Serious but plenty juicy: a treat for both aficionados of modern art and readers of celebrity bios. (24 pages b&w...
An inclusive account of the eventful life led by a driving influence in the world of modern art, by British playwright and historian Gill (An Honourable Defeat, 1994, etc.).
Born Marguerite, daughter of Benjamin and niece of the more famous Solomon R., Peggy Guggenheim (1898–1979) gained her first exposure to the world of the avant-garde as an unpaid clerk in her cousin Harold Loeb’s Sunwise Turn Bookshop in New York City. The 22-year-old took immediately to intellectual and artistic society; collagist and sculptor Laurence Vail, whom she married in 1922, was only one of the many artists in her collection of lovers. She blamed her promiscuity on Benjamin’s 1912 death aboard the Titanic, which left her “searching for a father,” but to his credit Gill refuses to take such remarks at face value. Instead, he weighs them against other testimony, noting that this “complex, anarchic, remarkable woman” was “not particularly introspective.” In Paris, Peggy soon found herself at the center of bohemian and expatriate society, forming durable friendships/love affairs with Samuel Beckett, Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, and other notable avant-gardists. Moving on to London, she established Guggenheim Jeune in 1938, a gallery focused on contemporary art. On the eve of WWII, she accelerated her purchases, buying “a picture a day” and amassing one of the period’s most extensive private collections of modern art. Fleeing to New York with German surrealist (and future husband) Max Ernst, Peggy opened Art of This Century, which featured exhibitions by such then-unknowns as Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. She returned in 1948 to her beloved Venice; her 18th-century palazzo became the permanent site of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection upon her death. Gill makes a persuasive case for Guggenheim as a uniquely individual patron who single-handedly and single-mindedly helped determine art history’s course.
Serious but plenty juicy: a treat for both aficionados of modern art and readers of celebrity bios. (24 pages b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: April 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-019697-1
Page Count: 528
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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