A well-informed, spirited cultural history.
The shock of the new.
Art historian Falconer charts the atmosphere of disillusion, anger, and restlessness that gave rise to avant-garde art, disparate movements that swept across Europe and Russia, beginning around 1910 and continuing for decades. Futurists, Dadists, Surrealists, Russian constructivists, De Stijl, the Bauhaus, and Situationists were bound together by their rebellion against the academy as gatekeepers for artists and against stultifying bourgeois values. They were intent on creating shocking, disorienting works “that defied all the prior categories of art,” such as multimedia performances featuring a rowdy mix of poetry, orations, and music. Some anointed everyday objects as art—such as Marcel Duchamp’s urinal titled Fountain; others insisted that art must evolve into architectural structures. Although some avant-garde artists railed against conventional forms of writing, they produced their own manifestos: The bombastic Filippo Tomasso Martinetti’s Futurist Manifesto was published on the front page of Le Figaro in 1909. André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto appeared in 1924. Some were drawn to the occult, the unconscious, and dreams; many harbored utopian visions, especially after World War I. Dada, Falconer asserts, arose from the trenches: “anarchic, acidic, preoccupied with a violent, politically turbulent, mechanized world.” Falconer creates lively capsule biographies of idiosyncratic characters in his well-populated history, including Guillaume Apollinaire, who invented new “isms” to describe the new art; Duchamp, “a prankster without a program”; Dadaists Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings; Tristan Tzara, Dada’s chief publicist; the Russians Vladimir Tatlin and Aleksandr Rodchenko; Theo van Doesburg, leader of De Stijl, whose aim was to connect with the universal; Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus. With entertaining asides about his own experiences as critic, scholar, and maker of art, Falconer offers a vivid picture of the fervent efforts of artists questioning the meaning of art itself.
A well-informed, spirited cultural history.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781324051428
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A cheeky, gossipy dual biography.
A study of two writers uncomfortably entwined.
After Eve Babitz (1943-2021) died, her biographer Anolik came upon a letter from Babitz to Joan Didion (1934-2021) that startled her. Filled with “rage, despair, impatience, contempt,” it read like a “lovers’ quarrel.” “Eve was talking to Joan the way you talk to someone who’s burrowed deep under your skin, whose skin you’re trying to burrow deep under.” That surprise discovery suggested a “complicated alliance” between the two. In sometimes breathless prose, with sly asides to the “Reader,” Anolik draws on more than 100 interviews with Babitz and many other sources to follow both women’s lives, tumultuous loves, and aspirations before and after they met in Los Angeles in 1967, sometimes straining to prove their significance to one another. “Joan and Eve weren’t each other’s opposite selves so much as each other’s shadow selves,” she asserts. “Eve was what Joan both feared becoming and longed to become: an inspired amateur.” At the same time, “Joan was what Eve feared becoming and desired to become: a fierce professional.” Didion had just won acclaim for Slouching Towards Bethlehem when Babitz, newly arrived from New York, began socializing with her and her husband, John Gregory Dunne. The reticent Didion and the sensual, energetic Babitz could not have been more different, and Anolik clearly prefers Babitz. “I’m crazy for Eve,” she admits, “love her with a fan’s unreasoning abandon. Besides, Joan is somebody I naturally root against: I respect her work rather than like it; find her persona—part princess, part wet blanket—tough going.” Their relationship—hardly a friendship—fell apart in 1974 when Didion and Dunne were assigned to edit Babitz’s autobiographical novel, Eve’s Hollywood. Babitz, resentful of Didion’s attitude and intrusion, “fired” her, pursuing her writing career on her own. Didion soared to literary fame; not, alas, Babitz.
A cheeky, gossipy dual biography.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781668065488
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
