The book shows the birth of modern art midwifed by a man we’d like to know better. Did Sinclair feel a need to protect some...
French TV journalist Sinclair carefully accesses a wealth of family archives in her study of the biggest art dealer in Europe until World War II, her grandfather Paul Rosenberg (1881-1951).
Rosenberg and his brother, Léonce, owned separate Parisian galleries; Paul concentrated on 19th-century French painters while his brother saw cubism as the culmination of all painting. It was Léonce who spotted the newest modern artists—in particular, Pablo Picasso. Eventually, in 1918, Paul took over as Picasso’s agent. Rosenberg and Picasso were inseparable, Paul effectively orchestrating Picasso’s career while Picasso established Paul’s reputation. He hedged his bets by carrying traditional art in his gallery separate from his exclusive relationships with Picasso, Braque, Matisse and others. The author uses her grandfather’s correspondence to paste together the story of their flight from Paris and the loss of more than 400 works of art to the Nazis when they took over his gallery. The building became the Gestapo-run Institute for the Study of Jewish and Ethno-Racial Questions; classical art was sequestered for “safe keeping” while the “degenerate” art of the modernists (“any art that…departed from the canon of what the Nazis considered traditional”) was sold or burned. Sinclair’s grandfather vociferously opposed the Nazi auction of the modern art, realizing that any profit the Reich received would “fall back on our heads [as] bombs.” The Rosenbergs fled to New York in 1940, and Paul remained in the forefront of the art world until his return to Paris and the fight to recover his artwork.
The book shows the birth of modern art midwifed by a man we’d like to know better. Did Sinclair feel a need to protect some family history? Even so, she offers an intriguing window into the art scene of the early to mid-1900s.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-25162-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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