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 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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