Drawing on interviews with Hockney, his siblings, and colleagues; Hockey’s autobiography; and diaries of famous friends,...
Hockney from age 38 to 75, bubbling with enthusiasm.
In this second lively volume of David Hockney’s authorized biography, Sykes (David Hockney, 1937-1975, etc.) covers the artist’s peripatetic, energetic years of fame: major exhibitions (a 1988 retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art attracted 16,000 visitors the first week), commissions to design opera and ballet sets, and an outbreak of Hockneymania when his work was exhibited at the esteemed Tate Gallery in London. Typically working from dawn (painting the sunrise from his bedroom window) to dusk, Hockney, a friend told Sykes, “loves to work until he’s so exhausted…his body has already caved in. At that moment he’s making his discoveries and those are inspirational.” The artist thrived on discoveries, which increasingly involved new technologies. Quantel Paintbox allowed him to layer colors without muddying them. He also played with a photocopier, which he found much more creative than lithography, producing “the most beautiful black I had ever seen on paper.” The fax machine inspired “endless experiments” in tone and led to his creating pictures made up of more than one sheet of paper, to be assembled by the recipient. Faxing also enabled him to communicate more easily than by telephone, which became impossible as Hockney became increasingly deaf. He was excited by the Brushes app on the iPhone, the process of digital drawing on an iPad, and especially the computer, which enabled him to make huge pictures. For a 10-gallery exhibition at the Royal Academy of Art, he produced the largest work ever hung in the gallery’s history. Only the AIDS epidemic and loss of friends and colleagues dampened Hockney’s irrepressible spirits.
Drawing on interviews with Hockney, his siblings, and colleagues; Hockey’s autobiography; and diaries of famous friends, such as Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender, Sykes matches his subject’s ebullience in this admiring, well-researched life.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0385535908
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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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