A thrilling history of one of the world’s most famous urban parks.
A stunning collection of architectural drawings that detail the original vision of New York City’s Central Park and offer a history of its evolution.
Central Park is more than just a “pastoral oasis” amid the din and clamor of urban life; it’s also an iconic landmark that’s been immortalized in popular literature and film. Debut author Brenwall, an art historian and conservator for the New York City Municipal Archives, expertly highlights the extraordinary cultural significance of the park, which, she writes, was first imagined by two “visionaries”: landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing and poet and newspaper editor William Cullen Bryant, the latter of whom argued in 1844 that the densely populated and commercial city needed an “extensive pleasure ground for shade and recreation.” The formal plan for the park—a remarkably innovative design collaboratively created by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1858—called for a bucolic alternative to the “confinement, bustle, and monotonous street-division of the city.” The author rigorously conveys how this idea unfolded and changed as it became a politically bedraggled project that remained incomplete well into the 1930s; at one point, it was nearly abandoned for budgetary reasons, as it was considered an “unnecessary extravagance in a time of crisis.” Brenwall had access to more than 1,500 archival architectural drawings and plans related to the park, and she beautifully reproduces many here as well as gorgeous black-and-white and color photos. Her thoroughness alone is impressive, as she highlights many design projects, including such famous park features as the Great Lawn and more quotidian ones, like its drainage system. The author relates the park’s development as a grand drama, showing how its successful conclusion was hardly foregone and how it required extraordinary creative genius and civic commitment. Also, her book astutely illustrates the park’s deeper significance—more than a “sylvan vision,” it also represented the democratization of space and stands as our “finest civic architectural tribute to the foundational American principles of equality and opportunity for all,” as architecture critic Martin Filler writes in a foreword. In addition, the book makes for a very handsome coffee-table tome.
A thrilling history of one of the world’s most famous urban parks.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3232-4
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Through thoughtful essays, Ewing (Breaking Bounds, not reviewed) transforms a fantastic collection of photographs into a history of photography itself. With careful arrangement and stylish writing free of art- critic blather, Ewing has rendered accessible an almost intimidatingly wide range of works. The introduction covers attitudes toward photographed nudity (and therefore toward sexuality), beginning with a photograph of two topless Zulu women published in a British magazine circa 1879. Setting a pattern for the remainder of the book, Ewing discusses how these photographs reproduced their subjects and simultaneously served as a mirror for contemporary British culture. Chapters carry vague titles like ``Probes'' and ``Metamorphosis,'' which are pithily defined (in these cases as ``the realm of scientific exploration'' and ``the body transformed,'' respectively). Each section starts with a mini- essay expounding a basic principle and tying together the photos. For example, ``Flesh'' links Regina DeLuise's nude woman gripping the heavy, knotted rope of a tire swing and Robert Davies's close- up of a navel. ``Eros'' ponders the personal nature of sexuality, and an 1865 photograph of one woman inserting an umbrella in a second, tuba-playing model's behind is grouped with some squeaky- clean, pin-up-style shots from the 1950s. The shocking chapter entitled ``Estrangement'' contains a range of striking, often disturbing images, including a servant crucified for killing his boss's son and a grotesquely obese sideshow man with a relatively tiny towel placed over his behind, as well as a series showing ``the Hilton Siamese Twins of Texas'' cheerfully swimming, playing tennis, dancing, and flirting in tandem. Some ground is covered twice, and there is an occasional oversight (the essay on ``Estrangement'' brings up the 19th-century popularity of photographs of corpses of loved ones, but no examples are offered). Overall, however, the result is engrossing and the balance of text and photos just right. Stunning, clever, and very provoking.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8118-0762-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
This lifeless account of Edgar Degas's 1872 visit to New Orleans unsuccessfully tries to link his artistic breakthrough with the city's Reconstruction-era social turmoil. Benfey (American Literature/Mt. Holyoke Coll.; The Double Life of Stephen Crane, 1992) claims the French painter's five-month sojourn with his mother's family ``is something of a legend in New Orleans.'' There's nothing legendary in Benfey's workaday account. A private man bent on being ``famous but unknown,'' Degas stayed indoors because his eyesight (which he fancied was failing) couldn't stand the intense southern light; he pined for black models but painted family members instead. Admitting the challenge posed by his ``notoriously secret'' subject, Benfey expands his critical field of vision to encompass New Orleans writers George Washington Cable and Kate Chopin—even though there's no evidence they crossed paths with Degas. Their work, obsessed with the enormous changes transforming New Orleans society in the Civil War's aftermath, is supposed to help us ``decipher the underlying meanings in Degas paintings and letters.'' Chopin gets top billing, but the largely forgotten Cable gets more ink, including a provocative but unsubstantiated suggestion that this creator of the archetypal ``tragic mulatto'' is the granddaddy of southern literature. Benfey, the first biographer to focus on Degas's American roots, adds valuable insight to the artist's work with his analysis of the effects American technology, architecture, and commerce had on his paintings. But Benfey's glosses of Chopin and Cable don't bring Degas into sharper focus; they push the enigmatic Frenchman further to the edges of an already sprawling, speculative biography. Conjecture about the psychological root of Degas's racial ambivalence—namely the possibility of black blood in the American side of the family—is overstated and underdocumented. Ambitious, perhaps, but Benfey's wide net nevertheless allows his primary subject to slip away, lost in a fog of lit-crit theory and psychobabble. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 12, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-43562-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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