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 succinct, passionate guide to fostering creativity.
A noted critic advises us to dance to the music of art.
Senior art critic at New York Magazine and winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, Saltz (Seeing Out Louder, 2009, etc.) became a writer only after a decadeslong battle with “demons who preached defeat.” Hoping to spare others the struggle that he experienced, he offers ebullient, practical, and wise counsel to those who wonder, “How can I be an artist?” and who “take that leap of faith to rise above the cacophony of external messages and internal fears.” In a slim volume profusely illustrated with works by a wide range of artists, Saltz encourages readers to think, work, and see like an artist. He urges would-be artists to hone their power of perception: “Looking hard isn’t just about looking long; it’s about allowing yourself to be rapt.” Looking hard yields rich sources of visual interest and also illuminates “the mysteries of your taste and eye.” The author urges artists to work consistently and early, “within the first two hours of the day,” before “the pesky demons of daily life” exert their negative influence. Thoughtful exercises underscore his assertions. To get readers thinking about genre and convention, for example, Saltz presents illustrations of nudes by artists including Goya, Matisse, Florine Stettheimer, and Manet. “Forget the subject matter,” he writes, “what is each of these paintings actually saying?” One exercise instructs readers to make a simple drawing and then remake it in an entirely different style: Egyptian, Chinese ink-drawing, cave painting, and the styles of other artists, like Keith Haring and Georgia O’Keeffe. Freely experiment with “different sizes, tools, materials, subjects, anything,” he writes. “Don’t resist something if you’re afraid it’s taking you far afield of your usual direction. That’s the wild animal in you, feeding.” Although much of his advice is pertinent to amateur artists, Saltz also rings in on how to navigate the art world, compose an artist’s statement, deal with rejection, find a community of artists, and beat back demons. Above all, he advises, “Work, Work, Work.”
A succinct, passionate guide to fostering creativity.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-08646-9
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A beautifully written, pensive, and restorative memoir.
A quiet meditation on art and life.
Matar’s Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir, The Return (2016), was about his Libyan father who was kidnapped in Cairo and taken back, imprisoned, and “gradually, like salt dissolving in water, was made to vanish.” His father’s presence reverberates throughout this thoughtful, sensitive extended essay about the author’s visit to Siena, where he ruminates and reflects on paintings, faith, love, and his wife, Diana. Matar focuses on the 13th- to 15th-century Sienese School of paintings which “stood alone, neither Byzantine nor of the Renaissance, an anomaly between chapters, like the orchestra tuning its strings in the interval,” but he discusses others as well. First, he explores the town, “as intimate as a locket you could wear around your neck and yet as complex as a maze.” Day or night, the “city seemed to be the one determining the pace and direction of my walks.” In the Palazzo Pubblico, Matar scrutinized a series of frescos the “size of a tennis court” painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in 1338. As the author writes, his Allegory of Good Government is a “hymn to justice.” Matar astutely describes it in great detail, as he does with all the paintings he viewed. When one is in a despondent mood, paintings, Matar writes, seem to “articulate a feeling of hope.” He also visited a vast cemetery, a “glimpse [of] death’s endless appetite.” Over the month, he talked with a variety of Sienese people, including a Jordanian man whom he befriended. One by one, paintings flow by: Caravaggio’s “curiously tragic” David With the Head of Goliath, Duccio di Buoninsegna’s “epic altarpiece,” Maestà. Mounted onto a cart in 1311, it was paraded through Siena. Along the way, Matar also ponders the metaphysics of rooms and offers a luminous, historical assessment of the Black Death.
A beautifully written, pensive, and restorative memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-12913-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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