Biddle, a former president of the Whitney Museum of American Art and granddaughter of the museum’s legendary founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, here commemorates the illustrious female dynasty of art lovers and the institution they created and sustained. Nowadays an integral part of the Manhattan art landscape, the Whitney was at its inception just a studio on Eighth Street, opened by the sculptor and wealthy heiress. Seeking to support contemporary American artists, she transformed her studio into a full-fledged museum by 1930 and remained its president and most generous benefactor until her death in 1942, when her daughter took over. By the middle of the century, running a museum had become a challenging business, requiring a well-trained staff and a constant influx of money. Reluctantly, the Whitney Museum changed its original policy, focusing less on acquiring new artwork than on interpreting and properly displaying the finest items in its collection. The Museum became progressively more dependent on donations, and an admission fee was introduced in 1966. At the same time, it widened the range of its activities to include lectures, publications, a library, films, and trips abroad for members. When Gertrude’s granddaughter became trustee and later president of the museum, it was moved to its present prominent location on Madison Avenue. While painstakingly recording endless fund-raising campaigns and providing an overview of day-to-day management, Miller Biddle also discusses the precarious balance between her private and public roles. After raising several children, she assumed responsibilities at the museum her mother had entrusted to her, while simultaneously taking continuing education classes and collaborating with Bob Friedman on her grandmother’s 1978 biography. Her life and legacy, like that of her mother and grandmother, became inseparable from the Whitney. Despite its relative neglect of art and artists, an estimable history of the Whitney, with illuminating forays into the history of several prominent American families.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55970-509-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
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
SEEN & HEARD
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