Glowing Reviews for "The Modern Art Cookbook"

Professor Mary Ann Caws' new book is out, and The Modern Art Cookbook is receiving glowing reviews. Here is the summary from the University of Chicago Press website followed by excerpts from influential reviewers:

"Matisse, Picasso, Hockney-they may not have been from the same period, but they all painted still lifes of food. And they are not alone. Andy Warhol painted soup cans, Claes Oldenburg sculpted an ice cream cone on the top of a building in Cologne, Jack Kerouac's Sal ate apple pie across the country, and Truman Capote served chicken hash at the Black and White Ball. Food has always played a role in art, but how well and what did the artists themselves eat? Exploring a panoply of artworks of food, cooking, and eating from Europe and the Americas, The Modern Art Cookbook opens a window into the lives of artists, writers, and poets in the kitchen and the studio throughout the twentieth century and beyond."

"Connecting the senses is what The Modern Art Cookbook is all about . . . the larger purpose of this delectable anthology is the association of reading, looking and cooking . . . Mary Ann Caws has a discriminating eye, a catholic taste, a fine feeling for feeding, as A. J. Liebling called it, and a wonderfully well-stocked larder of culture. As a trans-historical truffle-hound she is hard to beat . . . Mary Ann Caws's purpose is triumphantly achieved. The marriage of lookery and cookery is beguiling: the total effect is mouth-watering."

- Alex Danchev, TLS

"The best thing about this beautifully packaged book is the lavish quantity of coloured plates: still lives and drawings, the odd photograph, some familiar, others not, all of them of food . . . [Caws] has paired pictures and recipes in the most imaginative way . . . A visual feast to salivate over."

- Evening Standard

"Try Cézanne's pears and quinces with honey or Roy Lichtenstein's roast fillet of beef. Less a kitchen book than a feast for the eyes."

- Country Life

"It's the rare artist who doesn't occasionally make the antics of the kitchen the subject of a work or two. But far from offering a dry review of that phenomenon or a delicious-looking but unfulfilling cocktail book of plates, Surrealism scholar Mary Ann Caws has assembled a collection of artists' personal writings, from diary entries to poetry, to examine the connection between art and paintings in The Modern Art Cookbook."

- Art and Auction

"Beautiful food art, quirky artist recipes, and dinner table gossip make this book an picurean treat."

- ForeWord

"Mouthwatering . . . Captivating images of works by Mary Cassat and Gustav Klimt are partnered with recipes used by Salvador Dalí and Frida Kahlo, amounting to the perfect gourmet tour through art history. Beyond artworks and recipes, the work also includes diary entries, poems, and bits of correspondence that illuminate art's long love affair with food. You'll not only learn to cook Monet's madeleines but you'll understand why Cezanne had a penchat for drawing potatoes. If visions of abstract paintings and juicy roasted vegetables are dancing in your head already, we don't blame you."

- Huffington Post

"[Caws] cookbook is a compilation of recipes culled from various artists' repertoires or inspired by their preferences, interspersed with paintings, photographs, snippets of poems, fiction, and essays about food or cooking. For instance, there's a recipe called 'Cezanne's Anchoiade' in homage to the daily anchovies he ate rolled between sautéed eggplant slices on the way to his studio. Instead of pictures of the finished product, a painting by Julian Merrow Smith of two silvery anchovies accompanies the recipe . . . What Caws is doing is highlighting the intersection between the act of creating art and cooking."

- Bookslut.com