Description

COOK BOOK: Gertrude Stein, William Cook, and Le Corbusier by Roy A. Behrens ISBN-10 - 0971324417 , ISBN-13 978097971324411 Publication Date 2005 (first edition) Publisher Bobolink Books $10.00 Save $7.95 off List Price of $17.95 Product Description Paperbound book. 95 pages: black and white illustrations inside, full-color dust jacket, 5 x 7 inches. Note Dust jacket and some interior illustrations are digital montages by the author. Book designed by author. Book Contents This is not a cookbook. Instead, it is a “Cook book,” a book about a man named Cook. It is a book about the life of American expatriate artist William Edwards Cook (1881-1959), a largely unknown painter who was also one of Gertrude Stein’s dearest and most loyal friends. A second distinction is that he was the architectural client for whom Swiss architect Le Corbusier designed an early Modern home, on the outskirts of Paris, known today as Villa Cook or Maison Cook. Born and raised in Independence, Iowa, Cook left the US in 1903 to study in France, and continued living overseas (in France, Italy, USSR, and the Spanish island of Majorca) for the rest of his life. A close friend of both Stein and her companion, Alice B. Toklas, it was Cook who taught Stein how to drive, so that she and Alice could transport supplies for the French Red Cross during World War I. When Cook’s lawyer father died in 1928, Cook used his inheritance to commission Le Corbusier (all but unknown as an architect then) to design an innovative residence for himself and his Breton-born wife, Jeanne Moallic. His escapades were legion—he was the first American to paint a portrait of Pope Pius X, served as an undercover agent for the US Secret Service, and, while working as a Red Cross worker in the USSR, witnessed (and reported on) the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Based largely on hundreds of pages of unpublished correspondence between Stein, Toklas and Cook, this is a revealing and often amusing account of their warm and lasting friendship. But it is also about the mystery that Paris held for the “lost generation” of expatriate artists, writers and musicians; about Stein’s and Cook’s shared interest in automobiles and bullfighting; about her outspoken fondness for Iowa (although she had never visited there)—and about everyone’s painful memories of growing up, leaving home, and never truly going back. Reviews “Behrens’ Cook Book jumps out at my eyes, my ears. It comes from everywhere, never drags those even blocks of print that dull the mind. Look at it, read it, let it tease you: it’s researched with all the care that keeps its sense of humor and its visual and voice delights. Travel with it, leave home, go and explore the many ways for a book to be a house for living.” — Ulla Dydo (preeminent Gertrude Stein scholar). “This book is as good as topnotch Behrens gets!” — Guy Davenport . “…a delightful little book…a high point in recent scholarship on Gertrude Stein.” – Paul Padgette . “This book…pleases with the quality of writing and content it offers. Highly readable, Behrens’ style is more like storytelling than scholarship. But readers should not be fooled by this tact—the book establishes Cook’s reputation as a loyal friend to Stein and a well-connected figure among the ex-pat community of artists living in Europe in the early twentieth century.” — Dene Grigar , Leonardo Reviews . Author Until his retirement from teaching in 2018, Emeritus Professor Roy R. Behrens was Professor of Art and Distinguished Scholar at the University of Northern Iowa. He had taught graphic design and design history at that and other schools for more than 45 years. He is the author of seven books, and literally hundreds of articles in journals, books, and magazines, and has appeared in broadcast interviews on NOVA, National Public Radio, Australian Public Radio, BBC, and Iowa Public Television, as well as in documentary films. He has been a nominee for the Smithsonian Institution's National Design Awards, has received the Iowa Board of Regents Faculty Excellence Award, and has been described in Communication Arts magazine as "one of the most original thinkers in design." He has lectured throughout the US, and, internationally, in the UK, Canada, and Australia. More information and a wide selection of his work can be accessed at <https://northerniowa.academia.edu/RoyBehrens> and at <http://www.bobolinkbooks.com/BALLAST/>. In addition, he actively maintains two blogs at <https://camoupedia.blogspot.com/> and <https://thepoetryofsight.blogspot.com/>. He has produced or appeared in videos on art and design-related subjects that can be accessed free online at < https://youtu.be/2NJcvEmEg_o >, < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLX5YQF-H3k >, < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiSWNYCNRcM >, < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3asynn24nD4 > and < https://www.youtube.com/watch ?v=nS2ZwYyxy1Y > He is especially known for his books and other writings on camouflage, including Art and Camouflage: Concealment and Deception in Nature, Art and War (1981), Camoupedia: A Compendium of Research on Art, Architecture and Camouflage (2009), and Ship Shape: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook (2012).