A welcome introduction to the work of a painter famed in his day but now largely forgotten.
A lucid life of the émigré Expressionist painter.
Born in 1900 in eastern Turkey, Gorky regaled American friends with tales of an idyllic childhood among mountains and rivers. That much was true, as far as it went, though that paradise would be shattered by the onset of the Turkish war of genocide against ethnic Armenians within the Ottoman Empire—and, though he claimed Russian descent and kinship with the writer Maxim Gorky, the man born Mooradian was Armenian through and through. Biographer and art historian Herrera (Matisse, 1993) spends a full hundred pages discussing the Armenian milieu that Gorky took pains not to remember before landing his subject, in 1920, in New York and thence Watertown, Massachusetts, where he lived in a neighborhood called Little Armenia and set about training himself as an artist. Gorky soon emerged as an apostle of European modernism, introducing his painting students to the works of his beloved Cézanne, Picasso, and Braque; and though his early work was clearly derivative, he soon developed a distinctive style that earned many admirers. As Herrera writes, Gorky was capable of bohemian excess, although he maintained higher standards of behavior than some of his comrades in art, especially the surrealists; as art patron Jeanne Reynal would recall, “He didn’t understand the surrealists’ fascination with sexual perversion.” Though a dedicated family man and, by the early ’40s, quite successful as an artist, Gorky suffered from his own demons, and the collapse of his marriage and calamities such as a studio fire that destroyed much of his archive helped lead him to suicide in 1948. Herrera’s biography is competent and well-written, and, while it presupposes familiarity with major trends in modernist art and demands patience for sometimes unhelpful analysis (“We are not outside looking at the scenery but rather in the midst of stems, petals, leaves, branches, and twigs”), it serves its readers well.
A welcome introduction to the work of a painter famed in his day but now largely forgotten.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-11323-8
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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