Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry - Softcover

Shapton, Leanne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374175306 ISBN 13: 9780374175306

Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books, 2009

Synopsis

A love story told in the form of an auction catalog.

Auction catalogs can tell you a lot about a person -- their passions and vanities, peccadilloes and aesthetics; their flush years and lean. Think of the collections of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Truman Capote, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

In Leanne Shapton's marvelously inventive and invented auction catalog, the 325 lots up for auction are what remain from the relationship between Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris (who aren't real people, but might as well be). Through photographs of the couple's personal effects -- the usual auction items (jewelry, fine art, and rare furniture) and the seemingly worthless (pajamas, Post-it notes, worn paperbacks) -- the story of a failed love affair vividly (and cleverly) emerges. From first meeting to final separation, the progress and rituals of intimacy are revealed through the couple's accumulated relics and memorabilia. And a love story, in all its tenderness and struggle, emerges from the evidence that has been left behind, laid out for us to appraise and appreciate.

In an earlier work, Was She Pretty?, Shapton, a talented artist and illustrator, subtly explored the seemingly simple yet powerfully complicated nature of sexual jealousy. In Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris―a very different yet equally original book―she invites us to contemplate what is truly valuable, and to consider the art we make of our private lives.

About this title

Review:

Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2009: What is love? Artist Leanne Shapton may be the first person to answer this age-old question so persuasively, if not damn-near definitively. Her vision of love--that famously immaterial virtue--finds its best expression in the stuff of our daily lives. Which, of course, may not be as filled with the serendipitous charm that marks the courtship of her fictional lovers, but that doesn't make Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry feel any less universal. We meet Lenore and Hal after their relationship has ended; that the relics of their life--spent in fits and starts of togetherness--are presented in a Valentine's Day auction catalog has the potential to strike a bitter chord. What comes across instead is that these items, ranging widely from gifts, postcards, and photos to conspiratorial notes and precious evidence of daily rituals, deserve to be cherished for the love they still so clearly honour. --Anne Bartholomew

About the Author:

Leanne Shapton is an illustrator, writer, and publisher who was born in Toronto and now lives in New York. She is the art director of the New York Times op-ed page and cofounder of J&L Books, a nonprofit Publishing company specializing in new photography, art, and fiction. She is the author of Was She Pretty?

About this edition

• Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0374175306
• ISBN 13: 9780374175306
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144