Description: "Women Holding Things includes the bright, bold images featured in the booklet as well as an additional sixty-seven new paintings highlighted by thoughtful and intimate anecdotes, recollections, and ruminations. Most are portraits of women, both ordinary and famous, including Virginia Woolf, Sally Hemings, Hortense Cezanne, Gertrude Stein, as well as Kalman's family members and other real-life people. These women hold a range of objects, from the mundane--balloons, a cup, a whisk, a chicken, a hat--to the abstract--dreams and disappointments, sorrow and regret, joy and love. Women Holding Things explores the significance of the objects we carry--in our hands, hearts, and minds--and speaks to, and for, all of us. Maira Kalman's unique work is a celebration of life, of the act and the art of living, offering an original way of examining and understanding all that is important in our world--and ultimately within ourselves." --
Brief description:
Maira Kalman illustrated William Strunk Jr's classic The Elements of Style and is the author of My Favorite Things, Principles of Uncertainty, and And the Pursuit of Happiness. She is also the author/illustrator of numerous children's books, and her artwork has graced a dozen covers of The New Yorker. Her watches, clocks, accessories, and paperweights have been featured at the Museum of Modern Art store. She lives in New York City.
Alex Kalman is an artist, editor, designer, publisher, and curator, He is the founder of Mmuseumm and owner of What Studio? Learn more at alexkalman.com
Review Quotes:
"The prospect of reading and looking at Kalman's work gets my heart moving like a squirmy animal. This is not a hyperbole. The excitement, I think, is in how she is able to locate the elusive sweet spot of poignant and funny, along with the often-dark complexities behind these emotions. I feel like I will learn something new about people, myself." - Literary Hub
"The mega-talented writer and artist Maira Kalman presents, in radiant color, Women Holding Things. Kalman's brief texts are thoughtful, autobiographical, powerful. This life-affirming book shines a light on women's lives and how we all hold our humanity." - Sandee Brawarsky, Hadassah Magazine
"I love Maira Kalman. I love her painting, I love her perspective, I love her handwriting, and I love her books, which somehow contain all of those things and so much more. Maira is a gift to the world, and her gifts should also be your gifts. They will certainly be my gifts." - Emma Straub, Bookstore Owner and Author
"Kalman's images encompass both everyday pleasures and incomprehensible loss, always affirming art's sustaining grace." - Roberta Smith, co-chief art critic of the New York Times
"When [Maira] Kalman looked at her archives, she noticed that she had a large collection of photographs of women holding things. [...] The project that germinated [...] "Women Holding Things," gathers dozens of new images and some previously unpublished ones." - New Yorker
"In Women Holding Things, artist Kalman--an uncommon philosopher of the quietly magnificent in the mundane--celebrates all the things we hold. [...] The tender, infinitely expressive paintings are captioned with spare words that lend each vignette an extra air of human fragility and resilience." - Maria Popova, The Marginalian