Artists Past and Present; Random Studies

Elisabeth Luther Cary wrote these studies when the ink was still wet on her subjects' most famous works. This is not distant art history but immediate critical engagement with artists she knew, or knew of, during their creative lifetimes. The collection opens with a revelatory portrait of Antoine Louis Barye, the 19th-century sculptor who transformed animal depiction from decorative afterthought into high art a thousand times removed from sentimentality. Cary captures his struggle for recognition, his scientific precision fused with raw kinetic energy, and his ability to render beasts not as exotic spectacles but as creatures of terrifying intimacy. The volume also includes her influential writing on Mary Cassatt, one of the few women to crash the Impressionist party, offering a woman's critical eye on a woman's revolutionary art. These essays breathe with the urgency of first encounters rather than the mausoleum calm of retrospective scholarship. For readers who want art criticism that thinks alongside its subjects rather than from above them, Cary's random studies prove remarkably unhaphazard in their illumination.