inextricably bound together by tragedy, art, and desire, and no amount of time or distance can separate them. Years later, all three become entangled in a love triangle from which they will never escape.
west valley art museum | café on the avenue | literary
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feast s Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper Author—Harriet Scott Chessman Elegantly conceived and tenderly written, this richly imagined fiction entices us into the world of Mary Cassatt’s early Impressionist paintings. The story is told by Mary’s sister Lydia, as she poses for five of her sister’s most unusual paintings, which are reproduced in, and form the focal point of each chapter. Ill with Bright’s disease and conscious of her approaching death, Lydia contemplates her world with courageous openness, and asks important questions about love and art’s capacity to remember. Mary, seven years her junior, is on the cusp of realizing her creative ambitions, having been accepted as the only woman in the inner circle of late 19th Century impressionists who were stirring up Paris and the art world. These sisters savor their time together because they deeply love each other and they know they’ll soon be parted. Much goes unspoken. The younger sister avoids acknowledging that Lydia has little time left and the older woman doesn’t force the conversation. They communicate through the work.
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April 11, 2008
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The final chapter, “Lydia Seated at an Embroidery Frame,” is a reprise of all the themes that have come before. Lydia composes a farewell letter to Mary, comforting her: “My sister, my soul,” she writes, “you will remember me, bent over my labor, at my embroidery frame, on a hot June day in Paris, my dress like a field of flowers, my face calm. You will remember me because you caught my soul in paint.”
A Perfect Red Guide—Eric Mindling A Perfect Red recounts the colorful history of cochineal, a legendary red dye that was once one of the world’s most precious commodities. Treasured by the ancient Mexicans, cochineal was sold in the great Aztec marketplaces, where it attracted the attention of the Spanish conquistadors in 1519. Shipped to Europe, the dye created a sensation, producing the brightest, strongest red the world had ever seen. Soon Spain’s cochineal monopoly was worth a fortune. Desperate to find their own sources of the elusive dye, the English, French, Dutch, and other Europeans tried to crack the enigma of cochineal. Did it come from a worm, a berry, a seed? Could it be stolen from Mexico and transplanted to their own colonies? Pirates, explorers, alchemists, scientists and spies — all joined the chase for cochineal, a chase that lasted more than three centuries. A Perfect Red tells their stories – true-life tales of mystery, empire and intrigue. Join adventure guide and photographer Eric Mindling on a journey down the legendary Cochineal Trail, where you will learn the ancient secrets of cochineal and other natural dyes of Oaxaca, in pursuit of the most desirable color on earth.
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May 9, 2008
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| café on the avenue | west valley art museum
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Colorful Vacation Journey to Oaxaca Highlands
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Weaving, Culture and Natural Dyes A journey that will color your hands and soul! Our adventure takes us in search of the perfect cochineal red and other legendary natural dyes such as indigo and murex. We travel from the highlands of Oaxaca, where we will visit master weavers, explore village markets and Zapotec ruins, to the balmy Pacific coast to see murex dyeing with one of the last ancestral murex dyers on earth. Our base camp will be the mega-weaving village of Teotitlan del Valle, where there are 5,000 weavers hard at work, as well as a small handful of top-notch natural dyers. This is the mother-land of cochineal, and we’ll delve into its secrets, seeing how it is cultivated and harvested and working with master dyer and weaver, Demetrio Bautista Lazo. Then we climb into a bush plane and take an excursion over the southern Sierra Madre and down to the rocky shoreline of the Pacific coast with its entrancing blue bays and warm waters, to meet with one of the last ancestral murex dyers on the planet. Climbing in a fisherman’s launch we bounce to a remote location that is the lair of Purpura Panza, the source of murex purple in the Americas. We’ll learn how the dyeing is done and see samples of Mixtec textiles woven with this purple-dyed cotton thread. Returning to the highlands a couple of days later we take a breather in the colonial city of Oaxaca, admiring shops that carry some of the finest indigenous textiles in Mexico, before heading home rich with memories and hands lovingly tinged red, blue and purple.
Price Includes: • Transportation from Oaxaca International Airport to hotel. (Flight to Oaxaca not included.) • 10-days lodging, most meals, local transportation • Round trip airfare from Oaxaca to Huatulco • Boat trip to murex shell dyeing beach • Cochineal cultivation and techniques with Cochinel and Indigo dyes • Hands-on dyeing and material collecting with master dyer Demetrio Bautista Lazo • Enriching journey to Teotitlan del Valle weaving village • Visit with one of the last ancestral Murex dyers • Exploring the bustling market in Tlacolula and pre-Hispanic ruins When:
May 31 – June 9, 2008
Cost:
$2,600 Members $2,900 Non-Members
Scandals, Vandals and da Vincis Author—Harvey Rachlin Gaze at a Caravaggios, Rembrandt, Manet or Monet and you become filled with wonder and awe at the artistic genius of its creator. Yet before brush was laid to canvas, the painting’s unique story had already begun. In Scandals, Vandals, and da Vincis, award-winning writer Harvey Rachlin delves into the life of the painting itself: the circumstances under which it was created; its journey over the centuries, passing thorough the hands of a cast of characters, from kings and queens, to tragic lovers, spies and thieves; and the revolutions, the wars, the passions and the adventures that the painting encountered along the way. Join us and discover how nearly thirty of the world’s greatest masterworks came to be created and how they survived burglary, forgery, revolutions, ransoms, vandals, scandals, religious sects, and shipwrecks to eventually come to their current resting places.
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June 13, 2008
| west valley art museum | café on the avenue | literary
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calendar of event s January 11 Luncheon of the Boating Party Susan Vreeland
February 8 Strapless John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madam X Deborah Davis
March 14 The Wayward Muse Elizabeth Hickey
April 11 Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper Harriet Scott Chessman
May 9 A Perfect Red Eric Mindling
June 13 Scandals, Vandals and da Vincis Harvey Rachlin
Lunch Feasts
Reservations
11 a.m. 12 p.m.
Museum Tour/Reception Lunch/Program
Cost:
$45 Members $55 Non-Members
Guests have their choice of lunch or dinner for all Literary Feasts. Reservations are required as seating is limited. To purchase tickets, please call the West Valley Art Museum at 623.972.0635 or visit our website www.literaryfeasts.com.
Dinner Feasts
Location
6 p.m. 7 p.m.
Museum Tour/Reception Dinner/Program
Cost:
$65 Members $75 Non-Members
West Valley Art Museum 17420 N. Avenue of the Arts Surprise, Arizona 85374
Š 2007 Archibald & Associates