An authoritative and sensitive portrait of a modern master.
Best known for his Homage to the Square paintings, Josef Albers (1888-1976) investigated clashing, merging, vibrating contours between colors.
Art critic and reviewer Darwent (Mondrian in London: How British Art Nearly Became Modern, 2012, etc.) offers a meticulously researched, elegantly written, and generously illustrated biography of an artist whose personality was as enigmatic as his art. The German-born Albers, son of a house painter and craftsman, trained to teach elementary school, a profession his parents thought “safe,” while being an artist “was terrible.” Although he chafed at becoming a teacher, he discovered “that children should be listened to rather than lectured to,” a lesson that shaped his approach for the rest of his career. In 1913, he was granted a leave to study at the Royal Art School in Berlin, an institution that trained art teachers. More than from course work, Albers was energized by exhibitions of Die Brücke, Blaue Reiter, and other modernists. He was overwhelmed by Edvard Munch even though he would later deride expressionism as “that sentimental, self-expression business.” Albers’ early career culminated in his joining the Bauhaus community, lured by its emphasis on craft. Darwent deftly characterizes the outsized egos and philosophical and petty rivalries that roiled the Bauhaus, most notably from proponents of the De Stijl movement, which “laid claim to the square, which Albers considered “the ideal form for visual experiment.” In 1933, desperate to leave Nazi Germany, he accepted an invitation to teach at Black Mountain College, where for years he was the only painter. Albers’ last teaching position was at Yale, where he was brought in to shake up the staid art department and where, though admired by many, he became renowned for ruthless critiques. One student recalled him “as a cross between Bismarck and Santa Claus.” Forced to retire, he began to work obsessively on the Homages series, completing more than 2,000 in his last 25 years.
An authoritative and sensitive portrait of a modern master.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-500-51910-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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