A study of Abstract Expressionism by an art journalist and curator who takes 1950 as the movement's decisive year. Kingsley starts in January of that year, when the painters Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman had one-man shows, and proceeds month by month through the lives of the central figures—including Arshile Gorky, Clyfford Still, David Smith, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Philip Guston. Like the Impressionists, Kingsley explains, this ``large group of artists with very different styles interacted intensely for a short while and then went their separate ways.'' For the uninitiated, she introduces the artists' work—from Rothko's ``soft-edged'' rectangles to Still's ``grand-size, craggy canvases'' and the painted ``skeins and puddles'' of Pollock (``our first media-made American artist'')— and covers their private lives as well: problems with drinking, overbearing mothers, strained marriages, Gottlieb's sharp clothes, and Still's canvas-cluttered guest room. ``Abstract expressionism arrived with the atomic age,'' Kingsley points out. But the implicit promise of placing the movement into the larger context of N.Y.C. at midcentury, and of the country at the time of McCarthy and the Korean War, is only scantily met. The close-up view of 1950 proves it to have been a crucial year, particularly in bringing this new art to the public, but the calendar-based format loses logical thread as it delves into one artist, then another, moving backward and forward in time, bringing up psychology, criticism, and other aspects of this internally driven art. An informative, sometimes vivid, anecdotal survey that shies away from breakthrough interpretations of the artistic revolution staged almost 50 years ago. (Photographs—including eight pages of color—not seen.)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-63857-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1992
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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