This frank but flawed dual biography of Alfred Stieglitz, photographer, art dealer, impresario, and Georgia O'Keeffe, painter, from their meeting in 1916 to their deaths (he in 1946, she in 1986) reveals along the way the development of photography as an art form, the experience of a woman artist, and much about the studios, galleries, life style, and politics of the artistic communities in N.Y.C. and Taos in the early decades of the 20th century. Mostly, however, Eisler (Private Lives, 1986) explores the psychopathology of two intense, talented, ambitious, creative, and sexually liberated people. More a mutual exploitation—a ``collusion,'' as Eisler concedes in the last chapter—than a ``romance,'' this was an unlikely pairing. Stieglitz, short, spoiled, argumentative, a married Jewish intellectual 23 years O'Keeffe's senior, possibly a pedophile, sexually confused at the least, consecrated their relationship with a series of pornographic photos described here in considerable detail and interpreted variously as ``cunt worship'' and ``a canticle...to sexual mystery.'' Often sickly and depressed, eventually O'Keeffe found her own idiom—the giant flowers and fruits, the landscapes of Lake George where she and Stieglitz summered, even the skulls and bones she did in Taos, where she took refuge in her later years,—all interpreted sexually by reviewers however much she objected. Friends such as Sherwood Anderson, Jean Toomer, and Mabel Dodge, as well as wealthy patrons, were attracted by the couple's charm, talent, and the illusion of power, but many were alienated by their volatile nature and often scandalous sexual experimentation. For a book about visual arts, this is curiously out of focus. Eisler summarizes primary sources and major events, but also quotes minor reviews, introduces minor figures with full bios but little function in the major lives, and—in spite of the coda quoted from O'Keeffe, ``Art is a wicked thing. It is what we are''—shows only occasional relationship between the ``wicked'' art and the lives.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-385-26122-5
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
A lively and contentious companion book to a six-part BBC television series that probes the question ``Why do we value art so highly?'' In clipped, sound-bite style, the authors examine the mechanisms of power that give fine art its metaphoric and economic glamour: critics, museums, auction houses, collectors, and the mass media. Buck is a journalist with art-historical training; Dodd edits a film and television journal, Sight and Sound. Graphically, they've given the book a visual noise worthy of MTV: The text is set near boldface and photographs and quotes fashion implied ironies. Smart art-historical revisionism doubles as pop-culture critique as the authors cite Kirk Douglas's depiction of Vincent Van Gogh in Vincente Minelli's 1956 film Lust for Life to skewer the more serious biographical stereotype of the ``artist-as- genius.'' Elsewhere the authors speak of museums as creators and guardians of the ``present orthodoxy,'' enshriners of status-quo social values. They cite figures like David Rockefeller, formerly chairman of the Museum of Modern Art and currently chairman emeritus, to demonstrate that art collecting is a ``byword for power,'' in other words, that art, allegedly a spiritual good, is intimately tied to material wealth. Disparate artists are examined for their skills in politicized public manipulation, including Jacques Louis David, Jackson Pollock, Leon Golub, Jenny Holzer, and Jeff Koons. Throughout, the authors raise good, tough questions. Their answers, doggedly polemical, have less bite. They arrive at the unsurprising conclusion that ``art, its meaning and value, are made, unmade and remade throughout history.'' Pointed British brattiness and cut-up compositional verve give this book style points. A thin volume, it ends—happily—before it runs out of gas.
Pub Date: July 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-563-20749-3
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1994
A useful if dense compilation of texts illuminating Pop Art's historical origins, inception, rise to success, and legacy. Among the materials Madoff, former executive editor of ARTnews, has gathered is a terse, fascinating letter by the British artist Richard Hamilton concerning the 1957 ``This Is Tomorrow'' exhibition, regarded as the first Pop Art show. A 1958 article by Lawrence Alloway, who coined the term ``Pop,'' defiantly announces the vitality and importance of the mass arts, as opposed to the old elitist fine arts. Madoff next samples the critics' response to America's outbreak of Pop (which was initially referred to as Neo- Dada), including pieces on the ``four-headed goliath'' of the movement, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, and Oldenburg. The book's final section offers a handful of essays (by, among others, Roland Barthes and Robert Hughes) written up to 30 years after Pop's emergence. What comes through within this simple yet generous framework is a good measure of skepticism and fear about Pop's importance, mixed with some serious attempts to locate the meaning of art that mimicked our fascination with the representational image, an art nurtured by, in the words of Henry Geldzahler, the ``popular press, . . . the movie closeup, black and white, technicolor and wide screen, the billboard extravaganzas, and finally . . . television.'' There is clarity in Hamilton's analysis (Pop Art is, he writes, ``popular . . . transient . . . expendable''), as well as in the later essays, where distance aids the effort to define goals, impact, and meaning. But the bulk of the material has to be waded through, congested as it is with the struggle to process the onslaught of new media assailing the public. Readers will have to distill their own meaning and context for Pop Art from this anthology. It is not a cozy read, but a necessary compendium to slip on and off of the shelf. (8 color, 17 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-520-21018-2
Page Count: 413
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
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