An interesting story rife with personal drama and satisfying artistic detail.
Examination of two brilliant painters whose personal and professional relationship affected the rise of American art in the first half of the 20th century.
Adams (American Art/Case Western Reserve Univ.; Eakins Revealed, 2005, etc.) captures the story of the strange symbiosis between Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), a regionalist and realist painter, and Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), a trailblazer in early Abstract Expressionism who became world-renowned for the drip-painting technique he used in his later works. On the surface, the two men’s creative approach was wholly disparate. Benton favored Americana murals that evoked the working class, creating paintings that made a sharp social statement with vivid color and dynamic movement. Pollock’s works suggest universalism within their chaotic sweeps and layers of paint; each seemingly undefined canvas invites the viewer to contemplate both the immensity of imagination as well as the smallness of self. However, the author makes the cogent argument that each painter’s artistic viewpoint, and creative technique, stemmed from the same series of influences that include Rodin, Matisse, Russell and MacDonald-Wright, as well as rhythmic and structural components first used by those involved in the Synchromist movement (circa 1912). Pollock absorbed these aesthetic principles as Benton’s student, and then executed paintings in an entirely innovative way. This allowed Pollock, a man whose adulthood was marred with what later scholars suspect was bipolar disorder (accompanied by bouts of alcoholism) to position himself as unique in an emerging modern-art scene. The potent combination of timing and talent provided Pollock with an opportunity to expand his creative reach, and he studied the works of other artists while approaching the most productive period of his life—but he never abandoned those techniques that were instilled in him as an inchoate artist under Benton’s tutelage. Though Adams’s prose could use some polish, his portrayal of Benton’s impact on Pollock’s formative thinking brings new light to Pollock’s murky process.
An interesting story rife with personal drama and satisfying artistic detail.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59691-420-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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