Goodden's well-measured life of the artist may help bring Kauffman's oeuvre back to light.
Oxford historian and biographer Goodden (The Sweetness of Life, 1999) enlists her considerable knowledge of 18th-century art history in this fine study of the popular, though frequently belittled, Swiss painter Angelica Kauffman.
Goodden attempts to raise Kauffman's technical reputation while acknowledging her faults. Much like her contemporary Vigée Le Brun, Kauffman was denied the rigorous art training afforded to men, such as learning to draw anatomy from life, and relegated to so-called feminine and decorative subjects such as flower-painting and botanical drawing. However, Kauffman was a sensational popular portraitist in her heyday of late 18th-century London—she was triumphantly elected to the Royal Academy in 1768. She learned how to paint from her Austrian father, who would exert a strong influence on her for most of her life. Early on, she rejected her Swiss origins, and she received her formative training in Italy, copying the masters. On her Grand Tour, she picked up important commissions from the aristocracy, and her fame grew, as did her earnings for portraits; the young woman was the breadwinner in the household. Famous portraits of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and David Garrick established her reputation by the time she arrived in London, and she cemented important friendships with Joshua Reynolds and Henry Fuseli. Despite a rash marriage to a man who turned out to be a faux aristocrat and bigamist, Kauffman seems to have lead the quiet, single-minded life of a serious and industrious artist; her Catholicism prompted her to eventually flee her beloved England and settle in Rome with a second husband and friend to her father. A portrait of Goethe followed on their brief acquaintance, though he complained it was “effeminate.” In the end, the author deems Kauffman a populist, adaptable painter whose own success creating pretty pictures damned her.
Goodden's well-measured life of the artist may help bring Kauffman's oeuvre back to light.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-8441-3758-9
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Pimlico/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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 standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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