A welcome introduction to the work of a painter famed in his day but now largely forgotten.
A lucid life of the émigré Expressionist painter.
Born in 1900 in eastern Turkey, Gorky regaled American friends with tales of an idyllic childhood among mountains and rivers. That much was true, as far as it went, though that paradise would be shattered by the onset of the Turkish war of genocide against ethnic Armenians within the Ottoman Empire—and, though he claimed Russian descent and kinship with the writer Maxim Gorky, the man born Mooradian was Armenian through and through. Biographer and art historian Herrera (Matisse, 1993) spends a full hundred pages discussing the Armenian milieu that Gorky took pains not to remember before landing his subject, in 1920, in New York and thence Watertown, Massachusetts, where he lived in a neighborhood called Little Armenia and set about training himself as an artist. Gorky soon emerged as an apostle of European modernism, introducing his painting students to the works of his beloved Cézanne, Picasso, and Braque; and though his early work was clearly derivative, he soon developed a distinctive style that earned many admirers. As Herrera writes, Gorky was capable of bohemian excess, although he maintained higher standards of behavior than some of his comrades in art, especially the surrealists; as art patron Jeanne Reynal would recall, “He didn’t understand the surrealists’ fascination with sexual perversion.” Though a dedicated family man and, by the early ’40s, quite successful as an artist, Gorky suffered from his own demons, and the collapse of his marriage and calamities such as a studio fire that destroyed much of his archive helped lead him to suicide in 1948. Herrera’s biography is competent and well-written, and, while it presupposes familiarity with major trends in modernist art and demands patience for sometimes unhelpful analysis (“We are not outside looking at the scenery but rather in the midst of stems, petals, leaves, branches, and twigs”), it serves its readers well.
A welcome introduction to the work of a painter famed in his day but now largely forgotten.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-11323-8
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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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