De Kooning (1918-89) was a painter herself, and, in the essays here, she describes art the way artists experience it—the messy, hands-on, tactile experience of painting. De Kooning wrote for Art News in the 1950's, and amid today's jargon, theory, and various deconstructions, her essays—swift, taut, personal and to the point—are a delight to read as she, say, watches Arshile Gorky painstakingly build up a layered surface or David Smith puzzle out a devilishly complex bit of metalwork. De Kooning knew the great figures of the New York school—her husband Willem, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline—at firsthand from the early 40's, when they were not yet celebrities, and to her they're friends and acquaintances in low-rent studios, simply doing the work they do. With skepticism but also with love, she sifts through their self-created legends with a refreshing honesty after the hyperbole of gossip bios and the posthumous lawsuits, etc., that have surrounded the ``giants'' of the period. De Kooning's irreverent contemporary portraits restore the human scale, leaving out the machismo and the booze. The writer isn't doctrinaire, either, about the purity or primacy of abstract painting, but is perfectly willing, for example, to deflate the extremist pretensions of an Ad Reinhart in ``Pure Paints a Picture'' (1957). In the clairvoyant ``Subject, What, How or Who'' (1955), she explains how abstract and representational turn into one another; in ``Parody is King,'' she heralds a development on the art scene that was to choke out much else later on. She champions forgotten painter Edwin Dickinson; even Andrew Wyeth gets his due. Essays that are alive in new ways as they help us look back. Perhaps only an artist could write about other artists with such genuine curiosity and open-mindedness.
Pub Date: March 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8076-1337-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Braziller
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1994
A sweeping, ambitious examination of sea changes in human perception and interpretation over the past 100 years, from Oxford professor Conrad (A Song of Love and Death: The Meaning of Opera, 1987, etc.). The author admits that his account heavily favors the first half of the 20th century. Although the thematically organized chapters march in roughly chronological order, in many, Conrad devotes dozens of pages to an artistic trend as played out in pre- WWII decades, then tacks on a few paragraphs zipping us through its manifestations in the postwar years. His essential subject is the assault of high modernism on the received wisdoms of the past. As he depicts our century’s most daring painters, writers, composers, architects, and directors (abetted by their peers in science and apocalyptic politics) challenging conventional notions about the representation and even the essential nature of physical, social, and psychological reality, two central points emerge. Abstraction, Conrad suggests in his most interesting passages, is not just an artistic strategy, but a response to the increasingly abstract nature of modern life, experienced at an accelerating pace and accessorized with ever more complex technologies as disorienting as they are indispensable. His second principal theme—the loss of individual identity within the urban crowd, totalitarian political movements, and consumerist mass culture’seems more clichÇd. Indeed, there isn—t much new material here, as Conrad rounds up the usual artistic suspects (surrealism, dadaism, cubism, serialism, atonalism: name your favorite, and you—ll find it) and takes readers to such oft-visited sites as turn-of-the-century Vienna, Moscow in the rosy 1920s heyday of Soviet idealism, and 1990s Tokyo, paragon of the ersatz, virtual-reality world we now inhabit. Nonetheless, he capably integrates massive amounts of information into a smoothly entertaining chronicle. Scholars may regret the lack of original insights, but this accomplished and very thorough round-up of our century’s most important cultural trends is perfect for the serious general reader. (166 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: March 3, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40113-X
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
Bound for controversy, this study admirably attempts to cross from the academy to popular culture, but theory here acts less...
An elaborate theory by Garber (English/Harvard Univ.), insisting that the transvestite is at the elusive heart of Western culture.
In a century-sweeping book, Garber applies current critical thought to the phenomenon of "cross-dressing'' in fact and fiction, high culture and low. Arguing that gender is culturally constructed, she contends that cross-dressing challenges the binary categories of male and female as well as the concept of category itself. It signals "cultural, social or aesthetic dissonances.'' Garber argues that critics have looked "through,'' not "at,'' the transvestite, failing to see what is a Freudian "primal scene.'' Defined here again and again, the transvestite is "the space of desire,'' "a space of possibility,'' a "third.'' Garber plays out her theory in detailed analyses of countless transvestite figures- -Shakespearean heroines, Tootsie, Lawrence of Arabia, M. Butterfly, Madonna, and Laurence Olivier (here portrayed at death as "the triumphant transvestite''). There is no shortage of provocative speculation and information, some worth considering and some—like that about transvestite magazines and the politics of transsexual surgery—not. Unfortunately, the sub-flooring of French critical terms sets Garber's argument on a slippery slope ending up too often in a theoretical mire where "the transvestite is both a signifier and that which signifies the undecidability of signification.'' A discussion of Elizabethan dress codes and costuming concludes with the typically reductive claim that "there is no ground of Shakespeare that is not already cross-dressed.'' Also, when critical terms are rampantly applied—Elvis and Liberace, for instance, labeled, like Peter Pan, "changeling boys''—they quickly lose impact.
Bound for controversy, this study admirably attempts to cross from the academy to popular culture, but theory here acts less as a window onto cultural evolution than as a screen drawing attention its own overwrought, repetitive pattern.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-415-90072-7
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Routledge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1991
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