Scholars are unlikely to agree that Braque’s reputation will come to rest as high as Danchev insists.
An enthusiastic appraisal of the French painter’s work, but a less compelling account of his life.
Early in his career, Braque (1882–1963) followed Matisse, the undisputed leader of the Fauves. Shortly after, he formed with Picasso perhaps the most fruitful and intense partnership in the history of art: Together, they invented Cubism, a revolutionary pictorial assault on time and space. His reputation certainly benefits from his link to the two greatest artists of the 20th century, but Danchev (International Relations/Univ. of Nottingham), whose style and presentation occasionally evoke the manner of the artist he so clearly loves, insists that Braque is “the third man of modern art.” His establishment of Cubist motifs and his other innovations, notably paper sculptures and papier collés (pasted paper or collages), entitle Braque to a larger place in art history than generally acknowledged, argues his biographer. Rarely swayed by political or aesthetic fashion, intensely private, unusually silent and always disciplined, Braque went his own way, a path surely more narrow than Danchev appears willing to concede. His struggle was not so much with the times or with other artists, but rather with himself, to “bring painting within my gifts.” Conscious of his own limitations (he assiduously avoided portraiture), Braque applied his talent to still-lifes and landscapes. Danchev cannot persuade us, though he tries mightily, that the second half of the artist’s career measured up to the first. Still, if he was a lesser artist than Picasso or Matisse, Braque was surely a better man: faithfully married for more than 50 years, severely wounded as an officer during WWI and, though not a member of la résistance, at least a non-cooperator with the German occupation during WWII. By the time he died, in 1963, Braque’s achievements merited a state funeral presided over by André Malraux.
Scholars are unlikely to agree that Braque’s reputation will come to rest as high as Danchev insists.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-55970-743-7
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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