Indiana’s witty, insightful analysis brings refreshing intellect to a well-worn period of American art history.
Incisive look at how Warhol’s iconic Soup Cans paintings sparked the Pop Art movement, bringing American artists—Warhol especially—to the forefront of artistic and sociological discourse.
Prolific cultural critic Indiana (The Shanghai Gesture, 2009, etc.) presents a concise yet highly illuminating treatise on the paintings’ significance. During a period saturated with the art of the Abstract Expressionist movement, Warhol’s entrée to the scene, both in terms of his banal subject matter and ambiguous sexuality, was met with mixed reviews. His Soup Cans, lacking the technique and complexity that marked the success of big names like Pollock or de Kooning, were initially dismissed by critics as boring. But soon the importance of Warhol’s artistic commentary gained traction, and his symbolic aesthetic was recognized as ’60s America reflected in high art. By echoing his obsession with media and pop culture in his images, Warhol tapped into the psyche of a public whose intrigue with art was stymied by Abstract Expressionism’s very abstractness. Indiana writes that “Warhol’s cans demonstrate that modern reality is mediated through the symbolic,” and that his paintings are a “projection of everything that can be bought and sold, the practical but impermanent symbols that sustain us.” Warhol’s meteoric rise to fame brought with it a completely innovative approach to the art scene, culminating in The Factory, his infamous studio that was constantly filled with oddballs, ingénues, actors and artists. The Factory’s silkscreen production line was in itself a projection of commercial culture, and yet each painting was unique. Warhol’s genius lay in recognizing how to select the right subjects at the right time—from Marilyn to Mao—in order to elicit cultural self-recognition from viewers. It was only fitting that Campbell’s soup, a product Warhol was forced to eat for lunch each day of his childhood, was the first image he chose to immortalize.
Indiana’s witty, insightful analysis brings refreshing intellect to a well-worn period of American art history.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-465-00233-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Through thoughtful essays, Ewing (Breaking Bounds, not reviewed) transforms a fantastic collection of photographs into a history of photography itself. With careful arrangement and stylish writing free of art- critic blather, Ewing has rendered accessible an almost intimidatingly wide range of works. The introduction covers attitudes toward photographed nudity (and therefore toward sexuality), beginning with a photograph of two topless Zulu women published in a British magazine circa 1879. Setting a pattern for the remainder of the book, Ewing discusses how these photographs reproduced their subjects and simultaneously served as a mirror for contemporary British culture. Chapters carry vague titles like ``Probes'' and ``Metamorphosis,'' which are pithily defined (in these cases as ``the realm of scientific exploration'' and ``the body transformed,'' respectively). Each section starts with a mini- essay expounding a basic principle and tying together the photos. For example, ``Flesh'' links Regina DeLuise's nude woman gripping the heavy, knotted rope of a tire swing and Robert Davies's close- up of a navel. ``Eros'' ponders the personal nature of sexuality, and an 1865 photograph of one woman inserting an umbrella in a second, tuba-playing model's behind is grouped with some squeaky- clean, pin-up-style shots from the 1950s. The shocking chapter entitled ``Estrangement'' contains a range of striking, often disturbing images, including a servant crucified for killing his boss's son and a grotesquely obese sideshow man with a relatively tiny towel placed over his behind, as well as a series showing ``the Hilton Siamese Twins of Texas'' cheerfully swimming, playing tennis, dancing, and flirting in tandem. Some ground is covered twice, and there is an occasional oversight (the essay on ``Estrangement'' brings up the 19th-century popularity of photographs of corpses of loved ones, but no examples are offered). Overall, however, the result is engrossing and the balance of text and photos just right. Stunning, clever, and very provoking.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8118-0762-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
This lifeless account of Edgar Degas's 1872 visit to New Orleans unsuccessfully tries to link his artistic breakthrough with the city's Reconstruction-era social turmoil. Benfey (American Literature/Mt. Holyoke Coll.; The Double Life of Stephen Crane, 1992) claims the French painter's five-month sojourn with his mother's family ``is something of a legend in New Orleans.'' There's nothing legendary in Benfey's workaday account. A private man bent on being ``famous but unknown,'' Degas stayed indoors because his eyesight (which he fancied was failing) couldn't stand the intense southern light; he pined for black models but painted family members instead. Admitting the challenge posed by his ``notoriously secret'' subject, Benfey expands his critical field of vision to encompass New Orleans writers George Washington Cable and Kate Chopin—even though there's no evidence they crossed paths with Degas. Their work, obsessed with the enormous changes transforming New Orleans society in the Civil War's aftermath, is supposed to help us ``decipher the underlying meanings in Degas paintings and letters.'' Chopin gets top billing, but the largely forgotten Cable gets more ink, including a provocative but unsubstantiated suggestion that this creator of the archetypal ``tragic mulatto'' is the granddaddy of southern literature. Benfey, the first biographer to focus on Degas's American roots, adds valuable insight to the artist's work with his analysis of the effects American technology, architecture, and commerce had on his paintings. But Benfey's glosses of Chopin and Cable don't bring Degas into sharper focus; they push the enigmatic Frenchman further to the edges of an already sprawling, speculative biography. Conjecture about the psychological root of Degas's racial ambivalence—namely the possibility of black blood in the American side of the family—is overstated and underdocumented. Ambitious, perhaps, but Benfey's wide net nevertheless allows his primary subject to slip away, lost in a fog of lit-crit theory and psychobabble. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 12, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-43562-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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