A vivid, compelling portrait of the Armory Show and its lasting influence on American art.
Lunday (Secret Lives of Great Composers, 2009, etc.) supplies a sharp narrative history of the famous 1913 Armory Show in New York, which helped to introduce the American public to modern art.
When the International Exhibition of Modern Art opened in the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue on February 17, 1913, the American public had no idea what was in store for it. Chiefly organized by three artists—Walt Kuhn, Walter Pach and Arthur Davies—disillusioned that the artistic establishment known as the Academy had shunned their work, the Armory Show was the first large-scale exhibition of modernist and avant-garde art in America. The organization these men helped found to oversee the show was called the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, and its primary goal was to take down the outdated Academy’s stranglehold on the local art world. While modern painting had shaken up art establishments in Germany and France, Americans remained mostly unaware of the radical aesthetic movements taking hold. While the AAPS was optimistic about modernist art, many of the reviews and reactions of gallery visitors were less than understanding. Reviews often castigated the artists as insane and immoral, while attendees became obsessed with trivialities like finding the nude in Duchamp’s show-stealing Nude Descending a Staircase. However, it didn’t matter since the exhibition was a sensation. Lunday smartly refers to it in 21st-century parlance as a “meme” since it inspired so many crossover cultural references. But New York was kind compared to the show’s touring stops in Chicago and Boston, which tried to shut it down on obscenity charges. While the author ably crafts a narrative out of the building of the show, she expertly follows its influence through the reactionary “Regionalism” artists of the 1930s to the culmination of its ideals in Jackson Pollock, whose abstract paintings epitomized a uniquely American sensibility.
A vivid, compelling portrait of the Armory Show and its lasting influence on American art.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7627-9017-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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