Humorous and perceptive at times, but fragmentary in narrative, with habitual spleen-venting that may alienate the...
Prickly, polemical memoir on the fine distinctions between artistic inspiration and commercial reproduction.
Marthouret, a onetime petty thief, found a less risky occupation when he began copying French painters, including van Gogh, Chagall, Vlaminck, Gauguin, and Modigliani. Telling his life story in 101 brief, barbed chapters with such titles as “Ownership,” “Self-Importance,” and “Irritating People,” he conveys an impressionistic and misanthropic sense of the artist as outlaw: “I generally despise anything that joins people together in organized groups,” he declares. In the 1960s, Marthouret was employed by Fernand Legros, a notorious dealer in forged art and the European underworld’s conduit to the lucrative US market, for whom the author created numerous fakes. Although he ultimately served five years in jail for his role in those scams, Marthouret found that the international art market was structured so as to actually facilitate his crimes; artists’ heirs, for example, often had a vested financial interest in certifying the provenance of forgeries for personal gain. He became scornful of so-called “experts,” whose approval could be manipulated, and of the stultifying museum culture that focused public attention on a few ultra-expensive paintings rather than cultivating a broader love of art. Following his prison term, Marthouret found numerous clients for his work, mainly rich professionals who wanted to brag that they’d obtained “lost” paintings by the likes of Monet and Dufy. The author consistently portrays his work not as fraud, but as “a tribute to the greatest artists of all time.” Yet he mischievously notes that many of his approximately 4,500 canvases continue to be “rediscovered” and to hang in numerous museums. The author writes provocatively about the process of forgery, claiming that he inhabits the spirit of the original artists while dismissing the art scene overall as “a marshland swarming with crocodiles, piranhas, and other greedy animals.”
Humorous and perceptive at times, but fragmentary in narrative, with habitual spleen-venting that may alienate the dilettantes he so disdains.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2004
ISBN: 1-59209-048-6
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Carnot
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.
A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.
Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.
Photographer and author Stanton returns with a companion volume to Humans of New York (2013), this one with similarly affecting photographs of New Yorkers but also with some tales from his subjects’ mouths.
Readers of the first volume—and followers of the related site on Facebook and elsewhere—will feel immediately at home. The author has continued to photograph the human zoo: folks out in the streets and in the parks, in moods ranging from parade-happy to deep despair. He includes one running feature—“Today in Microfashion,” which shows images of little children dressed up in various arresting ways. He also provides some juxtapositions, images and/or stories that are related somehow. These range from surprising to forced to barely tolerable. One shows a man with a cat on his head and a woman with a large flowered headpiece, another a construction worker proud of his body and, on the facing page, a man in a wheelchair. The emotions course along the entire continuum of human passion: love, broken love, elation, depression, playfulness, argumentativeness, madness, arrogance, humility, pride, frustration, and confusion. We see varieties of the human costume, as well, from formalwear to homeless-wear. A few celebrities appear, President Barack Obama among them. The “stories” range from single-sentence comments and quips and complaints to more lengthy tales (none longer than a couple of pages). People talk about abusive parents, exes, struggles to succeed, addiction and recovery, dramatic failures, and lifelong happiness. Some deliver minirants (a neuroscientist is especially curmudgeonly), and the children often provide the most (often unintended) humor. One little boy with a fishing pole talks about a monster fish. Toward the end, the images seem to lead us toward hope. But then…a final photograph turns the light out once again.
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05890-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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