A fascinating commentary on the evanescence of fame and beauty. (b&w photos throughout; 8 pp. color photos, not seen)
Compelling backstory of the painting that scandalized the 1884 Paris Salon.
Debut author Davis, a former film executive and story analyst, says that her curiosity was piqued about Sargent’s painting when she wore a dress like the one pictured in the artist’s once notorious and now priceless Portrait of Madame X. Whatever the idea’s genesis, readers will enjoy this brisk, sometimes breathless account of the creation of the work the artist once called his best. Although not an art historian, the author relentlessly pursued the story in museums, archives, and libraries. The model for Sargent’s painting was Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, born in 1859 into Louisiana’s French Creole high society. The family moved to France when she was 8 (the Civil War had damaged their American holdings), and in 1878 the strikingly beautiful 19-year-old married a wealthy older man. Although little is known about her daily life, Davis effectively paints the social and cultural context in which Gautreau became “the bold era’s bold new ideal of female beauty.” The author gives us as well the parallel story of Sargent, an American born in 1856 in Italy, and his rise to prominence in the European art world. After his work was first accepted for display at the prestigious Paris Salon in 1877 and received excellent reviews, the artist slowly began to win impressive commissions; he also became the friend of Oscar Wilde and Henry James. In 1883, Gautreau agreed to sit for Sargent, who chose to depict her in profile, standing in a simple black dress with one strap slipping seductively from a shoulder. Parisian society was shocked by the image’s frank sexuality. The artist received the worst reviews of his career, and his subject’s reputation never recovered. Gautreau died in 1915, an unhappy recluse. Sargent weathered the storm to become both prosperous and revered.
A fascinating commentary on the evanescence of fame and beauty. (b&w photos throughout; 8 pp. color photos, not seen)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-58542-221-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
A California surgeon explores the striking parallels in the evolution of Western art and science in this enlightening exploration of where ideas come from and how they enter the consciousness of a culture. Though art and science are traditionally considered antithetical disciplines—with art dependent on intuition for its development and science on logic and sequential thinking—both nevertheless rely on an initial burst of inspiration regarding the nature of reality, and in Western culture the two have followed separate but remarkably similar paths. Shlain offers detailed anecdotes from the history of Western culture—from the ancient Greeks' penchant for single-melody choruses and blank rectangles, through the fragmented art and science of the Medieval period, to modern art's redefinition of reality and the relativity revolution in science—to illustrate how major movements in art have generally preceded scientific breakthroughs based on equivalent ideas, despite the artists and scientists involved having remained largely ignorant of one another's work. Shlain's suggestion that scientists have not so much been inspired by artists but have received initial inspiration from the same source—bringing to mind the possibility of a universal mind from which such ideas spring—is an intriguing one that offers a new window through which to view the dissemination of knowledge and ideas. A fascinating and provocative discussion—slow in coalescing but worth the wait. (Seventy-two b&w photographs and 15 diagrams.)
Pub Date: Oct. 14, 1991
ISBN: 0-688-09752-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A hilariously suave (previously unpublished) morality tale from the master of understated mayhem and apocalypse (The Unstrung Harp, p. 572, etc.). Its wonderfully dark pictures and text detail a dream journey undertaken, at century’s end, by dull-looking Edmund Gravel and an accompanying arachnoid figure, the Bahhumbug, to a “remote provincial town” where polite society’s veneer is blithely whisked away and assorted beautiful people are revealed in all their mendacity, folly, and awful bad luck. As always, Gorey’s trademark rhyming couplets are filled with inexplicably funny, sad, and somehow beautiful occurrences (e.g., “Sir U___ fell from a speeding train,/Which did some damage to his brain,/And after that he did not know /How to pronounce the letter O”). Calling this delightful tale its author’s “Vision of Judgment” or Inferno would be like breaking a butterfly on a wheel—with which image, come to think of it, Gorey might do something ineffably sinister and entertaining.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-15-100514-1
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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