Ideal for readers seeking to delve deeply into Renoir’s personality; those seeking critical assessments of the individual...
An in-depth biography of the French impressionist painter.
White (Impressionists Side by Side: Their Friendships, Rivalries, and Artistic Exchanges, 1996, etc.) is one of the leading authorities on the life and work of Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), “one of the greatest and most creative artists who ever lived.” Here, the author offers an “intimate” look into his life, a narrative fueled by her amassing a cache of more than 3,000 letters. Many are from the families of Renoir’s illegitimate daughter, Jeanne, and his three sons, including the great film director Jean (whose own biography of his father White calls “historical fiction”), as well as from fellow artists. They shed particular light on his relationships with key women in his life, especially his wife, female models, and fellow artist Berthe Morisot. In workmanlike prose, White moves forward in seven chronological sections, each representing specific phases of Renoir’s career. Throughout, the author presents Renoir as an “inspiring and heroic individual who overcame daunting obstacles.” In his early years, he experienced great poverty; when he finally began to find success, he became afflicted with paralyzing rheumatoid arthritis, which turned his fingers and hands into gnarled fists. He would have a brush tied between his fingers so he could continue to paint and smoke his beloved cigarettes, both of which he did relentlessly. Renoir created 4,019 paintings and hundreds of pastels and drawings. He was “complex, maddeningly ambivalent, yet endearing,” but he could also be “secretive, shrewd and even sneaky.” Though the writing is often dry, White does a fine job of tracing the phases of his career. His work—“permeated with the freedom and joie de vivre of the Impressionists, fused with a classical search for balanced compositions and form”—inspired many painters, including Matisse and Picasso (they almost met).
Ideal for readers seeking to delve deeply into Renoir’s personality; those seeking critical assessments of the individual works should look elsewhere.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-500-23957-5
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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