An adroit and lively portrait.
The latest in the Jewish Lives series focuses on a flamboyant champion of modern art.
Art patron Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) was notable as much for her scandalous personal life as for her discerning aesthetic sense. In this deftly distilled biography, Prose (Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, 2014, etc.) draws on Guggenheim’s memoir, several biographies, and works by and about her wide circle of friends, offering a cleareyed assessment of the complicated woman and her indelible contribution to modern art. Guggenheim’s Jewishness is handily dispatched. Subjected to anti-Semitism when she was turned away from a hotel, she claimed that her “inferiority complex” stemmed from her appearance rather than prejudice: specifically, her nose, which she hated and believed was an inheritance from her German ancestors. Convinced she was homely, she nevertheless “boasted of having had more than four hundred lovers,” including artists Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy, and James Joyce’s son Giorgio. For a woman of independent wealth and strong will, Guggenheim made surprising choices in men. “She lived in an era and a milieu,” writes Prose, “in which women needed men to explain the world to them….Without a man to direct her, without the rewards of male attention…a woman was…a failed human being.” Yet seeking a man’s validation still does not explain why she endured a violent marriage to Laurence Vail, who beat her; nor to the drunken John Holms, “a writer who didn’t write,” who demeaned her; nor to Ernst, who married her, friends thought, for her money and connections. Prose notes Guggenheim’s “lack of empathy” toward her lovers, their wives, and especially her children, a flaw more egregious than “promiscuity, shallowness, stinginess, and a sense of humor that sometimes crossed over into malice.” The author also chronicles her groundbreaking galleries: Guggenheim Jeune in London; the exuberant Art of This Century in Manhattan; and her Palazzo in Venice, where her collection still resides.
An adroit and lively portrait.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-300-20348-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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