by Annie Cohen-Solal ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 2001
Literate, accessible, and a pleasure to read: worthy to stand on a shelf next to Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years and...
A thoughtfully conceived, well-executed study of France’s influence on American art—and vice versa.
In 1867, writes French cultural-affairs journalist Cohen-Solal (Sartre, not reviewed), cultured Europeans flocked to the Exposition Universelle d’Art et d’Industrie to witness the end of history painting and the triumph of genre paintings such as Jean-Francois Millet’s The Harvesters. Among the artists exhibiting were ten Americans, including the landscape painter Albert Bierstadt and most members of the group later called the Hudson River School. The Americans didn’t make much of a splash, Cohen-Solal notes, though the French begrudgingly awarded Frederic E. Church a silver medal for his portrait of Niagara Falls. Despite their frosty reception, the Americans returned home convinced that France was the place to which all serious artists should repair, and for the next half-century their peers traveled there to soak up the ambience, drink good wine, and learn a few techniques using unclad models “willing to pose for only a few pennies,” as one young Alabaman wrote to his parents. The French, for their part, found these bumpkin visitors to be useful; America was a willing market for the Impressionists, who had trouble finding buyers at home. Thanks to entrepreneurs and artists such as Leo Stein, Paul Durand-Ruel, and other “ambassadors who carried the spirit of Modernism overseas,” American and French audiences alike had their horizons broadened, to the benefit of all concerned, even if the French still sniffed at the Americans among them. The outbreak of WWI in 1914 changed the equation, Cohen-Solal contends; with the war, New York emerged as the international artistic center Paris had once been, so that anyone with an interest in painting had to go there—and American artists could finally claim a home on their own shores.
Literate, accessible, and a pleasure to read: worthy to stand on a shelf next to Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years and Robert Hughes’s The Shock of the New.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-45093-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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BOOK REVIEW
by Annie Cohen-Solal ; translated by Sam Taylor
BOOK REVIEW
by Blake Gopnik ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
A fascinating, major work that will spark endless debates.
An epic cradle-to-grave biography of the king of pop art from Gopnik (co-author: Warhol Women, 2019), who served as chief art critic for the Washington Post and the art and design critic for Newsweek.
With a hoarder’s zeal, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) collected objects he liked until shopping bags filled entire rooms of his New York town house. Rising to equal that, Gopnik’s dictionary-sized biography has more than 7,000 endnotes in its e-book edition and drew on some 100,000 documents, including datebooks, tax returns, and letters to lovers and dealers. With the cooperation of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the author serves up fresh details about almost every aspect of Warhol’s life in an immensely enjoyable book that blends snappy writing with careful exegeses of the artist’s influences and techniques. Warhol exploded into view in his mid-40s with his pop art paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans and silkscreens of Elvis and Marilyn. However, fame didn’t banish lifelong anxieties heightened by an assassination attempt that left him so fearful he bought bulletproof eyeglasses. After the pop successes, Gopnik writes, Warhol’s life was shaped by a consuming desire “to climb back onto that cutting edge,” which led him to make experimental films, launch Interview magazine, and promote the Velvet Underground. At the same time, Warhol yearned “for fine, old-fashioned love and coupledom,” a desire thwarted by his shyness and his awkward stance toward his sexuality—“almost but never quite out,” as Gopnik puts it. Although insightful in its interpretations of Warhol’s art, this biography is sure to make waves with its easily challenged claims that Warhol revealed himself early on “as a true rival of all the greats who had come before” and that he and Picasso may now occupy “the top peak of Parnassus, beside Michelangelo and Rembrandt and their fellow geniuses.” Any controversy will certainly befit a lodestar of 20th-century art who believed that “you weren’t doing much of anything as an artist if you weren’t questioning the most fundamental tenets of what art is and what artists can do.”
A fascinating, major work that will spark endless debates.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-229839-3
Page Count: 976
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
by Randee St. Nicholas ; photographed by Randee St. Nicholas ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 19, 2019
A dazzling visual homage to a music icon gone too soon.
A Los Angeles–based photographer pays tribute to a legendary musician with anecdotes and previously unseen images collected from their 25-year collaboration.
St. Nicholas (co-author: Whitney: Tribute to an Icon, 2012, etc.) first met Prince in 1991 at a prearranged photo shoot. “The dance between photographer and subject carried us away into hours of inspired photographs…and the beginning of a friendship that would last a lifetime.” In this book, the author fondly remembers their many professional encounters in the 25 years that followed. Many would be portrait sessions but done on impulse, like those in a burned-out Los Angeles building in 1994 and on the Charles Bridge in Prague in 2007. Both times, the author and Prince came together through serendipity to create playfully expressive images that came to represent the singer’s “unorthodox ability to truly live life in the moment.” Other encounters took place while Prince was performing at Paisley Park, his Minneapolis studio, or at venues in LA, New York, Tokyo, and London. One in particular came about after the 1991 release of Prince’s Diamonds and Pearls album and led to the start of St. Nicholas’ career as a video director. Prince, who nurtured young artists throughout his career, pushed the author to “trust my instincts…expand myself creatively.” What is most striking about even the most intimate of these photographs—even those shot with Mayte Garcia, the fan-turned–backup dancer who became Prince’s wife in 1996—is the brilliantly theatrical quality of the images. As the author observes, the singer was never not the self-conscious artist: “Prince was Prince 24/7.” Nostalgic and reverential, this book—the second St. Nicholas produced with/for Prince—is a celebration of friendship and artistry. Prince fans are sure to appreciate the book, and those interested in art photography will also find the collection highly appealing.
A dazzling visual homage to a music icon gone too soon.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-293923-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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