This volume demonstrates how brilliantly Grosz caught the life, and more importantly the feverish imagination, of a city and a nation in a particularly turbulent time. Marrying the jumpy lines and figural distortions of cubism to narrative subjects and an angry sense of morality, he illuminated the tawdry, often violent, lives of Berlin's down-and-out, its powerbrokers, and its murderers, during the chaotic Weimar years of the 1920s, in corrosive, unsettling, kinetic images. The drawings and prints of drunken prostitutes and their leering customers, calm murderers inspecting the bodies of their victims, fat businessmen and their voluptuous mistresses, prim bourgeoisie and exhausted workers, and mutilated ex-soldiers, are complemented here by some of Grosz's less familiar, and equally disturbing, watercolors. Whitford, a former lecturer in art history at Cambridge, provides a useful introduction to Grosz's life and times, and detailed and very helpful annotations to the artwork. A superb overview of a unique career. (139 b&w and 54 color illustrations)
Pub Date: Aug. 20, 1997
ISBN: 0-300-07206-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1997
Flipping through this collection of fashion and portrait photographs by Baron Adolph de Meyer is like attending a glitterati cocktail party circa 1920. A raucous Josephine Baker clinks glasses with a suitably sophisticated Coco Chanel; an earthy Claude Monet eyes the ethereal Anna Pavlova; Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney poses like queen of the socialites; and Mary Pickford exudes the freshness of the bouquet she cradles in her arms. De Meyer photographed for Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Harper's Bazar at a time (chronicled here by photography writer Ehrenkranz) when fame was just beginning to rub shoulders with fortune, and the baron has captured the era with a hazy, soft-focus glow. But his most enduring images are not those of befeathered models who seem to have walked out of a Busby Berkeley extravaganza nor the studied portraits of beautiful women, but his series of photos of the ephemeral yet immortal dancing of Vaslav Nijinsky. De Meyer captures him in a chameleonlike range of moods: his feline eroticisim in SchÇhÇrazade, his playfulness in Le Carnaval, his classical restraint in Le Pavillon d'Armide, and the sculptural formality giving way to sensual release in the scandalous Le PrÇlude de l'apräs-midi d'un faune. The book accompanies a traveling exhibition that will open in New York City later this year.
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-8118-0830-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
A veteran photojournalist raids a lifetime's trove of powerful images to illustrate the ticklish subject of how men and women relate to each other—or don't. Erwitt (To the Dogs, not reviewed) explains in an amiably rambling introduction that the impetus for this book came from a chance assignment to do ``photos of couples'' for a Japanese magazine. Looking back over his oeuvre, he found the theme a constant and powerful one. All the pictures, sumptuously reproduced here in black and white, are technically accomplished. Most are pointed, emotionally loaded, and charged with a dry sense of narrative wit. Graphically striking, the book uses left- and right- page image counterposings to ironic effect. Logically, Erwitt opens with shots of children, then moves on to adult lovers, and closes with elderly pairs. A grainy and light-infused 1972 shot from Rio de Janeiro shows a young boy and girl meeting conspiratorially under a tree: He sits atop a tricycle brandishing a toy pistol as she eyes him with gravity—a miniature Bonnie and Clyde. A 1952 photo from Valencia, Spain, shows a young couple seen through a kitchen doorway in a dance-step embrace, their faces obscured, she with her apron on. In Krak¢w, Poland, in 1972, Erwitt captured a middle-aged woman in a garish striped frock offering her hand to be kissed by a drab-looking businessman. Towards the end, aged couples argue in Saint-Tropez, fill a car with gas in Iowa, dance on a Manhattan rooftop. Erwitt presents himself as a voyeur with a purpose, a lensman dedicated to capturing glimpses of our shared, international human condition. From stagy set-up to candid ditty, this selection shows off Erwitt's skills as a master of the modern photographic idiom, one with a clear idea of what he wants his work to say.
Pub Date: Nov. 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-393-03676-6
Page Count: 127
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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