UNLOCKING

A memoir explores an art lover’s family life and career.

This account begins with photographs in Pressly’s attic showing her ancestors from the shtetls of Eastern Europe. Her first-generation parents were hard workers who eventually made a comfortable life for themselves, the author, and her brother, Bobby, in America. Pressly describes her school days, first love—which brought out her father’s scary, protective nature—and college life. In graduate school, she met and married a man named Bill. The author began a career as a museum curator, and Bill became a professor of art history. He remained a professor while the author sometimes adjusted her focus but stayed in the fields of art and curation. They confronted all sorts of career hurdles and, more importantly, health issues. Bill had serious heart problems, among other things. Pressly fared little better. In her 70s, she faced ampullary cancer, necessitating the very radical Whipple procedure and a long convalescence. Eventually, the couple moved to Atlanta to help their only child, David, cope with being the single parent of their two grandchildren. This is the author’s second book; the first—Settling the South Carolina Backcountry (2016)—chronicles Bill’s roots. She writes well. This is a woman of extraordinary passion and enormous energies. The test of a person (and for that matter, a marriage) is how the individual handles and overcomes the challenges of life. Pressly time and again passes the test with flying colors in this candid memoir. A side benefit: the illuminating chapters devoted to her thoughts on what it means to experience great works of art. (The volume features copious illustrations, both art plates and family photos.) In Florence, she admired Jacopo Pontormo’s “enigmatic, strange, and beautiful” painting Deposition From the Cross (1526-28): “I was absolutely stunned by the intense, almost strident, pastel colors of the drapery, which in places clung so tightly to the grieving figures as to appear translucent.” The author is a truly marvelous guide on a tour literally around the world, insisting that art reproductions in books are a poor second to the in situ experience that she convincingly describes as life changing.

A wrenchingly honest account that deftly combines a marriage story and an art tour.