A thorough, engaging, and personal survey of an oft-neglected 20th-century artist.
A biography presents a detailed look at a French artist best known for his collages.
Jacques Villeglé was born in Brittany in 1926. He lived in Nantes during the Nazi occupation, and, after the Liberation in 1944, he moved to Paris. In that city, he liked to roam like a flâneur. His walks turned into a search for something special: posters. Villeglé developed a style in which he tore posters from the streets and rearranged them into something new. His works are full of fragments, letters, and sometimes clear images. They are often named for the streets where the posters were found. The materials were culled from advertisements, political proclamations, and anything else put up for Parisians to see. The book is filled with color photographs of the results, though it is not just about Villeglé’s art. Much is written about his life as well as the time in which he became an artist. He was well acquainted with individuals like Yves Klein and Raymond Hains. Villeglé was in Paris when the American artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg came there in the 1960s. The volume, which includes historical photos, follows Villeglé’s life into the modern day. Conrad creates an intimate feel by often quoting directly from conversations he had with Villeglé, who died in June 2022 in Paris. Villeglé recalled signing a manifesto as part of the newly formed Nouveaux Réalistes art movement with other artists: “I had some misgivings about the whole thing.” With high-quality images, the engrossing book also allows close inspection of the art itself. In Rue de Vaugirard (Bas-Meudon), from 1991, a vivid mix of numbers, French words, and torn images of people, there is much to uncover simply by looking carefully. But some chapters delve into the mundane. For instance, the author explains how, when Villeglé was in San Francisco, he drove the artist to “the Palace of the Legion of Honor, a museum built in the 1920’s, which is a replica of the Palais de la Legion d’Honneur in Paris.” The anecdote does not yield much intriguing information. Despite such lulls, the volume proves to be an indispensable resource. Even though Villeglé is not a household name, his work and life are skillfully explored here.
A thorough, engaging, and personal survey of an oft-neglected 20th-century artist.Pub Date: May 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-950301-37-9
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Inkshares
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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 virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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