Claridge’s biography is timely, accompanying a widespread critical reappraisal of Rockwell’s work. Though there will still...
A brilliant biography that affords considerable insight into the complicated, worried mind of the masterly illustrator.
Norman Rockwell (1894–1977) believed in painting as an expression not only of cultural values—including, in his case, patriotism, community, and ordinary decency—but also as a means of telling quiet stories about life, and his huge body of work reflected his belief that “the idea itself probably is the most important element of the entire illustration.” Still, writes Claridge (Tamara de Lempicka, 1999), Rockwell was not without his sense of irony, and even his subversive side; for one thing, as Claridge notes, he undid a long tradition of depicting women with “arched eyebrows, enlarged eyes, no shadows on the face, no nostrils, Cupid’s bow mouth arranged in a sort of suppressed yawn” and replaced it with an insistent narrative realism in which not-exactly-beautiful people figure prominently. Though Rockwell enjoyed early success as an illustrator for Boys’ Life and the Saturday Evening Post, earning a handsome living as an artist while still in his teens, he wrestled with fears that he was a failure and became obsessed with money, which caused him constantly to make commitments to produce work that he could not possibly meet. Still, he did produce, by Claridge’s count, more than 4,000 paintings. For all his remarkable output, and although contemporaries like Willem de Kooning and Andy Warhol praised his work, Rockwell was dismissed by contemporary critics as an old-fashioned hack, criticism he probably agreed with. Claridge’s exegesis of paintings such as Playing Checkers points to his very real skills while pointing out characteristic but not accidental shortcomings: “The careful and complex spatial composition, the unsettling use of vivid scarlets and scalding yellow, the brilliantly painted surfaces,” she writes, “all these are, finally, unspoiled by Rockwell’s typical compulsion to wrench at least one character’s expression into caricature, in the name of quick access to a story line.”
Claridge’s biography is timely, accompanying a widespread critical reappraisal of Rockwell’s work. Though there will still be those who sneer at him as a propagandist on canvas, her life makes a convincing case for Rockwell as genius and original.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50453-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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