Rich and colorful, if somewhat bulky, tribute to a visionary. (24 pp of color illustrations, 159 B&W illustrations)
The concluding volume of the first biography of the groundbreaking artist Henri Matisse, offering compelling insight and tiresome domestic details.
This expansive, prodigiously researched book from Spurling (The Unknown Matisse, 1998) familiarizes us not only with Matisse’s revolutionary art but his relationships with family and friends, his various aches and pains and his travels. Spurling is at her best when illustrating just how radical Matisse was. Few of his contemporaries understood his paintings—memorable works including 1910’s Dance (II) and 1912’s Goldfish—or his taste in art (he favored African carvings). The artist’s own work inspired violent public criticism. Truth is, even his friends and admirers at times weren’t quite sure of what he was up to, though they did understand what critics eventually acknowledged: his use of color was revolutionary. The best chapters outline Matisse’s long career. Lesser sections rely too heavily on mundane descriptions of his everyday life: Matisse raising his children, Matisse fretting over where he should travel next to paint, Matisse generally embracing a bourgeois lifestyle that appeared completely different from that of his friend and contemporary Pablo Picasso. The artist’s own remark, “If my story were ever to be written down truthfully from start to finish…it would amaze everyone,” is only true to a point, as it is for any man. Still, Spurling is exceptional at capturing Matisse’s personality and his interests, those crucial elements to understanding his output, and she ably dramatizes his final years. Even at the end of his life, as his health deteriorated, Matisse remained prolific. “As Matisse’s race with death accelerated, he feared each work might be his last,” the author writes. “His superabundant vitality” exhausted even his young assistants.
Rich and colorful, if somewhat bulky, tribute to a visionary. (24 pp of color illustrations, 159 B&W illustrations)Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2005
ISBN: 0-679-43429-1
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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