Book description
A stunning and surprising re-evaluation of Freud s life and legacy
told through his extraordinary art collection. Janine Burke,
award-winning author and art historian, reveals an intriguing new
perspective on sigmund Freud - as an obsessive artcollector; a
passionate and reckless man intent on surrounding himself with beautiful
objects. Sigmund Freud's collection of Egyptian, Greek and Roman
antiquities must be one of the world's best-kept secrets. Over a 40-year
period he amassed an extraordinary array of nearly three thousand
statues, vases, reliefs, busts,fragments of papyrus, rings, precious
stones and prints. For Freud, psychoanalysis and his art collection
developed together in a symbiotic relationship, each informing and
enriching the other. To create a portrait of Freud the art collector,
Janine Burke builds a vibrant, richly detailed and intimate image of his
life and times, set against the glittering, decadent background of
fin-de-siècle Vienna where an artistic flowering took place in
painting, theatre, writing and architecture. Janine Burke is the
award-winning author of fifteen books of art history, biography and
fiction. Between 1977 and 1982, she lectured in art history at the
Victorian College of the Arts before resigning to write full time. She
has degrees in art history from the University of Melbourne, La Trobe
University and Deakin University. She has written extensively on the
Heide Circle, including Joy Hester, Dear Sun: The Letters of Joy Hester
and Sunday Reed and The Eye of the Beholder: Albert Tucker's
Photographs. Australian Gothic, her acclaimed biography of Tucker, was
published by Knopf in 2002 and the final book in the Heide quartet, The
Heart Garden, a biography of Sunday Reed. She has lectured extensively
on art, curated exhibitions, written for newspapers and journals and
acted as a consultant to films and documentaries.
