A lively addition to the understanding of this difficult and important American artist.
An unfussy, thoroughgoing look at a multifaceted, restless genius.
Civil War historian Sutherland (History/Univ. of Arkansas; A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War, 2009, etc.) does not pass judgment too harshly on the brilliant, controversial and litigious American artist James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903), who fought to refashion art criticism from the artist’s point of view. The author clearly brings out Whistler’s uniqueness in terms of his technique; he was both a kind of naturalist and a trailblazing user of etching and pastels. The eldest of a large family, born in Lowell, Mass., Whistler spent a formative six years in St. Petersburg, Russia, when his engineer father was hired by the czar to help build the railroad; learning French turned out to be an important asset for Whistler when he began to pursue his career as an artist in Paris. Intractable and headstrong, winning and personable, he was bounced out of his father’s alma mater, West Point, and was finally able to play at being the young bohemian in Paris. With his practiced drawing talent and curiosity, he absorbed the styles of the masters around him, from classicism to realism to naturalism to photography. He began to hone his own style—e.g., in At the Piano and The White Girl, which was his “first tentative step away from narrative painting…one of the great artistic controversies of the century.” Indeed, in London, Whistler took his “art for art’s sake” credo to combative new heights by taking critic John Ruskin to task for disparaging his delicate, quick brush technique. While Whistler’s notoriety grew, the prices of his paintings did not, and he was often insolvent, self-promoting yet fiercely devoted to his craft. In this immensely readable work, Sutherland brings out how enormously influential Whistler became to younger artists, especially in Scotland.
A lively addition to the understanding of this difficult and important American artist.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-300-20346-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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 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
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