Smee takes readers deep into the beginnings of modern art in a way that not only enlightens, but also builds a stronger...
An exploration of the relationships among eight artists who were friends, mentors, and/or rivals and the particular incidents that changed their lives.
It may have been a portrait sitting, an exchange of works, a studio visit, or the opening of an exhibition. However they came to pass, writes Pulitzer Prize–winning Boston Globe art critic Smee (Nonfiction Writing/Wellesley Coll.; Freud, 2015, etc.), these relationships greatly affected the psyches of some of the greatest artists of their time. Some have cast them as rivals, others as enemies, but the author rejects many of these opinions. Francis Bacon’s influence on Lucian Freud helped loosen his style, and Jackson Pollock’s works drove Willem de Kooning to open up his manner of creation. All were undeniable talents, and their abilities were changed significantly by these relationships. However, none of them was ever an acolyte (imagine Pablo Picasso ever admitting anyone was better than he). Henri Matisse said it best in that he could never tolerate rivals, but he thrived in their presence. They all sought radical originality, and each man’s art was affected by lovers, successes, and failures, as well as hard drinking and brave collectors of modern art like Peggy Guggenheim and Gertrude and Sarah Stein. Would Edgar Degas ever have moved out into Paris’ streets without Edouard Manet’s urging ,or would Picasso ever have moved to cubism without the specter of Matisse’s maturity and pressure? In addition to digging into these intimate relationships, Smee explains their work in in an accessible way. He clearly and vividly explains the monumental effect each man had on modern art, from Manet’s daring Olympia to Pollock’s Number 1.
Smee takes readers deep into the beginnings of modern art in a way that not only enlightens, but also builds a stronger appreciation of the influences that created the environment that fostered its development.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9480-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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